Have you ever had a coworker email you and then a few moments later send you an instant message in Slack or whatever chat tool you use? It happens. And more often than you think. Research from Gloria Mark from the University of California Irvine, who has studied multitasking, interruptions and workplace habits for the last decade, has shown that your productivity and stress levels can have adverse effects on your work/home life balance.

That same research shows that an employee gets interrupted every 3 minutes and 25 seconds. And each interruption, each phone call, each email, each chat, each drive-by (those working in a cube farm understand this term), all can take upwards of 25 minutes to get back to the task they were working on.

A lot of time is spent on getting back in the zone of doing productive work. What if I told you there was a way to could take back control of your day? Would you want to know some ways to make your day more productive?

Here’s how I structure my day so that I can do my best work and stay productive.

1. Day Before

This may sound simple, but it’s often a lot harder to do than I make it seem. When I end my work day, I spend 15 minutes jotting down the top 3 things I need to get done the following day. If it’s a Friday, then I do it for Monday. Why do I do this?

Well if you spend just 15 minutes thinking about the next day, when you go to sleep that night, your brain (yes