Be conscious of the imitation factor

If you mindlessly copy how other people handle things, or fail to examine your habits, you will miss some opportunities to do things better.

Human beings tend to unconsciously use imitation as a tool for dealing with a lot of situations. They either imitate what they have seen other people do in similar situations, or they imitate what they themselves did the last time they faced a similar situation (Thats what habits are: Us imitating ourselves).

Imitation more or less works most of the time. Imitation allows you to gain the benefit of your own or other people's experience without re-inventing the wheel.

But sometimes what other people do in a particular situation is not the best thing for you to do in that situation. Maybe your values and preferences are different than most peoples, so what works for them doesn't work for you. Or maybe other people are just making stupid choices for unknown reasons. To paraphrase your mother: "Well, if Johnny jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?"

And sometimes the way you have always handled a particular situation in the past is no longer (if it ever was) the best way to handle that situation. Maybe your values and preferences have changed. Maybe your situation has changed. Maybe the first time you dealt with a particular type of situation you just made a stupid choice and then never revisited your decision.

The moral is, when you are making choices about how to get something done take a moment to step back and try to explain your decision to yourself as if you were explaining it to a stranger. If you find that your explanation for your decision sounds kind of stilted and shallow, or if it boils down to "that's just what I have always done" or "that's just what everyone does" then stop and take even more time to think through whether your decision is really the best possible in the circumstances, and whether there might be better alternatives. This process of re-assessing your habits, or the traditions of others, helps you spot inefficient or counterproductive habits and come up with new solutions that work better for you.

Configure your email program to work offline

Mozilla Thunderbird has this great feature called Work Offline. The way it works is that you click on the Work Offline icon and it downloads messages and then disconnects from the email server. Until you click the icon again, no new email messages show up in your inbox, and the emails you send go into a Unsent Messages folder. When you do go back online, all the pending emails in your Unsent Messages folder get sent, and all the new emails are downloaded.

So what's so great about that? The first time I noticed the Work Offline feature I remember thinking "Oh, I will never use that; It must be for people who want to work when they on airplanes or something" (and I am not one of those people; Airplanes are for catching up on New Yorkers). I forget what inspired me to try Work Offline for the first time, but when I did I immediately noticed two benefits.

The first was that I was able to focus on the task at hand much better without the distraction, and temptation, presented by new emails popping into my in-box. I don't know about you, but over time I have acquired an almost Pavlovian response to the little ding when a new email comes in. I drop everything, open up the new email, and then get sidetracked dealing with it. Of course with discipline its possible to train yourself to not respond to each incoming email, and if you have that discipline then good for you, but for me its easier to just remove the temptation.

The other benefit to working offline, which to me was completely unexpected, is that it is really handy to have all outgoing emails queued up in the Unsent Messages folder for a while before they actually go out. How many times have you sent an email, and then 5 minutes later realized that you forgot to mention something, or add the attachment, or you came across something that makes you realize that what you said in your email was wrong and you will have to send another email? With your outgoing emails queued up in the Unsent Messages folder its a simple matter to right click on the email, select "Edit as New," revise your email, re-send it, and then delete the old version.

Maybe I am ditzier than average, but there are times when I have revised a pending email 2 or 3 times before it actually goes out, typically because as I work through my email in-box I come across new information that makes me want to revise what I wrote.

Switch to two monitors

If you do a lot of work on the computer your productivity will be substantially increased by adding a second monitor. A second monitor reduces the amount of time you spend clicking around to switch between windows, and allows you to see and work on multiple documents at the same time.

Think about it: Would you even for one second consider using a physical desk that was 12" x 15"? Why not? Maybe because you don't want to spend all your time constantly reshuffling the things on your desktop to bring the current item to the top? If you wouldn't use a physical desk that small, why would you use a computer screen that small? Especially considering that you probably do a lot more of your work on your computer desktop than on your physical desktop.

I have been using two monitors for a year and a half now, and when I occasionally have to work using a single monitor I feel trapped and confined, and my productivity drops quite a bit.