Hello QClip­pers! We have been rush­ing to pub­lish one last issue before the end of the year and as you can imag­ine it has not been easy given the “hol­i­day crunch.” Clients want to get things set­tled before the Christ­mas / New Year hol­i­days, and many of us at Quan­tum­Method take our vaca­tion time dur­ing that week as well. Need­less to say it has been a chal­lenge. But, we did it!

With all that said, I do want to bring you a great “top #” list that I recently came across in Inc mag­a­zine (If you don’t read Inc you should, espe­cially if you are an entre­pre­neur run­ning a busi­ness). Who doesn’t like lists right? Well, I really found this one use­ful. Many of the items on the list are com­mon sense and con­cepts I already knew, but I always need a reminder to reassert myself. So, let’s give some kudos to Ilya Pozin at Inc. for putting this together and enjoy the read. AND, please have a Merry Christ­mas, Happy Hanukkah and safe New Year’s. See you all in 2012!

1. Work back­wards from goals to mile­stones to tasks. Writ­ing “launch com­pany web­site” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have spe­cific tasks that can be accom­plished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wire­frame, out­line an intro­duc­tion for the home­page video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actu­ally suc­ceed in cross­ing them off your list.
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switch­ing from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, chang­ing tasks more than ten times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, I’ve read, your IQ drops by five points. When you mul­ti­task, it drops by an aver­age of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at mul­ti­task­ing than women).
3. Be mil­i­tant about elim­i­nat­ing dis­trac­tions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant mes­sag­ing. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Inter­net con­nec­tion. Go to a quiet area and focus on com­plet­ing one task.
4. Sched­ule your email. Pick two or three times dur­ing the day when you’re going to use your email. Check­ing your email con­stantly through­out the day cre­ates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for con­ver­sa­tion. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let some­thing else set your day. Most peo­ple go right to their emails and start freak­ing out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accom­plish noth­ing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehy­drate, eat a good break­fast to replen­ish your glu­cose, then set pri­or­i­tized goals for the rest of your day.
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute inter­vals. Your brain uses up more glu­cose than any other bod­ily activ­ity. Typ­i­cally, you will have spent most of it after 60–90 min­utes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meet­ings). So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent to recharge. Yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not includ­ing lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5–10 hours.

Tags: business, Focus, Holidays, Inspiration, Leadership, stress, time management
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