Checking email, chatting with friends, looking at amusing blogs, playing flash games or MMORPGs – there are endless opportunities to procrastinate. That really takes a chunk out of your productivity.

One of the most crucial elements of time management is staying on track. Every day, we waste time and money playing online when we should be focusing on work. When that work is of a creative nature, you are even more prone to coming across something way too interesting not to lose focus – an impulse that has to be fought and fought hard, especially when a deadline is looming.

But that doesn’t mean there is no hope. You can increase your productivity and work without the distractions (or at least as many), using these three tips and a couple of helpful tools.

1. Use Distraction Management Tools

The Internet has more than just interesting things to make you lose focus. It also has tools to help you potentially combat that and get more from your day. Many of them are even free and so can save you money while you use them.

LeechBlock

It would be really great if we were able to use sheer force of will to keep us off of those sites that tempt us. But that just isn’t the way it works, unfortunately. The draw of funny cat pictures and YouTube clips can just be too much for us, and we find ourselves thinking, “Just a few minutes won’t hurt.”

But then an hour passes, and we go into panic mode. It is better to just block those sites that take up the most of our time, and LeechBlock does that. You download it as a Firefox attachment, then put in the blocked domains of your choice and the times that they should be locked out. That includes a time limit to block them out, such as a certain number of minutes per hour.

StayFocused

This extension does essentially the same thing, but for Google Chrome users. It limits the amount of time you spend on time-waster websites that you have listed yourself.

You can configure it more actively by deciding if you want a whole domain blocked or just certain areas, setting time limits for certain activities and more. You just set the amount of time, and once that has been used up you are done – it locks you out for the rest of the day.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk is a simple to-do list program that consists of dozens of options (online to-do list, task management, calendars, etc) and syncs up with your smartphone, PDA, tablet and other software. You set tasks on the program, it syncs with everything you register, and then it reminds you when something has to be done.

As you go through your day you tick things off your list. It even has an RSS feed tracker, a Gmail attachment and more. You will be amazed at how easy keeping a list is holding you accountable for yourself during the day.

Schedule Your Work

Setting a deadline is a great way of getting yourself on the right track and staying there. It sets a time when something needs to be started or done, and so you can just go through the motions. For example, say you have to finish a concept design for a website you have been commissioned for.

You might give yourself until the end of the week at 3 p.m. to have that concept design completed and sent out to the client.

Just make sure that your schedule is a realistic one and that everything in your day fits into it. Too many people keep separate schedules for work and home life, and then it gets thrown off when one thing intersects with the other.

Share Your Progress

Finally, hold yourself accountable by sharing your goals and progress with someone else. This could be another designer, a partner or just your client.

Make sure to show the different steps as you go along, so they can watch you making progress and you have someone to answer to. Another set of eyes can really go a long way toward making you work like you are supposed to. That is an opportunity that isn’t often afforded to freelancers or people who work from home.

Conclusion

Don’t allow distractions to keep you down. But also, don’t allow the project to become the distraction itself. Make deadlines, use tools to keep you on track and share your progress. All of this will allow you to spend the correct amount of time on each project and meet your deadlines as you are supposed to.

Just imagine, never having to ask for another extension!

Jennifer Moline writes about freelancing, small business and design for the PsPrint Blog. PsPrint is an online printing solutions company, which you can follow on Twitter.

Image credit: 1.

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3 Awesomely Simple and Effective Productivity Tips (And Tools) originally appeared on: Crenk
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One of such promising new tools is “MoreDays” which is still in invitation-based beta. (Getting an invite is easy and quick. Just be sure to check your spam box after you apply. Mine got there and I had been waiting for three days before it occurred to me to check it).

The best feature about the app is that it encourages you to use your photos to create tasks, events and contacts.

This is really brilliant: Taking a photo takes a second nowadays. Most of us have decent photo cameras always on hand and we can quickly take photos of anything. So why not use these photos to better manage your time?

Create an Event

The interface is very appealing: To add a task you need to create a title and submit a photo:

Obviously, you can set up (recurring) reminders, add notes and addresses and add as many other details as you need.

Each of your daily tasks and events is thus turned into a collection of memories of what you have been doing, whom you should have met and what were your daily experiences:

It’s like a digital photo album on steroids: it can alert you of new upcoming events and never let you forget about important meetings by creating sticky photo-enhanced visualizations.

