Time is short. Resources are scarce. Budgets are being cut. And you need to find ways to do more with less. So scan this brief article for quick and practical ideas to boost your professional productivity. This is the short version. If you like what you read here, you may want to take a little more time to read the long version also.

Respect the Sacred 90 Minutes. Your first 90 minutes of the work day should viewed as extremely valuable time. This is when you are most likely to be fresh and focused. Work on your most important projects and tasks during this time. Particularly those tasks that require creativity, innovation, strategic thinking, or just plain old deep work. Others are going to try to steal your first 90 minutes with meetings, phone calls and other activities that may not be critically important to you. It certainly may make sense to take or make a phone call, or attend a meeting if it is a critically important activity that requires your deepest brain power.

Increase Your Energy Baseline. To a large degree your productivity at work is driven by your baseline energy level. People with more energy tend to get more work done. That seems simple enough. But what isn't always simple is finding ways to enhance your energy level throughout the day - not just creating a brief artificial boost that is dependent upon caffeine or sugar (or both). Here are the bottom line rules to maximize your energy baseline:

• Eliminate caffeine, smoking and alcohol (did we lose you already?).

• Eliminate all refined carbohydrates (bread, pasta, starches, sugars)

• No television 2 hours before bed, to ensure a good night of sleep (min. 7 hours)

• Exercise at least 45 minutes every day. (half cardio, half weights)

Of course you already knew everything you just read in the above bullet points and you will in all likelihood keep doing exactly what you've been doing. That's fine. Just don't pretend that you are truly committed to peak professional productivity. 

Don't hold unnecessary meetings. Carefully assess how often routine meetings really need to be held. For example, if you have daily staff meetings, how productive are they? Can they be held less frequently? Or, perhaps, can they be held standing up someplace and kept to a few minutes? Staff meetings are crucial vehicles for maintaining good communication in the office, but it is important to find the right balance between good communication and productive uses of time.

Embrace “good enough.” Sometimes perfectionism gets in the way of productivity. We want to make something as perfect as possible that we never get anything done. But diminishing returns applies to whatever you do. Beyond certain point, your extra effort will give you less and less extra value. This is the point of “good enough”. Recognize this point of “good enough” and stop there.

Tweak Outlook to Work Better for You. Despite the popularity of Microsoft Outlook, several of its functions aren't noticeable unless you dig around in menus or try out keystroke shortcuts. Many of these tricks can be found by reading a user manual, but users would rather be spending their time in Outlook responding to or writing emails. Read this article in the online Wall Street Journal to get a great summary of some of the most valuable (and relatively unknown) features of Outlook. WSJ's Katie Boehret demonstrates how to get the most out of Outlook, including how to make you look like an overachiever.

Say What You are REALLY thinking. When do we need our interpersonal communications to be most effective? Usually when there are different opinions, when the stakes are high, and emotions are running strong. And yet these are the times when our communications with others tend to be least effective. So resolve to make an effort to communicate fully and accurately during these tough times. But remember, just blasting a colleague with your negative perspective or critical opinions may be "authentic" but it is unlikely to be effective.

You are responsible for both the content of your communication and its impact on others. So if others are offended and thus closed to your ideas, this is your doing. You don't have to diminish or water down your perspective in order to make it palatable to others - you can always find a way to be both direct and respectful.

Master the ultradian sprint. For high-intensity tasks, focus on just one task at a time and make it intense. Such high-intensity session is called the ultradian sprint and - as its name implies - it should be a sprint and not just a run. In a sprint where 0.1 second matters, distractions and interruptions are not tolerable.

Review Your Computer Filing Structure. Does your filing structure for saving work documents provide you with an adequate ability to retrieve items, or do you spend a lot of time searching for something you worked on a few weeks or months ago? Worst of all possible methods is to just save everything in your "My Documents" folder. Instead, one of our most well-organized colleagues uses a filing structure similar to the one below.

Under My Documents create several new folders, and sub-folders below those:

Under these folders create sub-folders for every person, project, etc. This structure makes it easy to keep store documents in a place that makes sense and can be easily retrieved.

OK, that's the short version. We would recommend that you first work at incorporating these practices into your work life, then come back and go through the long version for additional productivity tips and advice.