So, let’s meet five types of people who can be hell on your productivity:

The Nitpicker

In the right situation, the nitpicker can help you out. This is the person you want proofreading your copy before it goes to press, or putting the beta version of your app through its paces. In the early stages of any project, though, nitpickers can kill an idea with alarming speed. A great concept can become completely bogged down in a discussion of hypothetical details and future problems, well before it makes sense to start talking about them. Ouch.

The Naysayer

Whether he’s telling you that your latest project is a waste of time, or eagerly explaining why your entire profession is useless, the naysayer will never help you out. Nothing you’re doing is important to him, and there’s no point in asking him for help with the details, because he thinks your whole enterprise is ridiculous. The Naysayer isn’t necessarily a horrible person or a bad friend, he’s just a horrible person and a bad friend to talk to about work. One conversation with him can put you off your game for an entire day.

The Freeloader

If you’re good enough at something to get paid for doing it, you’ll inevitably meet someone who wants you to do it for them … for free. Whatever your profession, Freeloaders are basically inescapable. It could be a buddy who wants you to mock up a website on spec, an ex who wants free software, or the sister who wants you to fix her computer. This stuff takes time away from your paying work (or your exciting side project), and puts you in the awkward position of either giving away tons of useful time or looking like a jerk. The only way to deal with Freeloaders is by learning how to say no.

The Email Trainwreck

The popularity of Inbox Zero is a testament to the way we’ve increasingly come to view our inboxes as black holes of time and effort. Sometimes you’re the victim of your own organizational problems, and sometimes … well, some people are just bad at email. The Email Trainwreck is the guy who accidentally hits “reply all,” and then follows up with a message apologizing for hitting “reply all.” She’s one-word-email-girl. He’s the dude who abuses your inbox when text or IM would be faster. Heck, the Email Trainwreck could be your grandmother, forwarding you some conservative political humor. These people are the reason I turned off badges and alerts for new email.

The Über-competitor

Sometimes, a little bit of competition is healthy, even between people working on the same thing. Being around people who constantly strive to put out good work can be excellent motivation to do your own best work. The Über-competitor isn’t about healthy competition. This person doesn’t want to do her best work, she just wants to do better than you. This is obviously less than ideal when you’re supposed to be working together. Über-competitors have been known to hold back key information you need to do your work, or talk to clients or bosses behind your back, all in the name of beating everyone at everything.

Ideally, you would just avoid all five of these people, and deal with them only in situations that engage their positive traits — even annoying people can have an upside! — but I know that’s not always possible. At least you can be secure in knowing that you’re not the only one dealing with people who seem hell-bent on making work difficult.

I’d love to hear your stories (or your nominations for other productivity-killing personality types) in the comments!

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to The Morning News, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

Photo credit – shearforce

Brittany Ancell at The 99% recently decided to forsake Inbox Zero and start checking email only twice a day. Her reasoning was that “we feel a sense of accomplishment in tending to a constant stream of incoming (but not very important) requests. It’s the Inbox Hero Mentality: ‘I may not be making any headway on my to-do list, but I’ll be damned if there’s one message lying in wait!’”

Instead of operating with a reactionary workflow, based on responding to whatever hit her inbox, she decided to deal with email on her own schedule. The thing is, I don’t think this “balanced email diet” is antithetical to Inbox Zero. Brittany still zeroed her inbox every morning, dealing with anything actionable and deleting the rest. I think Merlin Mann would agree with her that it’s important to build a system that turns your actionable email into … well, action.

It will be interesting to see how productivity nerds respond to Merlin’s upcoming Inbox Zero book. I think the book will go a long way toward clarifying that Inbox Zero doesn’t mean actively processing email all day as if it were your only job. Inbox Zero is supposed to make your email less distracting, not more distracting. If that means you only check email twice a day, so be it.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to The Morning News, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

Here are some of things I’m doing today to clean out my computer today:

Running Maintenance Scripts

I’m on a Mac, so a system tuneup app like Onyx is ideal for this job. Your Mac runs scripts overnight that keep your system in working order, but it’s nice to run them manually if you don’t leave your machine on all the time. Some of these scripts only run once a month, so you should make sure to include those in a full cleanup. (Also, make sure you download the version of Onyx that matches your version of Mac OS.) If you’re on a PC, you should definitely run Disk Cleanup and defrag your hard drive!

