eviet at Wed, Sep 24 06:00 AM:

I enjoyed the podcast...reminds me of the word of God which tells us to be single-minded and focused.  Whenever I do this, I really do get a lot of things accomplished.  I have to still keep working on the consistency of doing this on a regular basis and not slip back into the bad habit of multi tasking...which is really nothing more than another word for distraction! 

biglife at Wed, Sep 24 07:52 AM:

Great great podcast, but I do have a question.  When it comes to email, I feel like people expect a quick answer, so I do check back and forth. How do you make sure you are on top of your correspondence and stay single focused?

Green_Raven at Wed, Sep 24 09:21 AM:

I too enjoyed this podcast, I don't often listen to the daily podcasts (well, almost never), but I listened to this one after seeing devlyn's blog post redirecting us here.  So I came along.

I have a huge problem managing time, there's always things I want to do, and never enough time to do them.  Earlier this year, in April, I took part in ScriptFrenzy, where you write 50 pages of script in 30 days.  Not that difficult was it?  I only managed 12 pages.  What I did, was work out how many pages it would take each day for 30 days, if I did 2 pages a day, that would take me over 50 pages in 30 days.  So that would be easy - but I spent time checking me emails, posting on the ScriptFrenzy emails, even IMing with others taking part and talking about it.  Talking to my friends in the real world, "I'm taking part in this... " all excited.  But I very rarely got down to actually do it, and my daily page count that I had to do kept increasing, as I had less and less time to do it.  I soon realised I needed more discipline in my life!  I never set aside the time to solidly work on my script, like the 2 hour slots Devlyn suggests.  Had I done so, imagine how much more I would have gotten done! 

I started my To Do List today, there's a lot of items on there, and they sit on my notepad undone while I check my emails and nosy around the site - guess I better get on with them before I run out of time for them!  :)

at Wed, Sep 24 10:56 AM:

Super Podcast...just Super :)

PJ

datdesignguy at Thu, Sep 25 02:20 AM:

@biglife: I recently read a blog post on the blog for the book The 4-hour Work Week, and a user wrote in saying he had his entire team (he was the owner of a design firm) commit to only checking their email 4 times throughout the business day.

So, what I took from that, was to set a reminder or if you use Outlook/Thunderbird, change your preferences to where it only downloads email once every 2-3 hours.

For me, in my work day, even though I use gmail for email both work and personal, I turned on the free Pop3  option which allows me to check new email using Thunderbird/Outlook, and then set my Thunderbird to only check for new messages every 3 hours. That means 3 times throughout the work day I have 20 minutes (for a total of 60 minutes per day) blocked out for email. If the emails don't get answered in either of those 3 20-minute periods, then I will spend a little extra time at the end of the day making sure all "can't wait" emails get answered.

By the way everyone, I haven't read it yet, but ppl are swearing by the time management principles outlined in the 4-hour work week, so it might be something you'd like to check out. :-) Hope this was helpful!