10 tips to increase your productivity
Follow these rules to manage time better at the I workplace and enhance your efficiency.
DEVASHISH CHAKRAVARTY
Are you spinning out of control with endless demands on your time and life? Are your stress levels at an all-time high with never ending tasks and deadlines leading to endless working hours and no family time to recharge your batteries? It is time to master productivity skills for the workplace that will empower you for higher performance while enabling good health and a better work life balance through reduced stress and efficient use of office time.
Here is how.
1 Think start your day Spend the first 10 minutes of your work day to figure out what you want to achieve. Think through pending jobs, pressing problems and urgent deadlines while making notes on your diary or a task list. Rearrange them into a rough check list prioritising the most important tasks on top. The first on the list becomes your primary goal for today – something that will make the day worthwhile. Use the early part of the day to complete stuff that requires greater mental bandwidth and save the afternoon for meetings or repetitive chores.
2 Clock your talk A large part of a wasted day invariably goes into communication that took too much time and yielded little output. Become aware of when you speak, to whom and for how long. If you are on the phone, stand up to speak and sit down only when the conversation is over. If you are conducting a meeting, set a start and finish deadline. If it is an unscheduled urgent chat with a colleague, box it to 2 minutes before you head back to your task list.
3 Birds of a feather Group similar tasks together and tackle them as a block with a deadline. Read all e-mails in 10-minute slots at one go, but only every 2 hours or more. Similarly make your 20 sales calls in a row. Clubbing similar tasks increases the rate at which you complete them once you settle into a rhythm for that batch. Engage technology to help you out like using labels or folders to automatically bunch together similar emails. Between two diverse sets, take a quick break and walk about to get refreshed and to change gears for the next lot.
4 Take baby steps Remind yourself every few minutes – is this really the best use of my time? Stop unproductive work and start the next task on the checklist with a simple action. Or focus on taking a baby step that will get you closer to your goal for the day. Thus you can catch yourself from chatting over Gtalk or the office messenger and refocus on researching information for tomorrow’s meeting instead.
5 Divide and conquer Often there is a project or target that is simply too big and complicated and keeps getting put off for later. In such cases, divide the project into smaller sub-projects and break those down further into individual actions. From this list figure out what can be done by other people and immediately communicate and delegate the tasks to them. From the rest, pick up the easiest actions and accelerate them to a close. Soon you will pick up momentum and achieve significant progress.
6 Quick to decide, slow to change On a cumulative basis, the biggest hurdle to productivity is your reluctance to decide early combined with an eagerness to revisit and revise those decisions. Reverse that attitude and commit to taking quick decisions and sticking through with them. Do you need to fix up a meeting for next week? Decide on 3 pm for Wednesday, communicate it, set a reminder and move on. Over time, your quick decisions will be as good if not better than the decisions you put on the back burner.
7 Uni-task Multi-tasking kills productivity and is as useful to you as Windows 95. The right way to work efficiently is to schedule and prioritise tasks and then tackle them one at a time. With complete focus on that one task, your speed will go up dramatically and you will get a lot more done in any given hour than if you try to speak on the phone while creating the sales chart on Excel.
8 Swallow the bitter pill Most efficiency experts recommend that you start the day by tackling the most unsavoury task first. Once that is out of the way, a lot of energy is released that helps you zip through the rest of your list. Try and see if that works for you. However some professionals work better by keeping the distasteful task for the last. Avoiding or delaying that task creates an impetus to finish other less unsavoury tasks in an effort to stay productive. Soon the rest of the check list is done and dusted and you have no choice but to tackle the last one. Which kind of person are you?
9 How to procrastinate How do you decide whether a non-critical task should be done immediately or later? If it takes less than 30 seconds do it right away, like responding to an email invitation for a meeting. For a longer non-urgent task, put it on your Google calendar or workplace scheduler as a reminder for the appropriate time. In both cases, the actions enable you to forget about it completely and move on to your next goal for the day.
10 The last thing to do 15 minutes before the end of day, review what you have done. Would you have performed better if you had done things differently? What would you change? This evaluation exercise will ramp up your efficiency on a daily basis. Finally before you leave, clear your desk of all objects and papers apart from the computer and a notebook and pen if you use one. The next morning will start well when you return to an uncluttered workplace.
Thumb rules of efficiency
• 80-20 principle The Pareto principle suggests that 20% of your time and efforts will yield 80% of the outcomes you desire. Focus first on those tasks that will yield such results and you will be amazed and satisfied with your output.
• Silence is golden To work faster and better, shut out everything that pings, beeps, blinks or talks when you are in the middle of a task. That means muting your laptop, cell phone, chat window and even putting a “Do Not Disturb” message for your colleagues. Warning: this does not apply to your boss!
• ABC analysis Divide your tasks into A, B and C lists. Tasks that need to be done right away, like making a critical sales call, make the A list. The B list has tasks that need to be done today like making that invoice. The C list is for non-urgent tasks like working on next month’s report. Focus on A and B tasks and ignore C tasks till they become A or B.
• Time is money So pay money to buy time where profitable. A smart phone with a 3G connection that lets you work anywhere may be a good investment. Or a driver for your car so that you can work or sleep through your 2-hour commute to work.
• Set S.M.A.R.T. goals Articulate and write down each work goal such that it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. E.g. I will complete the first 6 slides of tomorrow’s presentation between 10 am and noon today.
The writer is Director, Executive Search, at Quetzal.
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