So, I vowed to do a five-hours-per-day work week this week.  First, I banked my allotted Monday and Tuesday to create a 10-hour work day on Monday.  I’m working on a personal project that requires visiting where I grew up on Tuesday and Wednesday.  That project probably won’t see the light of day, but push has come to shove for creating it.  To me, personal projects don’t count as work.  That leaves ten hours to work on Thursday and Friday, which is more than enough if I follow these guidelines, and the utter lack of work that happened on Wednesday rolls nicely into Saturday.

And so I present…

How to have a five-hour work day for a week.

• Ignore Twitter.  (Primo timesuck.)
• Ignore Facebook. (Seconday timesuck.)
• Check e-mail ONLY twice daily and respond to e-mails immediately. (I have a habit of reading e-mails on my iPhone, which means I have to re-read them later in order to respond without tiny keys and misspelled words courtesy of Apple spell-check.)
• Create a task list and put the task list in order so that no thought is put into prioritization during the work day. (Takes five minutes, saves thirty.)
• Pay attention to zero blogs, forums, online magazines, and other things that aren’t urgent.
• Reward yourself for banking five hours or less in a work day.  Maybe it’s a nice long bath, a visit to the dog park with your furbaby, or a big ol’ heaping ice cream cone.  Setting a goal and meeting it is cause for celebration!