Thankfully Sankarshan didn’t follow through on his threat to petition that I post productivity tips every week because I’ve definitely been off of my blogging game.  The early morning blogging routine has been replaced with exercise and methodically working through Your Best Year Yet! (affiliate link).  Although a quarter of 2011 has passed, I now have a rock-solid list of 10 goals for the rest of year.  I’m also getting an energy boost from exercising first thing in the day.

Here’s a recent discovery when you need to be really productive within a block of time—set one countdown timer for the whole time period.  It’s slightly different than kitchen timer power and is probably best suited for times when you have lots of little tasks or one big task you want to get done within a certain period of time.

A really nice and simple count-down timer for your web browser is at http://cd.justinjc.com.

After a busy morning of meetings and a quick lunch at Chipotle Grill I headed to the public library to crank through a bunch of tedious tasks that would bring sanity to my meeting schedule and leave the weekend more work-free.  I also had to head home at a fixed time to help get ready for our the neighborhood soup night we host at our house in the winter.

I saw saw myself going off-task a few times and on a whim set a timer for the remaining two hours and forty five minutes.  It was a nice constant reminder that I wasn’t working with an unbounded amount of time and that anything I did that wasn’t on my “todo” list was putting finishing the complete “todo” list in jeopardy.  Seeing the current time on the countdown timer made it much clearer how much time was left before I had to jet versus casually looking at my watch and seeing that it wasn’t time to leave yet.

Hopefully in time I will be able to blog about two of the projects that have taken the place of Fedora in my role as program manager at Red Hat.  If you are an active RHCE you may have been invited to participate in a recent beta of one of them.