Time is short. Resources are scarce. Budgets are being cut. And you need to find ways to do more with less. So scan the list below for practical ideas, tools and strategies to boost your productivity, in both your personal and professional life.

To save you time there is no "fluff" in this article. We are getting right to the good stuff. The ideas that will help you get more done, achieve better results, and enjoy the process.

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.

The Best Productivity Book of All Time. This book is out of print but you can still get used copies at Amazon.com and it is a quick read. You can read the whole book in under an hour and it will truly help you with practical and specific tips to get more out of every day for the rest of your life. The author, Alan Lakein, was a renowned time-management consultant in the 70's and 80's. I don't know him personally, but his ideas are even more relevant today.  So if you take action on nothing else that you read in this article, this is the one thing you really should do.

Create a Focused Work Space. This is important throughout the day, but especially so during the Sacred 90 Minutes. If you work in a cube, put in ear plugs to screen out the sound around you. Or bring an .mp3 player to your cube and use earphones playing soft music to screen out all of the background sounds. If you work in an office with a door this is less of an issue, you can just close the door during your focus time. And whether you are a cube or office dweller, arrange your work space so that you can focus on one important task at a time.  De-clutter your space, strip away everything that gets in the way. This is of course a very personal and individual element of productivity. But the key is to think of this location as the one place where you are most productive - and make sure this space is arranged in a way to boost your productivity, not diminish it.

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.

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.

Get the first draft out as soon as possible. When you create something, try to get the first draft or prototype out as soon as possible without worrying about its correctness or quality. You should let your creativity flows freely and worry about organizing later.

Focus on actionable ideas. In this information age, many ideas could come your way everyday through newspapers, web sites, and other means. You could end up spending a lot of resources (time, energy) on them and get very few done. You should filter those ideas by asking: is it actionable? Can it be applied to improve your life? Focus your resources on the actionable ideas and ignore most of the rest.

Eliminate. An essential step to be productive is to eliminate unnecessary things. When you have a task in front of you ask yourself: do I need to do this? If the answer is no then don’t hesitate to eliminate it.

Delegate. If you think you need to do something but you can’t find the time to do it, you should delegate the task to someone else. Delegation is a secret to increased productivity since you now use other people’s resources. For example, you can hire a virtual assistant to do your tasks.

Download and use RescueTime. RescueTime is a fantastic FREE application that tracks your computer usage and reports how efficient and productive you are.  It’s free to use and quite easy to set up. Once you have a chance to accurately assess just exactly how you spend your computer time, in all likelihood you will identify areas form productivity improvement.

Prevent problems through planning. Before you do something, take time to think in longer term and anticipate problems that may occur. Of course, you shouldn’t overdo it in such a way that you become afraid to act, but proper planning never harms.

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.

Set a minimum time to start on a task and don’t stop before time is up The Now Habit suggests 30 minutes, but you can start with smaller amount of time if you want to. The important thing is not to stop before the time is up. Every time you want to stop, just decide to take one more step forward. There are many timer applications you can use to help you (I use CoolTimer).

Watch your TV shows online. You can watch most of your favorite television shows at Hulu.com, which has approximately 5-10 minutes less advertisements than if you watch them on a television.  Additionally, you can pause and come back and also watch it at your convenience (on the bus, doctors office, etc.)