I had to become an email expert — otherwise, I would have been buried alive by it.

Back when I was running a music school all by myself — something I don’t recommend — I received tons and tons of requests, complaints, ideas, and questions via email. Using David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, I was able to keep things manageable.

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There are times when that elusive quarry known as “productivity” is impossible to get ahold of.

Grief, stress, and anxiety are like RAM-intensive applications running in the background of your mind, hogging all the resources and leaving you with only a sliver of processing power to complete your work.

Sometimes, you can still spend the afternoon putting in the time and going through the motions. A day of being present in body only isn’t much of a setback. But if you’re working from home — or worse, working for yourself — day after day without being able to focus, you might need to do something differently. In this article, I’ll share my tips for being productive when I’m exhausted, distracted, or overwhelmed and the work still has to get done.

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When you begin with the belief that everyone wants to learn, it stimulates a lot of high quality problem-solving.

As a teacher, I can’t just write off a student as lazy, disobedient, unintelligent, or unmotivated. If something isn’t working, I see it as my responsibility to find something else that will.

What to do with a student who struggles to turn in work on time (or at all)? Who looks at an assignment and immediately gets overwhelmed?

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In the early days of my business, I was doing all of my own marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

That meant that I lived in my email. Each weekday, I would start around 8 AM, crank through as many emails and phone calls as I could, and then start teaching music lessons at 3 PM.

Hiring help was necessary as the business grew, but the volume of email didn’t go down. If anything, it expanded. But I was committed to processing it all, based on what I had learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, a painstaking process that required making a decision about what to do with each email, phone call, and piece of paper I received. And once everything was processed, my reward would be an empty inbox, an empty voicemail box, or an empty actual box. Everything would be filed, archived, put away, and dealt with.

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It is incredibly frustrating to be the parent of a child who would seemingly never turn in their work on time (and maybe never get it done in the first place) without intervention. Not only does it make many afternoons and evenings a joyless slog, it leads to worry that your child will still be lost and helpless as an adult. I am guessing that fighting over homework was not part of the live you envisioned as you beheld your newborn infant for the first time.

Below, five tips to help make things better. Ready?

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