Ever have those days where you have a boatload of work to do, but you find yourself playing games, or browsing YouTube for hours? Or how about browsing Facebook or MySpace, watching the time tick by? Even though there is nothing wrong with any of that, we all fall into those habits from time to time. End the end its just poor time management.
I am someone who usually has a short attention span or an extremely focused one. There really isn’t much of an in-between for me. The trick is to make sure everything is set up properly in order to make me super-focused. What works for me?

Cleaning before working
There is something to be said about cleaning and organizing. I find myself doing that right before I have a huge task to do. While cleaning and organizing things around me I think I start to organize things in my head. Then when I sit down to work I’m not distracted by my own disorganization. I know this is one of the things you commonly read about in Zen Living books.

Make Short-Term Goals
Even though long-term goals are great, short terms ones are even better. With short-term goals you’ll notice progresses much easily. Make a physical list of things you need to do every day. I know that can sometimes make you feel really uptight, but it’ll help you a lot. Having a physical list is important, don’t type up your list unless you plan to print it out and put it up on the fall in front of you.

Failure
Don’t let failure or the possibility of failure hold you back form doing something. Also don’t let obvious failure hold back people around you. We learn more from failure than we do from success.

Set A Schedule
This isn’t a science. Just go by the hour, what you plan to be working on each hour of the day. Try to stick to it the best you can. If the schedule you set doesn’t work out the greatest you adjust it so that it does. Your first draft will never be perfect.

Read A Book
No, I’m not talking Harry Potter. Read a book that teaches you a new skill. This beats TV hands down. Right now I’m reading up on AJAX as well as another PHP book that is a little more advanced. Hard copy of books work best, but if all you can get your hands on are e-books then thats ok too.