If you are feeling distracted and unfocused, here are seven steps for becoming more productive. They are not that revolutionary on their own. But practiced together, they are like a defibrillator for that stuck project that’s still on your to-do list.

Because it will take longer than two minutes to write the action down on your to-do list, organize it, get back up to speed later, and complete the task. … And it will keep your to-do lists much shorter. [smartads] Here are four ways to cut your to-do list in half: Understand the five basic decisions.

You know it’s time to declare email bankruptcy when you are experiencing the following four symptoms. If this is true of you, I provide a seven-step strategy for wiping the digital slate clean and starting over.

[guestpost]Matt Perman is the former director of strategy at Desiring God and is now an author, consultant, and speaker on productivity and leadership from a faith-based perspective. He is the author of the recently released What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done. He blogs What’s Best Next and you […]

I face a dragon named Lethargy every morning. It has three heads: spiritual, physical, and intellectual. If I don’t slay this dragon before breakfast, he usually gets the best of me.

or several years now, I have profited from using a “Master Task List.” This is a way to group your work-related activities so that you do what you were hired to do and keep from getting side-tracked by “trivial pursuits.” It is something you should develop before you start throwing together a to-do list.

Rather than reviewing one book this week, I thought I would share my favorite business books. I get asked this question regularly, most recently when I was lecturing at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Business School earlier this week.

As long as you have to have meetings, you might as well do them well. Before you plan another meeting (and suffer the rest of us to sit through them), make a commitment to do the following:

I often hear people complain about how long it takes to get a response to e-mail. Sometimes, to be sure, it is because the person they are waiting on is inept. The simplest request gets lost in a sea of unprocessed e-mail.

In his book, Getting Things Done he writes: If you’re like me and most people, no matter how good your intentions may be, you’re going to have the world come at you faster than you can keep up…. We book ourselves in back to back meetings all day, go to after-hours events and generate ideas and commitments we need to deal with, and get embroiled in engagements and projects that have the potential to spin our creative intelligence into cosmic orbits…. If the item requires me to take action, I can:  Do it if it takes less than two minutes or add it to my Outlook task list to do later;Defer it by actually scheduling a time on my calendar to deal with it; orDelegate it to someone else for action and enter it into my Outlook task list using the “@WaitingFor” category.