If your place of work heavily relies on Outlook calendars and IM, consider the following:

• Set your IM status to away or busy when you don't want to be disturbed.  While a quick question from a colleague may be more appropriate over IM than him stopping by in person, fight your urge to be helpful all the time.  Most times the answer can wait.  How likely is the question you will be answering be more important than what you are working on if you have explicitly set your status away because you don't want to be disturbed?  If it were really a higher priority, the question wouldn't be asked over IM.
• Turn off Outlook sounds/notifications for when you receive new e-mail.  We love distractions and being up to date on communications, but reading and responding to e-mails more often than not throw us off our pace.  I've heard that it may take up to 15 minutes to be able to get back on track after being "randomized."  Which also gives support for the first point above.
• Block off "me"-time in your calendar and find a private area to work.  I had a manager who was always the go-to person for so many teams that I was always amazed at how he could still be so productive on his own projects.  Turned out that on occasion he would block out two-hour chunks on his calendar and go to the cafeteria or a conference room and work on his laptop there.  Sometimes that block of un-interrupted time is necessary and requires more steps to enforce.
• Work-life balance?  Block off (and mark private) times that you cannot stay late at work due to prior commitments.  If you know ahead of time that your kid's championship game is on a weeknight and your team has a tendency to schedule late meetings, put an out-of-office appointment on your calendar that also considers commute time and stick to your guns about it.  The whole point of having access to shared calendars is to know when people are available and give flexibility in scheduling.

Of course there's also making sure your office door (if you're lucky enough to have one) is closed.  That's a low-tech solution that works well, as people are less likely to poke their head in if they have to go through the formality of a knock.

And per proper etiquette, respect when a coworker has her IM status set to busy or her calendar says she's not supposed to be there.  I still hold a grudge against a former manager (not in my management chain) that didn't understand that the reason there was a calendar reminder popping up was because I had to leave right then and there to catch my bus so I could make it to a rehearsal.  While I know better today to ask "Can it wait for tomorrow?", I also expect professionals to also know when to ask "Is now a good time?"

Hope these tips for minimizing distraction and interruptions help!  They work wonders for me during crunch time!

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a couple years now, so finally here goes.

The Goal:  Complete 40 half-marathons by the time I turn 40.

The Reason:  Because doing something once is just a first step.  Because Forty-By-Forty has a great ring to it.  Because by starting this in my twenties, this means I will have to maintain a level of fitness for more than a decade, hopefully meaning that I will have and continue healthy habits for life.  Because doing something forty times can't be just a fluke.  Because doing something forty times means making it a priority, and working around life, work, and family.

Write a novel in forty days, try forty new restaurants in the next five years, read forty books... What's your 40x40 challenge and why?

A while back, a friend of mine sent me the link to a one-hundred push-up training program. I finally took a look at the site, and since I'm always looking to add (and then cross off) something on my bucket list, I'm going to take a crack at it.

The program spans six weeks, with various stress tests every couple weeks to determine if you should do a week over.  It's three work-outs a week, doing 5 sets of reps.  The number of reps in the first four sets are based on the level the previous stress test placed you, finished with the last set being as many reps as you can comfortably manage with good form.  By the end of the six-week program, you're supposed to be able to do one-hundred consecutive push-ups.

The site also links to two-hundred sit-ups and two-hundred squats programs.  I do love a good challenge, so this week I started both the push-up and the sit-up program... well, girly push-ups on my knees and crunches.  Since my next half marathon is in two weeks and I want to do well in that, I'm going to pass on the squats.

Today was Week 1, Day 2.  So far so good, minor soreness on in between days, but I'm not sure if that was from Day 1, the yoga class I took the day before that, or the pull-up bar that I hung from at my friend's house.  I'll update about this after the first stress test.