I really appreciate your great responses to my blog on “time vampires” recently, so I want share with you some more ideas.

Rather than specific tips this time, I’m focusing more on the root causes of “time vampires”. If you can identify your own mindset issues that lead to the “time vampires”, then you can make better decisions to help you to get the important things done. Here are some of them:

• Lack of direction. If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish in life and business you can waste so much time aimlessly pecking away at this or that project without really getting anything done.

• Limiting Beliefs. Here’s a doozy: “To be a good wife and mom I have to keep a spotless house and make gourmet meals.” Perfectionism isn’t only a problem in business. It can manifest itself in all areas of life.

• Lack of organization. Do you feel like you’re so overwhelmed and tired trying to keep up with everything? You can have so many great things you want to accomplish and by trying to do them all today you can burn out.

How can you readjust your mindset?

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Toddlers love to say "no" to just about everything. For them it’s sport. For us, as entrepreneurs, saying "no" is about survival.

To better protect your valuable time, I want to suggest some simple actions you can take to say “no” to time vampires and say “yes” to your life.

• Cut down the “Chatter”. If you have Instant Messenger, Skype, or Google Chat open, set your status as “away”, “busy”, or even “invisible”. If there’s an emergency, people will find you. If there isn’t an emergency, you’ll have focus for the time that you need it to get things done.

• Turn off email notifications. If you get a little flash, beep, or any type of interruption whenever a new email comes in, turn that off. Every single time that your eye gets drawn to the flash it distracts you and causes you to lose your train of thought. Even if it’s a split second, it adds up and cuts into your productivity.
• Speaking of email, unsubscribe from most of your email notification lists. Choose just a few that you really enjoy reading and dump the rest. If that’s a scary thought, then set up a new email account and re-subscribe with the new email address. Plan to check it once each week. You may find that the new email account never gets opened.

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