I have heard just about EVERY young leader at one time or another complain that their job requires more of them than they have time to give (myself included). A few years ago, while reading Getting Things Done, I started to pay attention to “time suckers” – things that take time away from productivity in my day. Here are a few of them; my hunch is that they are affecting your work world too! My point is that you will find a TON of time inside of every day where you can be more productive, not so that you can add more work to your hours but so that you can add more hours to your life. (I don’t want to work all of the time!)

EMAIL - every single person I know if guilty of checking their email too much and then being drawn into ‘urgent’ items that they find awaiting them in the in-box rather than staying focused on items that are at hand right now or that are due sometime very soon. TURN OFF your email and block out some planned for work time. I promise that the email will still be there when you come back to it. EMAIL is not IM and it is not the phone, so stop treating it like such.

PHONE CALLS – these, along with text messages, also suck tons of high impact time out of your day. Believe it or not, there was an era where people couldn’t be reached or interupted every second of every day.

FACEBOOK, TWITTER & their posse – Mark Cuban has an interesting post on this; I agree with him. While usable networking tools, you have to admit they more often than not are a distraction to your work.

CERTAIN  INDIVIDUALS - you know who they are… when you see them come up on caller ID or walk down the hallway or send you a meeting request for an hour but you know it really means 2. Work hard to put parameters on these certain individuals so that they don’t suck your time.

MEETINGS - I know, they are unavoidable. But, going out on a limb here, I think that 50% of the meetings that exist out there in our worlds are largely ineffective, inefficient or just straight up bogus. Most people leading them haven’t even read a single article let alone a book on how to lead an effective meeting. Way too many meetings involve needless chit-chat. Please, read Death By Meeting and then start giving it out as gifts for Christmas.