Turn Around an Unproductive Day by Rehearsing a Better One

Productivity blogger Andre Kibbe knows that he gets distracted early and often by hang-ups, inconveniences, and a school of distractions just waiting to take him away from his tasks. He recommends a form of bad day auditing—looking at every step that happened before you got off-track, and fixing it for tomorrow. Waiting for his laptop to boot, for instance, he pledges to check his action lists rather than zone out.

The basic idea is to mentally step through the day, looking for the forks in the road that compelled you to do X when you know in hindsight that you should have been doing Y. When was the precise moment what your attention shifted to the path of less resistance? What precisely was the distraction?

What daytime distractions always trip you up at work? What clever time uses have you implemented as a fix? Let’s hear it in the comments.