Last July I wrote a post about how to maximize your work productivity. I have made various comments and additions to this both here on Web Publishing Blog and on various forums. A year later, I think it is time for an update.

Understand what productivity really means. Working hard all day verse 30 minutes is not a sole qualifier of “better.” As Timothy Ferris pointed out in The Four Hour Workweek almost all of us are wasting time doing things others can do better and cheaper. You must measure your work output by profit and performance, not by hours put in.

Tip #1 — Work around, and eliminate “stopping points.”

If a programmer is slow to produce a finished application, a project should not grind to a halt. Linear business plans can mislead you in to taking things one step at a time when steps 4,5, & 6 should be done now.

For experienced guys this is rarely an issue. For newbies, “stopping points” are a massive and horrendously destructive problem. Example: two months from sparking an idea the newbie is still working on a logo and design while the experienced guy is already pulling in solid profits.

Tip #2 — Track goals with lists.

That 5 point hand written list laying right next to your list often will be finished quicker than the 20 things to do on your pocket PC. Another alternative is a dry-erase white board. The downside is that you lose your history of what you did and what you passed over (Of course, there are even solutions that record dry erase “data”)

Tip #3 — Eliminate Distractions.

Distractions can be work related or recreational. Reading affiliate marketing blogs is technically work, but spending 4 hours a day doing so turns it in to a distraction. The same can go for e-mail or voice mail. Making yourself difficult to reach is not always a bad thing.

Find yourself wasting hours every day on blogs, forums, and Digg? Load up your Windows hosts file (assuming your not on Mac or Linux) and block the URLs that are draining your time away. If you still have to have your daily fix you can log in from your laptop or other PC later; this way you won’t pop over to Digg in the middle of an important task and spend the next hour there when you should have been working.

Tip #4 — Automate and Delegate.

You can not do it all yourself. Human capital is dirt cheap. If you are hesitant to hire your first employee, justify it by hiring someone to exclusively do the tasks you hate.

There should be no such thing as a repetitive task. Often a program can be written quicker than it takes you to do simple redundant tasks by hand. Some online marketers brag about achieve 7 figure revenues by hand. They are simply working twice as hard for half the profits.

Tip #5 — Measure everything important, automatically.

My parents had the nasty habit of writing down the car mileage and cost of gas every time after filling up a the gas station. Besides doing absolutely nothing with the information, it was a waste of time — because the knowledge was not actionable.

Measuring things that matter is critical if you want to scale your business. Measurement is step one of optimizing. Optimizing is why some business grow dramatically while others wither and die. The reason is simple — the optimizers are doing exactly the things which truly result in growth. The alternative? Read lots of books and magazines and speculate what is causing your problems. This is less than ideal choice.

Have you discovered anything which has dramatically increased your productivity and performance? I’d like to hear it.