A friend of mine asked me regarding the techniques that I employ when I used to do many projects at a time. Here are some useful tips that I think would be general enough for other people to use.

1) Devote at least 2 hours per project.

Make sure you’ve got your own todo list per project before you start working on something. We call these todolists “preambles”, something you do to make yourself feel productive enough, and actually producing enough stuff to satisfy your clients and/or colleagues.

2) Turn everything off.

Discipline yourself. Don’t go to facebook every 5 minutes for heaven’s sake. Don’t tweet every 5 minutes also. Don’t go refreshing your feed reader if you feel that you’re lazy and don’t wanna work. Don’t watch nonsense youtube videos for kicks. If it’s too hard for you, I suggest you disable these domain names on your hosts file.

127.0.0.1    twitter.com youtube.com facebook.com

Chances are, you’ll produce more work this way. There’s a time for everything, and I’m sure these social networking activities are not within your working hours.

3) Reward yourself.

After allocating enough time for your project, make sure you give yourself a logical reward for finishing your tasks. Rewards can be as simple as “okay now I can check my facebook account”, and can also be something like buying yourself delicious donuts. These rewards usually rejuvenate yourself enough for you to devote a solid amount of work for a different project after feeling refreshed.

I’ve been employing these 3 very basic rules, and I can positively say that they’ve been working tremendously well. If you’ve got any more tips feel free to leave comments.