Effective Ways to Be More Productive in the Workplace

Have you found yourself in a situation where you have to take tasks and assignments at home with you after spending close to 10 hours in the office? It happens to many people, where you’re in the office, but most of the hours you are daydreaming. In this era of handheld devices, staying on task proves to be a difficult thing. One minute, a friend has sent you the most exciting photos they had over the weekend during their outing with their boyfriend, the other minute, your manager calls you head to his office to help him sort out something.

Avoiding distractions in the office can be harder than even accomplishing the work you have on your desk. You can’t even figure out where to start and all your precious time is lost in the drain. Everyone wants to be productive, whether in business or at work.

So, if you are seeking ways to make your days more productive without taking excessive amounts of caffeine or list-making, you need to focus on these things:

● Have a reasonable to-do-list with smaller time goals for your tasks

● Identify your working patterns so see when you’re more focused

● Avoid multi-tasking and attempt one task to completion

● Focus on the habits you can control

A Manageable To-Do List and Smaller time Goals

You need to make a to-do list that won't overwhelm you. Often, people fail to accomplish their tasks and assignments when they make them too complex or when the tasks are unequal. You may find that some tasks take more time while others are finished quickly. This scenario may create an imbalance in how you distribute your time. Instead of getting started and finishing the tasks within the timelines, you end up procrastinating. Perhaps, you think of doing the easy stuff first, but when you get to the hard stuff, you are stuck.

Once you have set a reasonable list of tasks to do for the day or the week, you also want to set small goals. With assignments or projects, the scope can seem too large. However, when you break things down you begin to realize what is accomplish-able and what’s not. This way, you can see how each part of the assignment builds upon the other.

For example, you can break down your deliverable or marketing project into small goals. If there are people or clients you have to talk to, decide who you will first engage with. When you have broken down the tasks, you can now set your timeline and estimate the amount of time it’s going to take you to accomplish the tasks. When you do this, you find that a project that initially felt overwhelming to you becomes easy to accomplish. Another thing you need to consider is to focus on a single goal at a time.

Identify Your Working Patterns to See When You’re More Focused

It’s important that you track your time, even when your boss doesn’t ask you to do it. It will help you understand how you work and what time of the day you are more productive. When tracking your time, look at the things that distract you from working or focusing on your tasks.

Identify the time when you are busy checking your email, chatting, engaging in social media, or visiting your favorite website. These are things that probably interfere with your work schedule and you need to pinpoint them and when they happen in the course of your day. When you rearrange these things, you find that you get more work done.

Tracking your time also allows you to detect the problems where you seem to be less productive, for example, when you hold weekly meetings, or when a colleague comes to your desk to chat with you, or when you have appointments with clients.

People have different habits of working – some are night owls, others are early risers. With the modern business environment, it may not accommodate these kinds of patterns. Your peak could be from 5 am to 7 am, but your office does not open until 9 am. So, what do you do? This is what to do:

● Find about 2 hours every day where you can engage in harder strategic work

● Allow yourself to take on less urgent tasks during the off-peak hours when you’re less energetic or unfocused.

● During the off-peak hours, schedule meetings, meet clients, and do those things that tend to interrupt you when you have high energy levels or when you are accomplishing the harder tasks.

● Identify patterns of when you engage in deep work or when you are more focused for more hours.

Some tasks need more focused time, for example, when you have to come up with a marketing campaign concept, but other tasks are shallow and easy to attempt like answering emails.

Avoid Multitasking and Attempt one task to Completion

Switching tasks can make you feel tired and disoriented. When switching tasks, it takes up brain energy and that’s something you don’t want to do – you need that energy for the harder tasks you have in front of you.

Daniel Levitin, a professor in neuroscience behavior at McGill says, “Switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing.” Professor Levitin also hints that instead of taking more caffeine or eating more to awaken your brain and induce focus, consider taking a break. And you know what? Coffee can be addictive, the breaks you take are a healthier way of keeping your brain sharp and re-energizing the body and mind to be able to work on your assignments or projects.

When it comes to picking one task and doing it to completion, it can be difficult. Why? Some projects take 30 minutes, others an hour, and others a day, or even several days. So, how do you go about the tasks that need several days to finish?

● Break the projects or tasks that would take several days to complete into several smaller assignments

● Pick each of the smaller tasks or assignments at a time and do it to completion

● When breaking up the task, decide what amount of time the little tasks you come up with should take.

The Pomorodo technique can be helpful when you want to set time goals for the little tasks. The technique suggests having 25-minute blocks of time in addition to short 5-minute breaks between the blocks of time before taking a longer break thereafter.

Focus on the Habits you Control

When you feel like you have tried to improve the environment you work in but you aren’t more productive, you can try to focus on habits that you control in order to increase productivity. It may require you to seek motivational speakers to help you learn those habits that can help you stay more productive. Some of the good habits you can build on in your life to help increase productivity are:

● Taking breaks to help rejuvenate the body and mind and allow you to be stronger throughout the workday

● Spending 20 percent of your workday doing the most important tasks that you face

● Devising a plan of what you want to accomplish as well as the time goals

● Prioritizing the tasks you have on your desk

● Taking time to reflect on things you did and those you didn’t do during the day

Being more productive doesn’t necessarily imply working 8 hours nonstop. It doesn’t mean doing everything you have on your desk or even attempting the harder tasks first. It means being in control of your working schedule and knowing when you are focused and when you aren’t. You need to set realistic to-do lists and time goals. It’s also important that you refrain from the habit of multitasking and break up large projects into smaller tasks that you handle each to completion. Lastly, check on those habits you can control and see how you manipulate them to allow you to be focused, energetic, and productive.