Everybody gets 24 hours.  How do some people get more done in that 24 hours than others?  If you know someone productive, ask. In the meantime, here are six sure ways to accelerate your achievement by finding and allocating time.

1.  Be on task.  Of course, you set goals! But don’t stop there. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that goals alone get the job done.  Use them to guide you.  Keep your goals in mind—keep them in front of you.  Talk to yourself about them.  Note how you are progressing on them; if you drift, come back with a vengeance.  Lock in on them like a heat-seeking missile.

2.  Be ready for gaps.  Throughout your day, capture the inevitable lulls between activities by preparing for them.  A friend of mine carries with him whatever he is currently reading.  If he has to wait for an appointment, he reads.  Recently, at dinner, when a companion went to the bathroom, he captured time enough to read a couple of pages.

3.  Short blasts.  Work in relatively short, intensive bursts.   It is far better to work intensively for 45 minutes on a highly specific piece of a project and finish that piece by fully concentrating, than to block out an hour and a half and work in a desultory, non-specific way.

4.  Pair activities.  Some things go together.  There are natural couplings.  To stay focused, avoid these.  That’s right, avoid.  You will stay fresher, if you alternate between pairs of disparate activities.  That is, go from intense focus on one activity to another of an entirely different kind.

5.  Switching activities:  By switching up after 45 to 90 minutes and working on a different activity or project, you allow yourself to take a break without really stopping work and losing the time that breaks consume.  This does not mean that you should never completely stop.  It is good to entirely stop at least once in the morning and once in the afternoon for, say, 15 minutes.  But your brain takes a working break when you give it something fresh to tackle.  Novelty is the antidote to slogging.  And you work with greater vigor.  Afterward, switch back again.

6.  What’s on the way to something else?  I was invited to spend a morning at the studio of Peter Max and follow him around a bit.  No matter how you appraise his work, Max is a prodigiously productive artist.  One thing I observed there stuck with me.  Max has many pieces to sign before they are shipped.  He has arranged his studio so that assistants place unsigned pieces on a table he passes frequently as crosses his studio.  Each time he passes, he signs what is there.  

Is this a smart, or what?  Find your version of this strategy for dispatching routine tasks in small doses.