productivity Archives - Page 2 of 3

A Free Productivity Guide for Writing Addicts

Posted on November 7, 2015 Written by Pinar Tarhan

I’m putting together a productivity guide and giving it to my subscribers and followers for free.

It won’t always be free, so please comment below if you want to get it without paying anything! 🙂

The guide will include improved versions my best productivity posts as well as new tips I haven’t shared yet.

Who is it good for?

Basically any busy writer who gets sidetracked by their life, the pleasant and the sour. And yes, I know that not all out days can be equally productive. There’ll be off days. But we can even use those to our advantage.

So comment, and you’ll have your guide as soon as I’m done. If you are already a subscriber, you’ll get it as my thank you. (You can still comment, and I’ll love you for it, though.)

How to Save an Hour Every Day by Michael Heppell: Review

Posted on January 19, 2014 Written by Pinar Tarhan

A Little on Heppell and His Style

Michael Heppell is quickly becoming one of my favorite non-fiction authors. I’ve also read and loved The Edge and How to Be Brilliant.

His language is fun, catchy and he doesn’t waste words. He knows you don’t have all the time in the world, and appreciates that.

Heppell’s books successfully refute any excuse you might have about improving any area of your life by providing real life examples both from his life, and lives of his clients (he’s a personal development expert that works with companies and individuals) and readers. He also gives examples from real life success stories of people we are familiar with. He renders it impossible to say it’s not in your hands.

How To Save An Hour Every Day

How often do you wish every day had more hours? I know I have. Forget 25, I wouldn’t mind 250. But even though we can’t make days longer, we can feel like we have more time by making an hour available for an activity or task of our liking. We can achieve this by managing our time better.

How To Save an Hour Every Day was born out of Heppell’s own need for a good time management resource. However, what was available wasn’t simple, applicable and practical enough. So he delved into his own experiences, tips of his readers and clients, and hence created a book that is fun to read, and possible to apply – regardless of your marital status/lifestyle/job hours….etc.

We can see Heppell’s tips work when we look at his CV, popularity and number of bestsellers. But to get the best idea (and results), I strongly recommend the buying the book, reading it, keeping it as a reference and really applying stuff without trying to cheat.

The book covers:

– Creating a strong enough why: This chapter explains why you won’t take action unless you feel obligated, and how you can feel obligated.

– Overcoming procrastination I don’t need to explain this one. 🙂

– To Do or Not To Do, that’s the question: This section covers the problem with to-do lists, a very lucrative idea, priotizing and how to create not-to-do lists. I can’t stress the importance of the not-to-do lists enough.

– Dealing with distractions: Freelancers and office employees might deal with different distractions, but both have a lot of them. Luckily, Heppell comes up with beneficial tips on how to take care of them.

– Home: This part is about how to optimize the time we spend at home – and how we (should) spend it with the people at home. This doesn’t just cover quality family time, but also booking holidays, managing your finances, technology, exercise and more. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite chapters, though I love the book as a whole.

– Work: This is especially awesome for people with full-time jobs – complete with co-workers and bosses. It features tips on making meetings more efficient, optimizing your working hours and job description, emails and more. Freelancers can of course apply most of the tips about delegation, meetings, people that take too much off your time…and more.

– Advanced techniques: There’re some more concentration-requiring techniques, including using your voice to command technology, increasing your reading speed and more.

– Twenty-five extra ideas: These are the working ideas contributed by Heppell’s clients and readers. Take what applies, adapt and make them your own.

I recommend How to Save An Hour Every Day to everyone who wishes they had more time on their hands, but feels frustrated and stuck about the how.

Procrastination and distractions are universal problems, though as freelancers we probably need to deal with them even more regularly as we are our own bosses, and we are the ones responsible for all our working and free time.

You might think you have heard it all before, though I’m pretty sure you didn’t think of all of what’s suggested here, or at least you haven’t tried all the tips that might work. After all, you still have problems or at least desire improvements in this area, right?

Whatever you need more time for, this book gives you ideas to enable you to lead a more fun, productive and satisfactory life. Oh, and you could probably finish the book in an hour, especially if you’re good at speed reading.:)

More Useful Posts on Productivity and Time Management

Procrastination: Friend or Foe?

9 Productive Things Writers Can Do When They Have a Cold

How to Use Our Email Accounts Productively to Avoid Procrastination

How to Turn Procrastination into Productivity: 7 Fun Tips for Writers

Productivity for Writers: Tips to Increase Your Productivity During Hot Weather

Posted on August 10, 2011 Written by Pinar Tarhan

Writer Productivity in the Summer. Or not:)

August already arrived and yet it is still typically very hot. Oh, I’m not complaining. I always take my summer wardrobe & weather over looking like an Eskimo and a bleak winter.

However extreme heat reduces productivity and the will to work. It might also cause you to stock on iced-drinks and face the wind/air-conditioner, and ultimately making you catch a cold, like the one I’m trying to fight off right now.

Fortunately, applying a few simple tips to your daily life can help you make the best of the summer, while managing to get all your work done.

1) Air- conditioners. Not every house has one, but it is unthinkable for any respectable coffee shop not to use them. If you don’t have air-conditioning in your living quarters, you can always go to the next Starbucks or a similar concept coffee shop where you can work.

You just need to make sure that directly under the conditioners as this will most probably cause you to get sick. Also make sure you bring a sweater with you just in case. After all, outdoors might be hot enough to walk around in your swimsuit, indoors might feel like the North Pole.

