Even with a schedule meant to let me proceed with a project at a comfortable pace, more immediate concerns can make it much harder to finish a project on time. And if the project is one that you don’t have a client or employer expecting you to finish, sticking to a schedule is just that much harder.

It’s OK to Say No

I think email has doubled the amount of work people ask me to do. When clients had to pick up the phone to ask me to handle some small detail, I think they were a little more reluctant to try to find me and add to my work load. But sending an email is just a matter of a moment and doesn’t require a whole lot of worry on the part of a client or a manager.

With all these little requests piling up in my inbox, it quickly becomes impossible to find time to work on a project not immediately due. But just because those small requests are in my inbox doesn’t mean that I have to take care of them. When possible, I hand them off to someone who is better able to take care of them. I’ve even been known to tell a client that I can’t handle a particular task. It’s important to minimize the number of little items that make it out of your inbox and onto your task list.

Schedule Big Projects First

I’ve been writing e-books on top of my normal work load lately. At first, I had the hardest time just finding a few hours to work on them. I had them on my task list, but they kept getting bumped in favor of closer deadlines — and client work with a more definite payout. Day after day, one of my e-books would be first on my desk, until I glanced through my email and saw some fires that I just had to put out first.

While there’s no easy solution to all those little problems, I found a surprisingly simple way to get my bigger projects done:I worked on them for an hour or two before I opened my email in the morning. Sure, I still had plenty of requests waiting for me when I did get around to my email — but they weren’t distracting me during the time I had allotted to my longer projects. And, amazingly enough, the world didn’t end because I wasn’t able to get to quite every little problem that someone had notified me about.

How do you avoid distractions to focus on your long-term projects?

Image by Flickr user Chris Campbell

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