Fire Studios

It seems like such a simple process: wake-up, shower, breakfast, and then start working. It's how we start everyday and what we do after that affects how much work we get done. But it's so easy to take that productivity out back and shoot it dead that many times we fall victim to distractions and lose valuable time, and for many of us that means less money coming in since it's taking longer to get projects done.

So here are the top 4 things to avoid and achieve your maximum working potential:

1. Social Networking

   - Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Linkedin, MyYearbook, etc. while they may be great sources of potential clients and fellow colleges, they encourage long hours of time spent on the site accomplishing little if anything at all. Even Freelance Freedom writer N. C. Winters has written about this problem on his regular comic strip for Freelance Switch.

2. Instant Messaging

   - Yes, AIM, MSN, ICQ, Skype, GTalk, YIM, and even chatrooms can become huge time wasters. This is my number one sin as I can spend all day messaging people, in-fact, this article took an extra 12 hours to write because of IM. But you don't have to sever your IM all together, you can keep IM'ing by following Life Hacker's IM Survival Tips.

3. Information Abundance

   - This on you can only half control. You can't tell people when they can or cannot add new content, but you can control how much you read. If you see in your RSS Reader that there are 162 new updates, you will be very inclined to go through and read all of them. Luckily Chris Garrett has 21 ways you can manage all those feeds and still keep up to date on all the happenings of the Internet in his post 21 Tips For Keeping Up To Date.

4. Activities

   - One of the main draws of Freelancing is that you can set your own hours and work when you want to, but you shouldn't. Don't work for an hour then take a Halo or Call of Duty break because you're almost guaranteed to spend more time than you planned playing the game. And when you get back to work, you're likely to not be as inspired as you were before. If you start to feel like you're working too much John Kuck wrote a fabulous post on Freelance Switch on How to Become more Social while Maintaining your Success.

So What Should I Do?

The jest of all the productivity killing problems we face come from combining our business and personal lives. When you're at work, be at work, even if you work from your house. Don't use instant messengers while on a call with a client,they get half your attention and you get half the information, meaning half the product.

Unless your job requires that you be connected to the Internet to work, don't be. Most things can be developed locally using systems like XAMPP so disconnect or get out of Wi-Fi range and there will be very few distractions left to kill you productivity.