Combined, small steps will lead to big improvements that will be easier to maintain over the long-run. The best way to tackle the decluttering of your home, your work space and your life is to take things one small step at a time. Having some uncluttered space around you actually makes it easier to unclutter your mind.Unclutter your life in one week pdf download Managing your old-fashioned desktop is a good idea, too. If you arrange it right, you can scan to see who's sending you e-mail and decide whether you need to read it right away or wait for later, lessening the interruption. Research by Mary Czerwinski at Microsoft indicates that a very large computer screen can be helpful in keeping you focused, especially if you keep your main task in the center, your e-mail to one side and a secondary document or task to the other side. It will fortify you for the less social parts of the workday. The answer: schedule a coffee break or water cooler rendezvous. If we have a deficiency, we wander the hallways seeking human connection at inopportune times for ourselves and others. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell calls this Vitamin C. That's because we are a social creatures and we crave human contact and connection. 1 cause of interruption and delay in a workday is a colleague stopping by. Another tip that's obvious but underused: unsubscribe to useless mailings. Markowitz also suggests bundling non-urgent tasks together at one time, so they don't preoccupy you when you are under the gun. You just pick a reasonably empty spot on your calendar and schedule the task for that spot preferably with a reminder alert. The "designate it" tactic is a great way to deal with tasks that take too long to do immediately. designate (for later by putting it in your calendar), or Daniel Markovitz, senior associate at IBT-USA, a time-management consulting firm, teaches clients to apply one of the "4 D's" to e-mail, snail mail and just about everything else: Don't let your e-mail inbox fill up with undifferentiated stuff unread mail, read mail, flagged-for-follow-up mail, etc. Doing this will make a huge difference in your productivity, and you'll also discover just how much you've fallen out of the habit of uninterrupted concentration. You can always turn on an "away" message that explains you'll be back in an hour, or whenever. Turn off the alert sounds on your e-mail. So, step away from the cell phone and/or BlackBerry. If you are trying to do something serious writing an article or report, interviewing an applicant for a job, or talking your teenager through a crisis devote ALL of your attention to that task. 1 Create uninterrupted time for concentrating. And I'm happy to share a few tips that I know I should be applying more assiduously myself. But I'm probably more conscious than most people about the pluses and minuses, the limits and excesses of trying to do too many things at once. That doesn't exactly make me an expert (heck, no, for at this very moment there are 147 unread e-mails in my inbox). Unlike most folks, however, I've researched the subject, having now written two big articles on multitasking, including this week's cover story. Follow just about everyone else I know with an office job, a couple of kids and something that passes for a personal life, I do a lot multitasking.
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