Increasing Productivity

If you are an entrepreneur, productivity is one of the most important things you can concentrate on.  No matter how hard you try to focus on one task, it can be very difficult, especially in this day of the Internet, Facebook, Texting, Smartphones, Tablets and so many other distractions.

I fight it every day  I get anywhere from 500 to 800 emails per day.  If I let it fall behind, I am facing an insurmountable problem, it seems sometimes.

I want to mention something that happened yesterday. I have written about a tech guy that I follow, named Steve Dotto. Steve is a Canadian and used to be on TV there with tech-related programming. Now, he does all of his “TV” stuff on his own and posts it on YouTube. He seems to be very successful. He does a lot of Webinars. I watched one of his Webinars yesterday, about how to be more productive. I thought I was fairly productive already, but he offered some great ideas on how to vastly improve productivity.

I used to have 3 monitors and felt it made me way more productive. Some time back, one of my monitors died and I have been using only 2 monitors, but procrastinating on buying a new monitor and getting back to 3. Well, Steve said on the webinar that he used to use 3 monitors, but he went to one monitor because it increases productivity. It is counterintuitive, but he went on to explain how if you have multiple monitors so you can monitor everything at once, you get too many interruptions. Say you are working on editing a graphic, then an email comes in, you quickly move over to see if it is an important email. If you get a Facebook notification, you gotta check that out! ETC ETC ETC. As he explained this, I just kept shaking my head… YES, YES, YES. I got so many emails and other notifications that sometimes I can’t get a thing done.

Already, I got rid of my second monitor, and am just using one, and I can already see that the distractions are way, way less than before. I think I am going to buy a new 27″ monitor to have a really nice setup. A larger monitor will also mean that by setting the same resolution, things will be bigger on the screen, and that will be great for my eyes (I have been fighting some diabetes-related eye problems for over a year now). I already lowered the resolution on this monitor earlier today and it made seeing things much easier for me. Having a bigger monitor will be even better.

So, I feel I am permanently back, and happy, with a single monitor! I bet that caught you by surprise!

I have embedded the YouTube version of Steve’s Webinar below.  it is long, but I also feel it is very worthwhile to watch.  I think the video might only be up on YouTube for a couple of days, so if you want to watch, don’t waste time before having a look!

I can see that some of Steve’s ideas are going to make a major impact on my productivity.