Savvy Affiliate

What Makes Your Productive?

Daily Blog Tips has recently asked bloggers the question, what makes you productive?

Their response to their own question was Being Unplugged.  They stated that they found out, by accident, that they get the most work done when they are unplugged from everything.  They turn off their e-mail client, shut down instant messaging, and close anything that might distract them.  Then they open a text editor and just write.

I can see how this would be a productivity aid.   Those are all big distractions which can eat up your time.  However my biggest aids to productivity isn’t shutting out the rest of the world, it is interacting with it.

BlogLines

Since I started using bloglines, my productivity has increases dramatically.  Bloglines has enabled me to read more blogs at one time than I ever was able to before.  Reading the blogs has sparked my own ideas for content.  My favorite method of blogging is to sit down with my blog writing gui open in one tab, bloglines open in another, and other blogs posts open in a third.

This enables me to rapidly get ideas on a new post.  I read another bloggers point.  Do I agree or disagree?  Do I have an entirely different opinion on the subject?  Perhaps their post sparks a post of my own which is tangentially related.

The bottom line is that using bloglines is a great brainstorming exercise.

The one caveat I must add to this is Don’t Steal Content.  Reading another blog to spark ideas is much different than stealing content from the blog.  Don’t take another’s blogs posts word for word, or even idea for idea.  I personally feel that it is fine to take one or two of their ideas and co-opt them, but if my post isn’t 80% or more entirely of my own making, I don’t do it.

This post is a great example of the aid I got from blog lines.  If I hadn’t read daily blog tips, would I have though to write a post about bloglines making me productive?  Probably not.   Is this post any kind of rip off of their post?  I think most people would agree that this is not.

So what do you do to make yourself more productive?  What are your best ideas?  Let me know, I might co-opt them for myself.