7 Ways to Get More Done

Following are seven ideas that you can use to help improve your productivity and get more done. Have other ideas for how to improve productivity, don't forget to comment below.

1. Be clear about your goals - As the cat in Alice in Wonderland said, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." One of the first steps to achieve greater personal productivity is to formalize your goals. Setting good objectives (whether for your life or a project) requires three steps. First, identify the end-point that you are trying to reach. How will you measure success? Second, write down the steps that you will need to follow to achieve your goals. Third, identify milestones that you can use to check your progress as you progress.

2. Understand the difference between effectiveness and efficiency - Effectiveness is efficient action guided towards a specific goal or purpose. Effectiveness is just getting more done. While it is critically important to be efficient, unless you use goal-directed action, you run the risk of simply working hard and not benefiting from your effort. Always strive to be more effective.

3. Turn down the distractions -despite what the popular media might tell us, the human brain is really bad at multitasking. Instead of distracting yourself with multiple tasks, try to block out specific periods of time to work on one task at a time. Learn to be intense with your life. When you are working on a particular task, attack it as if it where the most important thing in the world. The same goes for spending time with your friends and family. It is much better to come home 30 minutes late from the office and dedicate 100% of your energy to your family when you get back then to sit at home with your Blackberry tapping emails away during dinner.

4. Use leverage and specialization to your advantage -One of the wonders of the modern world is that an army of specialists are literally at our fingertips. In school, we are taught that cheating (looking at another student's paper) is wrong. In the real-world, leverage is the name of the game. Don't be afraid to outsource tasks if you can free up time to focus on projects that are more important to you. Websites like elance.com can connect you with programmers, writers, and numerous other professionals to help you get more done. Services like Soundview Executive Book Summaries also save you time by providing summaries of your favorite business books.

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5. Avoid analysis paralysis -All other things equal, the longer you give yourself for a task, the longer it will take to complete. This is not to say that you should procrastinate. However, you should always set yourself an aggressive delivery date for each project, even if the real due date is well in the future. Determine up front how much time you will dedicate to research and stick to it. Most of the time, after an initial analysis is complete additional data will do little to impact the outcome of a project, although it may make us feel better about our decisions.

6. Learn to say no - This is a big one. Throughout the day, all of us are inundated with requests from friends, family and colleagues for assistance. While there may be times that you will want to (or need to) help someone, your default position to all request should be "no", unless you can identify a selfish reason for helping. I'm not saying that helping people is wrong (far from it!). I'm simply saying that you should be the one who decides where to direct your assistance.

7. Choose one or two big goals per day -Far too many people fail in life by taking on too many small tasks and not focusing on the projects that are important. As a general rule, you should have no more than one or two big tasks per day (both of which tie to your long-term goals). More importantly, your schedule should reflect the importance of these tasks. If you need to cancel a meeting, do it! Don't be afraid to turn off your email if your main task has not been accomplished. At the end of the day, you will be judged on the results of the most important tasks and everything else will fade into obscurity. This is especially true in a large corporation where your manager may or may not be aware of everything that you work on every day.

What other techniques do you use to improve your productivity?