Three Easy Tips To Turbocharge Your Productivity This Fall

Summer is finally in full swing. You’ve put work out of your mind for a few weeks. You’re on vacation, or at least away from the office. You’re finally ready to tackle that 960 page book you’ve been eyeing all summer. In fact, you’ve made it to page ten! Well, I hate to break it to you...but fall is here. Metaphorically, at least.

Look around you. Every store has back-to-school sales. The business news is talking about Christmas season projections. College kids are saying goodbye to their summer friends. High school kids just got their schedules. Younger kids are playing their last few video games with a fury unseen until a new console comes out. You can’t fight it. Pretty soon it's going to be time to refocus your mind on work.

That doesn’t mean that you need to plunge into full work mode right away. In fact, the bridge season between summer and fall can be the best time of the year for setting an agenda, exploring new ideas, and clearing out vestiges of the past. Here are three things you can do in the last weeks of August to set yourself up for success in the fall and the year ahead.

Review your investments. Fall is a great time to rebalance your portfolio and explore new investment ideas. Before work drowns you in a tsunami of tasks, take a few hours to look at investment goals, and actually pull the trigger to move money into an index fund, hire an investment advisor, or just sign up for your company’s 401K. The fact that October has a history of being a challenging month for stocks can work to your advantage if you set a strategy now, and take the opportunity to put a little more money into your chosen investments should there be a downturn. You can’t predict the markets, so don’t try. Leave the beach an hour early and make a transaction. A few hours of focus a year on investments can lead to big rewards down the line.

Update your insurance. Wow. Could you be more boring? But that’s the point. During lazy summer days, the last thing you’re thinking about is a car accident, health crisis, or frivolous lawsuit. If you insure yourself correctly, you won’t need to worry too much about them in the future, either. There are lots of ways to get insurance information these days, and purchasing policies can be done on an app, anywhere you have internet service. Pay special attention to auto policies. Has one of your kids reached driving age? Has one of your cars become so old that you only need to insure it for liability? You’d be surprised how much you can save and how easy the process can be. Put the beach book down for an hour and review details on your iPad. 

While you’re at it, explore an umbrella insurance policy. These policies can insure you against the truly unexpected, like a lawsuit when someone slips on the ice in front of your house. If you own a business, umbrella policies can be especially important. They’re surprisingly cost effective, and you can buy them online from numerous companies.

Organize your computer folders and bookmarks. If you’re like me, you’ve been accumulating bookmarks since Internet Explorer 1.0. When I started organizing my bookmarks, I discovered that about 25% of the hundreds of links I’ve accumlated are no longer functional. This project could take weeks for me, so I try to limit myself to one hour a day, focusing on one set of bookmarks. I’ve created a workflow using a mindmapping program, which allows me to organize everything into subjects that I can then put into a folder under a bookmark heading. Then I toss anyting I don’t use regularly. I use a ridiculously old and inexpensive, but still fuctioning Mac program called Incubator, which allows you to copy a list of your browser links and separate them as items that you can move easily around the page. Now that modern browsers let your bookmarks sync across all your devices, it's more important than ever to clean out the useless stuff and bring the productive links up easily, on any device. You’ll be amazed at the satisfaction you get by getting rid of half of your old web browser bookmarks and organizing the rest.

You don’t need to launch a new company or read all of the great books to set yourself up for a productive fall. Take a few hours now, while time is cheap, and you’ll be ready to crush it in the fall.

Source: Forbes.com

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