Productivity hacks, life coaching, career power-ups — all of it’s pointed towards enabling the individual and helping him or her to go further on the road toward success. A lot of times, that means cutting through the distractions and tedium of everyday work and doing more in an industry, blazing a path ahead, rather than sitting back passively and letting things go by.

How do you make every day most productive? What are some secrets to the productivity puzzle?

Here are three techniques we have found very useful as we counsel our clients.

Curb The Inbox

Although it’s a great advancement in immediate, low-cost communications, e-mail can be a nasty thing. It can drain you of your stamina and ruin your entire day. Individuals can spend hours clicking through their inbox, instead of going directly to the things that they should be getting throughout the day.

First of all, understand when you’re getting CC’ed on e-mails, and leave those alone. Allow people to manage their jobs, rather than trying to micromanage every single thing. It also helps to get good at scan reading e-mails, to tell at a glance whether it’s an important, notice or one that you can leave alone.

Allocate Time For Doing

Rather than letting your workload dictate your day, make it fit your day by carving out time for specific tasks. Then, if you see that one thing is consistently overloading its allotted time portion, you can fix that. Don’t let the little things keep you busy all day and keep you away from the big things that you need to be doing.

Delegate and Plan

When it comes to proactively in productivity, there’s also the promise of delegation.

A lot of people get slowed down because they’re taking on too much of the shared workload and paying too much attention to the larger context, rather than narrowing in on their particular jobs.

If there’s something you can farm out to someone else, don’t be afraid to do that. Again, micromanaging is bad for a manager, and it’s bad for the person who’s being micromanaged. But delegation is the flipside of that — delegation means you turn someone loose with the task and let them do it themselves. You may have interns at the company, who want to learn the ropes, or part-time people or floaters who need the hours. This is what does these people are around for. In some unfortunate cases, many of these types of workers starve for responsibility and workload, while managers stagger under the weight of a top-heavy schedule.

Some of these simple techniques can help you make each day more of a success, enabling you to work toward your long term goals instead of just plodding along.

For more on all sorts of business advice, keep an eye on Full Steam Staffing as we talk frankly about we’ve seen in the Ontario, California, area, and how it applies to the objectives of companies and career professionals.