Cleaning Up My HD

This one probably takes the most time and manual effort. That untamable documents folder is just sitting there waiting to be properly organized, and today is the day to man up (or woman) up and just do it. This has become a much easier task on my Mac since the introduction of Quick Look. No more opening up all those poorly-labeled Word docs to see what they are. … which brings me to another point: I should be labeling my files better to begin with, so I’ll be able to remember what they are when next year’s Clean Out Your Computer Day rolls around.

The other problem areas that need serious attention —for me, anyway — include my horrifying iTunes library and collection of seldom-used fonts. This stuff is taking up valuable hard drive space, and the fonts are only increasing the load time on my apps.

This would also be a good time to back up your hard drive if it’s been a while.

Cleaning Up My Browser

Time to see which of those bookmarks you still actually use, and which ones you can safely chuck out. Clearing cookies and caches isn’t a bad idea, either. How about those scripts, add-ons and themes? Still using all of them, or are they just slowing you down?

Literally Cleaning Up My Computer

Macworld has a great guide to cleaning up the physical stuff about your laptop, especially displays and keyboards. These tips aren’t Mac-specific, though, so feel free to apply them to whatever machine you’re cleaning.

Ahhh, doesn’t that feel better? Now, go get some work done on your freshly-cleaned machine!

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to The Morning News, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

Photo Credit – twid

Tom Davenport, co-author of The Attention Economy, argues that this is nothing to be concerned about. In The Harvard Business Review, he writes that there’s no point in dwelling on information overload because none of us is actually going to do anything about it. When was the last time you reorganized your RSS feeds or changed the way you sort email?

Davenport thinks the real waste of time is worrying about a bogeyman like information overload. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I should be doing something productive instead of writing this column about a “problem” that nobody really wants to fix. I think he’s wrong. I update my spam filter dutifully and prune RSS feeds I don’t read. Letting your mind wander and reading junk on the web isn’t necessarily a productivity killer in moderation, but feeling obligated to read every email and every RSS item really can suck up a lot of valuable time.

I believe a few minutes spent cutting down on how much info you’re subscribed to will save you the time it would take to read or delete the junk later. Davenport’s point is generally right. Once we’re signed up to Facebook, Twitter, a few webcomics, a fantasy baseball team (or whatever your particular distraction might be), we’re not going to stop reading it. Does that mean that effective spam filtering and careful trimming of subscriptions can’t benefit our productivity? No way.

What do you think? Is info overload a real problem, or just an overhyped myth?

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to The Morning News, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

According to researchers, even a five-second interruption increased the time it took the study participants to complete the rest of their assigned tasks. That means all those Growl notifications, new email popups, instant message windows and bouncing dock icons are subtly undermining your productivity, whether you notice or not.

That’s because it takes time for the brain to task-switch and remember what you were working on before you checked email or answered an IM. Maybe not a LOT of time, granted, but it definitely adds up. “We might find ourselves needing a few moments to re-gather our thoughts, and remember what it was that we were about to do before we switched our attention to the interrupting on-screen notification,” said Helen Hodgetts, who authored the study.

The study did suggest an alternative to visual alerts, though: sounds. When we hear alert sounds, we don’t …

[At this point, I received a Growl notification from Twitter, and was distracted from writing this article.]

… as I was saying, we don’t feel the need to respond immediately to sounds, the way we do with visual stimuli. A simple auditory ping that tells you something’s happening doesn’t demand the same level of involvement as seeing the subject line of a new email pop up on your screen.

Alert sounds can certainly be annoying, though, so I recommend browsing the sound sets on Adium Xtras and picking out something subtle that you can live with. (These are designed for the excellent Mac chat client Adium, but they can be downloaded and plugged into other apps as needed.)

How do you have your alerts set up? Let us know how you cope with distractions, in the comments.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He writes about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also follow him on Twitter and at his blog.

Photo Credit  — mukluk

When it’s almost time for bed and my queue of deadlines is still stacked up like some hairy 8-foot monster, I find myself wishing I had cared just a little bit less about what Lady GaGa wore on the red carpet or what cool new jQuery plugins people are using this week.

