Last night I took my MP3 player for a run. For at least 5 of the 5.28 miles, my damn earphones were slipping out of my ears. I need the kind that are made for runners, not the cheap earbuds that come with every MP3 player.

How much faster would I run if I wasn’t fiddling with my earphones and cussing?

And, in the bigger picture, what little things can I do or buy to cut down on cussing at work and to make me more productive?

Sometimes I think I miss the big picture about how to save time. I don’t remember that I wanted to make a template for client drafts until I have to do another client draft and I cuss because there’s no template. But by then I don’t have enough time to first create a template, so I just dive in and create the whole thing from scratch for the umpteenth time.

Other things I don’t remember to do in advance:

• Get a headset for my office phone so I don’t get a crick in my neck when I type notes.
• Rearrange my computer wires so I don’t get static on the stereo headphones or the landline.
• Put complete contact info into my Outlook address book so I don’t have to search old emails for phone numbers or go to the websites to look for client email addresses.
• Label notes in my spiral notebooks so I can find projects by client in a flash.
• Bookmark important websites so I don’t have to do a Google search each time.
• Keep style sheets for all my clients so I don’t have to look up whether they use a comma before “and” in a series or how they prefer to talk about their products.
• Create a new box for 2008 receipts — I’m still stuffing them in with the 2007 box.