(note: This post was created to help me retain my focus and try to figure out how I spend my time, and why I spend it the way I do.)

My productivity is hindered by my broad base of interests – there are simply to many things that I am interested in doing at once to focus on one thing. This is the reason that I have been focusing on minimalism, and on single-tasking.

With multi-tasking I accomplished nothing, with single-tasking I accomplish what I want. Accomplishing what I want to accomplish and not what I need to accomplish sounds counter intuitive - most productivity systems teach you how to do things that you need to get done. Not the things that you want to get done, often though I find that the things I want to get done are being hindered by the things that I need to get done.

more after jump…Like everyone else in the world there are many things that I must do every day that often I do not want to be doing, balancing those with the things that I want to do is where I have found more happiness and better productivity. It is not a simple thing to do, and it has not come easily for me but through perseverance I have been able to arrive at a solution that works.

The Hinderances

There are a few things that distract me during the day an they are (no particular order):

• Twitter
• Baseball Games
• News

Those are the major non-work distractions that I face on a daily basis. None of these hinderances are things that are being thrust upon me, they are interests that pull my attention.

My Solution

My solution to these problems is very simple:

Twitter: I only keep on the “Internet screen” on my computer which is separate from the screens that I do all other work on. I also have no pop-up notifications (with exception to direct messages which prompt Growl notifications).

Baseball Games: Luckily being a Mac user these are not readily available on Mac OS so I have to boot into Parallels in order to play. This curbs the playing significantly, but often times I uninstall all games. When I do uninstall the games I don’t find myself missing them much at all.

News: I use Fever° by Shaun Inman which is truly phenomenal. When I feel as though I am missing too much I go and see what is “hot” and then get back to work. That takes less than a minute. I try to limit how often I go through all of the feeds and have been doing very well at this limiting myself to 3 times during working hours (9-5).

There are a few other hinderances to my productivity that I have left out thus far, namely other people. They call, email, or stop by to chat and inevitably end up giving me more work. There truly is only one solution to this (as I can’t stop interacting with people) I can choose to put the new task on my task list or do it now.

Most of the time when something comes up that is unexpected I have already allotted time for the unexpected and I do that task then and there. Not having to worry about these tasks while I work on other things is worth the interruption to my flow.

Doing What I Want Not What I Need to do

At the beginning of this post I talked about how I strive to do what I want to do during the day and not what I need to do. In the solution I offered above I showed how I keep the things that I want to do at bay while I work on what I need to do. What you would not be able to tell though is that I spend the vast majority of my day doing only what I want to do.

This is done by leveraging my desire not to do things. When I am working on something that I truly want to be doing, time is of no concern and I am in no hurry to accomplish the task at hand. However when I am doing something that I don’t want to do, but that I need to do, I typically am in a rush and am trying to get the task done as quickly as possible.

By sandwiching the tasks that I need to do with tasks that I want to do I can keep that urgency with task that I need to do at hand, thus leveraging it get tasks done more quickly.

For example, first thing in the morning I roll through Twitter updates (a want task), then I check email (a need task – I hate email), then I read news feeds (want). This makes my email checking much quicker, I will delete the things I don’t need and add the rest to action lists or delegate them out. I continue to use this technique throughout the rest of my day often setting time limits on how long I spend on want tasks (25 minutes usually per the Pomodoro technique) and then switch back to a need task until it is finished.

By mid-day most days I have completed most need tasks for the day and am left with the rest of the day to deal with unexpected tasks and the things I want to do.

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• 20 Computer Productivity Hacks
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• Productivity: As Simple as a Grocery List