Celine Roque over at Web Worker Daily really got to the heart of the problem with her thoroughly bookmark-worthy post about eliminating compulsive online fiddling. After quitting my favorite distracting sites cold-turkey and finding it totally didn’t work for me, I found this advice sane and reasonable by comparison:

Track Your Time

WWD’s first step is to identify just how much time you’re spending on your distractions, and keep a record of it. I love this, because it’s the web equivalent of figuring out how much you spend on cigarettes every year and using that as motivation to quit smoking. A few minutes here and there doesn’t seem like much to worry about it, but it adds up.

Remove The Distractions

I’ve talked about this in other posts, but using software to block your most distracting websites during work hours can be a good emergency measure for the hopeless web fiddler. Removing distracting apps from your dock and bookmarks, so they’re out of sight and out of mind, is a less extreme measure that I still find effective.

Understand Your Motivation

Probably the most useful general piece of advice in the WWD post. You’ll be more likely to take measures to save time if you know why you’re doing it. Do you want more time with family and friends, or extra time to do freelance projects for some extra money? Focusing on your goals gives you a reason to pause and reconsider before you spend three hours reading Gawker.

Don’t Do It All At Once

Designate a few hours of solid work without fiddling, and try that out before you decide to do it for an entire day. There’s no point in asking too much of yourself at once and giving up out of frustration.

I don’t mean to make web fiddling seem like some kind of horrible addiction— although I can tell you that my own distraction problems might almost reach that level — but it’s one area where most of us could get back a few extra hours a day. With that time, we could be making something really cool instead of refreshing email!

How do you avoid distractions on the web? Sound off in the comments.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He writes about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also follow him on Twitter and at his blog.

Photo Credit  — ari

Basically, shutting myself off from the world can’t force me to get more done. There are plenty of other distractions out there, and I’m going to find them when I don’t feel like working. Sure, I didn’t waste any time reading Twitter this week, but I did watch the entire first season of Torchwood.

My takeaway is that social sites are no worse than any other favorite distraction. It’s okay for them to be part of your life — a big part, even —as long as you manage the amount of time you spend and don’t let them interfere with work.

Here’s my best advice on how to allow work and Facebook to peacefully coexist:

Don’t Go Cold Turkey

I can’t recommend completely quitting your social networks as a way to increase your productivity. If you’re a compulsive Facebook checker, thinking about loading up your News Feed can be just as distracting as actually doing it. Allow yourself a few checks a day — at lunch breaks or logical stopping points in your work — so you can put it out of your mind and get things done.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The best thing I did for myself while taking a break from social networks was to hide all the bookmarks and apps that connected me to them. This seems obvious, but I didn’t fully understand how important it was until I put it into practice: when the distraction wasn’t right in front of me, I wasn’t tempted to go look for it. Even an extra step as small as having to type “Facebook” into my browser’s address bar was enough to make me stop and decide whether that’s how I wanted to spend my time.

Don’t Check First Thing in the Morning

A lot of people have a policy of not checking email right when they wake up, and the same thing can apply to social networks. Whether you wait an hour, or wait until you’ve done a certain amount of work — for me, writing two blog posts is about right — you shouldn’t go there right away. Like email, social sites give you loads of stuff to respond to. Event invitations, wall posts about friends’ relationship drama and tweets about the coolest new web game are all great ways to kill an hour, and they can all wait until you’ve finished at least SOME work.

Try a Time Tracker

I didn’t take things this far (probably because I’m afraid to find out exactly how much time I spend not doing work) but there are some great tools out there that tell you how long you spend on various websites. RescueTime is a popular choice, but you can also try Slife or  Nebul.us.  These services will give you a stark picture of all the time you spend not working, which ought to motivate you to be more efficient.

Don’t beat yourself up over using the web to procrastinate, just be aware that you’re doing it, and adjust your habits accordingly. Good luck!

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He writes about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also find him on Twitter and at his blog.

Photo Credit — escapetowisconsin

You’ve heard this a million times: the first step is admitting you have a problem. A couple of days ago, I realized that I had some difficult deadlines coming up before the end of the month, and decided I couldn’t afford to devote so much time to social networking. I closed Tweetie and took it out of my dock. I deleted my Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr bookmarks. I moved my Twitter and Tumblr iPhone apps to the very last page on my phone. I made a couple of quick announcements so that nobody would take it personally, and I dropped social networking for a week.