More to Be Excited About

While I loved the photo-support feature most of all, there were other great options I liked in the tool:

• You can store all your events and tasks in a map (and soon they will all be visualized on a single map);
• You can synchronize your to-do lists and photos among various devices (laptop, desktop, mobile, etc);
• There are other cool features promised that we still have to see to believe:

Moredays is getting very positive reviews from the press, so let’s hope the app will stick and get developed. So far the team has done a great job; let’s wait for the upcoming features to be introduced!

Sonia Tracy is the content editor for PsPrint and editor of PsPrint Printing and Design Blog. PsPrint is an online printing company, which you can follow on Twitter

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Manage Your Time Creatively Using Photos! originally appeared on: Crenk
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Action Method was introduced this year as the premiere application to manage your projects, tasks, planning, and meetings. The application allows you to create projects, create tasks, assign tasks, and manage a calendar. If tasks are falling behind you can nudge the people to whom you assigned them to in order to remind them of deadlines. Color coding is a big winner for this app as it’s easy to find what you’re looking for with alternating colors.

Have an iPhone or iTouch? No problem, your web application syncs with your mobile app so your to-do list is never far away. Incredibly useful and sure to improve with future updates, the app is free to download, and free for up to 50 tasks, premium service for unlimited tasks comes in at $12/month or $99/year.

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Kick Productivity Into High Gear with ActionMethod originally appeared on: Crenk
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ReminderFox

This neat little plug-in goes for simplicity. While not necessarily an official “to-do” application, I find it almost necessary for those that seem to forget the important dates. People that forget birthdays, anniversaries, parties, and other date based events, ReminderFox will send out an alarm or an alert to remind you of what’s coming up. This plug-in has no aspirations to be a full calendar application, but rather makes its home at the bottom right of your browser ready to announce the days you NEED to remember!

ToDo Cue (experimental)
ToDo Cue unfortunately was very buggy in my use of this plug-in. It relies on the user creating simple, let me stress that again…simple, to-do lists. Once installed a side bar will appear in both your Gmail and Gcal accounts with the lists of things to-do in priority order. I was only able to get sustainable functionality with the older version of Gmail, which did me little good as I have updated it. There are a lot of other tools that do the same with better results. This plug-in needs more work, but remember, it is still labeled experimental, just not sure if it will ever be ready.

Todo Reminder
I found this to be the plug-in with the most potential. Currently the plug-in is very effective with event reminders. Things like parties, birthdays, get togethers, anniversaries, etc. What I loved about it is that alerts not only come via email, but you can set yourself up with SMS alerts. If more than one person is involved, take it further by setting up group alerts. This will make sure everyone is on task and aware of what is coming up. I especially found the one mouse click addition through emails and pages very effective when needing to list something quickly. The site says further development is needed, but I think this little plug-in has a great future in the productivity field.

Delegate to Remember the Milk
A lot of you have heard of Remember the Milk. If you’ve not, no worries, Remember the Milk (RtM) is simply another way to create your to-do lists with functionality with both web apps and mobile apps. There are a great number of power users for RtM, and as such, this plug-in is very popular. For starters, if you follow the GTD (Getting Things Done) philosophy, then this plug-in will be very effective. A “remember” button is added to all of your emails for quick task managing directly from you email. No bothering with cut and paste, simply click and the message is tasked into your RtM account. Yes, it’s that simple!

GTD Inbox
GTD Inbox is a plug-in that tries to do a whole lot. Unfortunately in this endeavor it tends to fail on a lot of fronts. This plug-in completely changes the face of your Gmail inbox by adding the functionality of GTD (mentioned above). For hardcore GTD’ers, the layout will be very familiar with intuitive clicks to productively manage all of your information. Similar to the RtM plug-in, you have a button that will take your emails and place them into your task list. You have the ability to create labels, ticklers, and build the productivity method that best suits your needs. This productivity juggaurnaut is definitely not an entry level “to-do” plug-in and may confuse first time users of GTD. A little buggy with newer versions of Gmail, but useful if you can understand it.

There are more I am sure, and even more being created for Firefox 3, but share your favorite To-Do Plug-ins here and let’s all get more done.

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5 Firefox To-Do Plug-ins originally appeared on: Crenk
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