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I have a load of things to get done today. None of these tasks are billable, it’s a pure overhead day. But they are all necessary to keep the machine running, and that includes having some small semblance of a social life.

About right now, I need to add some “keywords,” like “blogging productivity,” just so Google doesn’t get overly confused about what we’re talking here. Search engines are literal-minded and not inclined to nuance, analogy, metaphor, ambiguity, obliquity or indirection. Which takes a lot the love out my writing. No matter.¹

The way this blogging productivity method works is by spending focused time reducing friction and clutter in your environment, so you can better focus on productive blogging in the future. Most people, myself included have a “messiness quotient” beyond which nothing productive will be achieved. You can leverage this time creatively. It’s grist for your mill. Your life as content, &c.

Watch…

1. Have your time clock running!

This is absolutely critical, and your clock doesn’t have to be running billable hours. Set up a task or project called “housekeeping” or “LMS” and run your clock against that. The psychological importance of knowing where your time is going when you have a large number of small, unrelated tasks to accomplish cannot be overstated.

I consider this so important I charge my time against tasks ranging from “Overhead” to “Blue Sky.” That way, at the end of the week when I see umpteen hours of Blue Sky in my ledger, I will know with perfect certainty that yes, I did indeed waste a bunch of time.

Clicktime is what I use, but it hardly matters, use whatever is easiest for you.

2. Catch up on email

I have found that letting my non-critical email stack up for a few weeks allows me to knock it all out periodically, with little cost. For example, today I’m cooking a Turkey (early Thanksgiving), which is a perfect time to smack the inbox down to zero.

Here’s what I do 1, 2, 3:

1. Mostly, I delete stuff.
2. Label and archive.
3. Task it out. See the next tip.

These tactics support a strategy of removing unwanted ideas from your head, as will be explained next.

3. Catch up on tasking

Concurrently with smacking down the inbox, I can move emails needing long term followup to my Trac tasking system. Trac isn’t very fancy. In fact it’s not much than a wrapper around a database query, emitting the result set into an HTML table.

I like that.

It’s unpretentious, powerful, easy to modify queries, and I can grab a CSV file if I really need one.

But whatever. Your project management tools only needs be productive for you. If you haven’t used project management tools before, Basecamp² is as good as any.

Building out task lists does not beholden you to actually doing those tasks. The exercise is to get rid of ideas. Get those pesky ideas out of your head, out of your inbox, and off of your scratchpads, moleskins and the like.

Note: you can do this while you’re doing other things. Go put a load in the laundry, offload some ideas from your inbox into tasking. Just takes a few minutes. Low commitment, high reward.

4. Update software

I hate those pesky model dialog boxes forever prompting me to update some application which is either irrelevant, or mission critical.

Yet at some point the machine must be serviced.

A day like today, full of all sorts other chores, is also a great day to carefully update your computer. For me, this included doing the whole Apple/iTunes/iPad/pod/phone thing. A great thing to do while I’m banging through emails.

5. Catch up on podcasts and screencasts

Personally, I am, most emphatically, not a podcast person. I’m not even a radio person. This causes colleagues such as Dave “The Podcast Guy” Thackeray no end of annoyance, but there is really no help for for it.

And it’s me, to be sure. I have a lot of respect for podcasting; it’s the future of journalism. I’m just a really bad podcast listener.

So, today, is one of those days, catch up on podcasts.

6. Computer cleanup

After a month or two of hard work, my computer desktop looks like a virtual tornado ripped through my file system, scattered files and documents and applications and other miscellaneous accoutrements of modern computing all over my virtual desktop.

Bloggers and their First World issues…

…and it’s all my fault: I use the desktop as a staging area for stuff I want to look at, but not right now.

Go further, learn something new. For example, I figured out how to remove the pesky hard drive icon from my desktop. Easy, sure, but I’d never taken time to just do it. Now it’s down and do I feel great!

Here’s a tip for keep your desktop cleaned off: use HUGE ICONS. It will fill up faster and you will have to deal with it. Itty bitty icons proliferate like bunnies in the Outback. You don’t want that eco-annihilation on your desktop, do you?.

7. Listen to new music

Tired of listening to the same old tunes while you’re knocking out the chores? Nothing worse than boring music when you’re already bored. Try one or more of these suggestions:

Bob Culbertson Cafe San Francisco

• Find a new iTunes channel (or Pandora, whatever) in a different music genre. This means if you normally listen to Country, listen to Western instead.
• Dig your your mp3 collection and find some of that stuff you download (you pirate, you) which you haven’t gotten around to listening to yet.
• Found a misplaced CD? This morning I found Bob Culbertson’s Cafe San Francisco, a CD I misplaced months ago. Time to spin it up.

Maybe you have a new music suggestion of your own? Great, leave a comment below.

8. Cook something

Fourth Tuesdays monthly are Super Tuesdays, and when Super Tuesday falls before Thanksgiving, I always cook up a storm. Instead of blogging (or programming, or whatnot), it’s all about cooking and cleaning.

If you don’t know what to cook, find a recipe site, say, Andicakes. Andi has been posting recipes a long, long time, and is also a long time hRecipe plugin user.

9. Write a blog post!

I’m not supposed to be blogging today. I’m supposed to be cooking, and cleaning, and getting ready for a bunch of people to descend on my home like a flock of crows on roadkill. Crows are serious business, I’ll have you know. Crows got culture. So I shouldn’t be messing around with this blogging stuff.

But I am.

I get some of my best work done – especially blogging – when I’m really supposed to be doing something else.

Try it. You might like it. And you might find it’s not only possible but a whole lot of fun to waste time productively.

10. Your secret productivity weapon

I promised ten, but I could only think of nine. Since I’m now (PTL) out of ideas, I’m going to channel Ze Frank and put the onus on you to come up with #10.

What favorite technique of yours have I totally missed?

Let us know in the comments.

And for those who celebrate, Happy Thanksgiving 2011.