How can you focus on what is at hand?

If you know what you want to do and you have made time for it, it is still not certain that it will get done. A crying child, an urgent phone call, a talkative colleague. It can all distract, hinder or even prevent.

The five essential work-through techniques:

1. Close the door.

An open door policy is good at the office if it doesn't get in the way of even more important things. Close the door. Hang a sign with when people can invade. Make sure you are available at certain times, but also that you can continue working.

2. Shut down.

Put periods in your calendar in which you can work alone without popping up emails, people or phone calls. Turn off those devices too. 

3. Open up.

Don't forget to make sure you are available at regular intervals. Let those moments know to your environment. Leave those moments on your voicemail. Choose one moment per day when you view and reply to your e-mails.

4. Jump over the block.

Writer's or beginner's block is a state of immobility and uninspiredness where you feel paralyzed and cannot begin. When writing, it helps not to write the first, but the second or third sentence. As long as you start. It doesn't have to be perfect, let alone good, but put something on paper or the screen; With an assignment, it helps to just dive in and just start doing something, even if you don't really know what or how. 

5. Finish it.

The cap-on-the-toothpaste tube trauma. It takes 1 second to do it and it saves a lot of trouble. Put it away, seal it. The 30 second principle can help with that. Realize that the average time to perform small household tasks is 30 seconds. 

• 20 seconds to hang a jacket
• 7 minutes to iron a shirt
• 4 minutes to vacuum the room

Top Tip: Attack your reading pile with scissors. Cut out what you really want to read and throw away the rest. Then put those articles in places where you have lost time. In your jacket pocket to read in the doctor's waiting room. In the car for an unexpected traffic jam. In the toilet for a light diarrhoea. Read with a pencil or pen. Mark things. You will therefore remember them more easily and find them effortlessly when you need them.