It’s been two days so far, and I’ve noticed a definite uptick in my productivity. Without the social bookmarks and apps there to click when I don’t have a plan, I find myself clicking on the dashboards of the blogs I write for, and getting work done instead. In fact, I turned in twice as many words yesterday as I normally do. Was Twitter a bigger drain on my work than I had realized?

I think so, but I also don’t think it’s as bad as it seems. A general lack of focus can manifest itself in a lot of ways, and social sites just happen to be some of the closes distractions at at hand when you work on the web. Getting rid of the option to check them unconsciously was a good step. Much like turning off alerts and badges for incoming email, removing bookmarks and social apps means you have to make a conscious effort to check those sites. Checking 3 or 4 or even 10 times a day might not hurt your productivity, but checking hundreds of times certainly will.

I don’t think the cold-turkey approach to dealing with these sites — which, after all, connect you with friends and work contacts — is the best one, but I’ll try to stick with it until the full week is up. I’ll report back when it’s over to let you know how it went.

Meanwhile, let us know about your experiences with social networking sites and productivity in the comments.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can usually find him on Twitter, but not this week!

Photo Credit — left-hand

Here we go, then: how to declutter a hopelessly messy workspace.

What needs to be there?

Instead of starting with the attitude of keeping everything and moving or throwing away things one by one, start with a blank desk and add back the stuff you can’t work without. My laptop and second display take up a ton of space on my desk, but I can’t very well get rid of them, because I use them for work. Other than that, I just need my phone, and occasionally a pen and pad.

What are you going to do with all that paper?

Paper is probably the biggest source of clutter in my work life. I don’t even use it, it just comes in the mail each day and never gets adequately processed. This is where you do as I say, not as I do, and process your paper as you receive it. Recycle, shred, file it in an inbox … do anything but allow it to grow across your desk and take over your space. Of course, avoiding paper in the first place is the best way to prevent this, but that’s a subject for another post.

Clear off your walls and floor

The workspace is more than just a desk. If you’re going to go truly distraction-free, make sure you’ve got unadorned, solid-colored walls in your field of vision. Also, don’t let too much junk pile up on the floor. I know it sounds crazy to the neat-freaks amongst you, but I can see a pile of dirty laundry on the floor out of the corner of my eye, taunting me as I write this post. That’ll never do.

Clean up your computer’s dock and desktop

You probably spend more time looking at your computer’s dock and desktop than anything else in your office, so keep them clean and free of distractions. I’m on a temporary detox from Twitter and Facebook right now — another subject that deserves its own post — and I’ve found that removing the bookmarks and apps associated with those sites also blocks my habit of clicking on them every 5 minutes while I’m working. The same goes for games and other time-wasters. Hide them anywhere but the desktop.

That’s obviously not everything you can do, but it’s definitely a good start. If you work from the premise that everything in your workspace has to be essential or very useful to earn its place, you should be able to maintain an environment that’s clean and distraction-free. You don’t have to be a monk, you just have to recycle your paper and take out your pizza boxes when you finish with them.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

Photo Credit – jeffreydenver

In one of the most insightful essays I’ve read all year, Paul Graham explains the difference between the Manager’s Schedule and the Maker’s Schedule, and why meetings have a cascading effect of wasted time for people who make things. That “Maker” group includes writers, coders, designers and other project-oriented folks.

When a Maker has to attend a scheduled meeting, it has the effect of breaking a useful stretch of time into chunks that are often too small to accommodate any difficult work. Even a half-hour meeting can be distracting, because anticipating it and remembering to go to it pulls focus away from the task at hand, and refocusing afterward takes time, too.

Graham says that Managers don’t understand the Maker’s schedule, because their own schedules are blocked out into hour-long chunks by default.  They have time to take speculative, “just-getting-to-know-you” meetings. A Maker, on the other hand, might need an entire day to work on one problem.

So, what can you do if meetings keep breaking up your valuable work time? Obviously, turn down the ones you can skip without causing offense. If you can, try to set up office hours, so you can do any face-to-face interaction on a schedule you can plan for and control.

Beyond that, communicate with the Managers in your life, so they won’t ask you to schedule an appointment without understanding the damage it does to your productivity. In fact, send them Graham’s essay — writing it and spreading awareness was his way of addressing the issue.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

Photo Credit – clagnut