2) Fans. Fans are more affordable and a lot less complicated than air-conditioners. However, most of the time, they tend to be less effective. But then again, a fan is the next best thing when there is no wind outside and you feel like the heat is suffocating you. Just make sure you get the cool indirectly as fans can also easily make you sick. I should know, I’m a few hours from taking my prescribed antibiotics.

3) Beaches and pools. If you live near a sea or an ocean, take advantage. Not only swimming will help you get fit, it will also keep you cool and fresh.

And even if you don’t live near a sea, there are usually affordable pools around. Although some people don’t enjoy the pool experience, it is a nice way to energize yourself. For instance my university gym offers a reasonably-priced membership so I go swimming almost everyday. I can work for much longer and much more productively after I swim.

You just need to make sure you don’t get in the sun without protection.

4) Showers. It is all very well to save water and protect the environment, but you can’t restrain yourself from taking regular showers as this will help you cope with the heat, especially if you live in a city where the daily average temperature easily hits 40 degrees Celsius.

You can be careful about not wasting much water, but you can’t survive without getting under the water at all.

5) Cold drinks and lots of water. Drinking lots of liquids is always crucial, especially during hot weather when you lose a lot of water through sweating. Try to make sure you consume healthy drinks, though- such as water and freshly squeezed juices. As simple as this may sound, many people often neglect this or just try to fulfill their liquid needs through fuzzy drinks, which is not the healthiest option.

Try to apply these daily and you will find it easier to work in the summer.

How to Use Our Email Accounts Productively to Avoid Procrastination

How to Turn Procrastination into Productivity: 7 Fun Tips for Writers

9 Productive Things Writers Can Do When They Have a Cold

Posted on June 18, 2011 Written by Pinar Tarhan

funny pictures chipmunk asks you to-go-on — Yep, that is exactly how I react when I have a cold…:)

Catching a cold can come in any season. You know the symptoms: dizziness, lack of energy, and low fever. I typically get sick during unstable weather, through a combination of the temperature differences between outdoors and indoors, and the differences between indoors with air-conditioning and indoors with no air–conditioning. Combine it with all the open windows and all the others getting sick and voila: you have a writer with a cold, trying not to vaporize and writing despite a headache.

And while I, unfortunately, discovered that there is no way I can be as productive as my usual healthy self, there are still a lot of productive and not-so-exhausting things I can do. Here is how you can work through a cold if you want to or need to:

1) Facebook: Facebook is a great way to catch up with your friends. And since you are sick, it is OK to start replying to your received messages, as opposed to replying when you are totally healthy and supposed to be doing something else.

But it is not all. You can also promote your old & recent articles. If you are well enough to log on to Facebook, you are well enough for some mindless article promotion. And since you are already active there, browse through groups and fan pages, join the ones you like, join some communities. If you already have a bunch of communities you joined before, converse and leave your own relevant links that will bring value to the conversations. Also, leave links in your messages to your good friends. And don’t neglect to copy-paste your article links to your profile.

Worry not. There is no need to overdo anything. 3-4 article links to your Facebook profile/news update within some hours between them is great for exposure and give your friends time to digest and all.

2) Twitter: Yep, you can tweet about your sickness, but while you are at it, why not post some good links? It can be your old or new article links, friends’ articles, or links to stuff you are promoting. If you can turn on your computer and log on to Twitter, you definitely owe this little activity to yourself.

3) Social Media of Your Choice: Are your readers on Pinterest? Dying to get better results on Instagram? Is it time you experimented with TikTok? You don’t have to take photos or videos when you are sick. But you can play around with hashtags and look at other creators’ content for inspiration. And when you get better, you will realize you’ll have gotten rid of some of your promotional chores for a while. At the very least, you will have conducted some market research.

4) Registering and signing up for useful sites: You may have come across links to register for social media sites, sites that pay for your content, e-mail newsletters you find useful, etc… Registering to multiple sites take time. Since you have time now, use it to sign up for useful stuff.

5) Read blogs and articles: If you are well enough to read, take this time to read friends’ and other’s articles and blog posts. If you can comment, please do. If you don’t have the energy, just help spread the word about the article and let the author know you did this.

6) Check and clean-up your e-mail inbox: You may not feel good enough to study newsletters or apply tips that you are getting from them, but you can always clean out spam and other unwanted stuff. The cleaner your email inbox is, the more productive it will be for you to use it when you feel healthy.

7) Organize bookmarks: How many bookmarks do you have? The idea for this article came to me while I was trying to organize an enormous list of bookmarks. Most of the time, we run into a useful resource, we bookmark it so that we can come back to it later. But since this happens with a lot of sites, we barely ever have the time to go back. Sometimes it is even hard to remember we had a list of websites to visit in the first place.

Do yourself a favor by organizing them. Get rid of the ones you don’t need. If you run into some beneficial stuff, remember to stumble them up, and/or write them down on a Word document, so that you will remember them easily.

8) Take advantage of your entertainment. And if you do watch excess amount of movies and TV shows, remember to write about them later. I once devoured 7 episodes of Supernatural on one sick day. I later wrote a lot of articles on them.

If you have done general reviews for that movie/tv show/whatever already, you can come up with comparison articles, collection of best episodes, list posts and many more.

9) Jot down ideas. When you are physically inactive, your mind can go into overdrive. Make use of these ideas: write them down so you can use them later.

So above are things I do when I am not feeling well. What are your tips for “sickness productivity”?

Recommended Articles on Productivity & Time Management

Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers by John Soares

How to Use Our Email Accounts Productively to Avoid Procrastination

How to Turn Procrastination into Productivity: 7 Fun Tips for Writers