Reducing time spent drifting

It is easy to get carried away on emails, responding to unimportant mails, reading interesting articles and generally wasting time.

To help me reduce the time I spend on this and to free up more time for the important tasks, I have started to use the stopwatch feature on my phone to highlight how much time I am spending on different tasks.

Before I start a new task I intend to decide how long I should spend on it, though it is important to remain flexible if important tasks take longer than expected. Let them crowd out the unimportant (but often addictive tasks) rather than the other way round

(Image from www.freeimages.co.uk)