If you are working from home, office, coffee shop or even on the road, here are some pretty cool productivity tips. 3 of my favorites are:

In coffee shops I have a few rules: Try to face a wall and never a busy street, and order a small drink to minimize bathroom breaks. — Corina Kellam, Founder of Life History Books Ltd.

Plan on wasting time. Instead of keeping unnecessary windows open (chats, blogs, twitter, etc.) all day long, work intently with no distractions for a given time, then give yourself (significantly shorter) blocks of time to be unapologetically unproductive. — Matthew Hall, Jr. Consultant at Mutual Mobile

Do NOT check your e-mail for the first 45 minutes that you are in the office in the morning. Don’t even open it. There are never meetings at that time and most people are settling in and reading their e-mails, so it’s a mellow time (not too much talking, few drive-bys, hallway conversations and urgent requests rarely happen). — Amanda Feifer O’Brien, Marketing Manager at Firmenich Inc.

Do you have any particular ones that you use?

Mashable ran an interesting post showcasing several online tools for managing time differences. If you are a web worker these would be really helpful to you.

Conducting business with international clients can mean more than just a language barrier — there can be a time barrier as well.

With 24 standard time zones, it can be overwhelming to keep track of all your clients’ business hours, and scheduling tasks across time zones can be a challenge.

If your business depends on knowing what time it is everywhere, don’t worry, as there are plenty of free online tools to help you coordinate, and ensure you never unwittingly call a client at 4 a.m.

Check out the tools here.

Out of these http://everytimezone.com/ looks really cool and maps to your local time zone automatically!

The reason we started DeskAway was to overcome the limitations of email and spreadsheet-based collaboration when working in teams. Email was never meant for collaboration. It is fantastic for a one to one tool but quite easily breaks down when you start to work with more people. Why not create something simple, powerful yet smart? That is the question we asked back in 2006-07.

Today, we see more and more people take to the web. That is a good thing! Going forward what will work is collaboration systems or online ’social’ software that gives you a central location (think your social network) to collaborate and track your work with your colleagues. The knowledge will not be stored within your inbox but on this central system that can be tapped by any one of your collaborators. This is where collaboration and project management software is moving towards - definitely out of your inbox.

It was great to read our vision nicely laid out in the recent story on Mashable - A World Without Email - One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace.

Sahil Parikh wrote a guest post for GQ India on managing email and using the new Google Priority Inbox…

We were nearing the finishing line and we could taste success. The champagne was in the fridge. Then a few days later it hit us. We’d lost out on the client because of an email that we missed about deadlines. One measly message meant we missed out on a project that could have thrown us into the big league.

So it’s unsurprising that until last week, I would go through all my emails in the constant fear that I would miss something critical amid the mountain of spam. With the advent of smart phones, emails that were once considered work are now mixed with articles stored for reference, grocery lists, new conference notices and desperate salesmen promising first place in search listings.

Read the entire article on the GQ India.

Read an interesting article over at zenhabits.net titled - ‘The best goal is no goal’

Unfortunately, it never, ever works out this neatly. You all know this. You know you need to work on an action step, and you try to keep the end goal in mind to motivate yourself. But this action step might be something you dread, and so you procrastinate. You do other work, or you check email or Facebook, or you goof off.

And so your weekly goals and monthly goals get pushed back or side-tracked, and you get discouraged because you have no discipline. And goals are too hard to achieve. So now what? Well, you review your goals and reset them. You create a new set of sub-goals and action plans. You know where you’re going, because you have goals!

I do have very high level goals (business as well as personal) that helps me make decisions and motivates me to do better. The key here is not to obsessively track and make gantt charts out of your goals but to be aware of them and work on the stuff that make you happy each day.

Does the same work for you?