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Awesome Productivity Lifehacks for Work

Is work life getting you down? Tackle important tasks with productivity lifehacks for work to boost your productivity and take command of your workday​.

By Patty RamsenPublished 5 years ago 8 min read
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Lifehacks are popping up everywhere, but most of them don't seem to work. Or, they do work, but they're not worth the time and resources you need to get the job done. Luckily, tried and tested productivity lifehacks for work are easy, and sure to make you feel more accomplished at the end of your day!

Anticipate things to "come up unexpectedly."

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Anticipate, as you plan your day, to plan for the unexpected. Anticipate emergency meetings or last minute projects that needed to be done "yesterday." Assign an hour of "wiggle room," and in the best case scenario, you have extra time to work on other important things. Allow yourself blocks of time to deal with the task at hand, not just things you need to get done to stay on track.

Although we can't always foresee the unexpected, you can plan for things to come up. If you schedule seven hours of your work day and have that extra hour unscheduled, it allows you to control what "emergency" you will devote time to without it affecting your task list.

Take five and map out your day.

Aside from waking up early or increasing the amount of time you spend at work, this is a simple aspect of your workday you can control to increase productivity and save time, too.

Always plan out your day as soon as you walk in the door or sit down at your desk. Having a plan will keep you out of meetings or areas you don't need to be in, so you can start your day on track and stop wasting time. This five minutes can also help you tap into your "work mode," or in other words, start your day. Too often people sit down and make a phone call or start answering emails. Instead, take five minutes to yourself and schedule your blocks of time.

Productivity lifehacks rely on behavior, such as avoidance.

The key to executing any productivity lifehack is changing a simple behavior for significant results. That's right, there are tasks you can avoid because productivity is about choices. Unless your company has a strict policy on emails, avoid them. Your company probably has a policy about cell phone use, so avoid your cell phone. It's too easy to lose valuable time to these fruitless time sucks.

Using avoidance for constantly present distractions, such as your phone or email inbox, is difficult at first, but you can use some other lifehack tools to keep you on track. On any smartphone, you set "Do Not Disturb" time frames; while for your emails, you can reduce the frequency that it refreshes. To use the avoidance productivity lifehack, you can also set an alarm that allows you to check your phone or email. This trick helps some people because they know that they're only avoiding the thing for a short while, not all day.

Automate follow-ups.

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Even if you're not in a leadership or management position, you can set a recurring alarm to follow up with people who are working on projects. How many times have you left work fuming or frustrated because someone else didn't have something done and it affected your work day? Increase your productivity by taking less than a minute to check-in with your teammates.

Be objective with your task list and eliminate three things.

The odds are that your task list for any given day is more than you could accomplish in an eight hour work day. Because of this, you can focus on your essential tasks and hone in on your productive times with time blocking. David Allen has a lot to say about task lists and increasing productivity.

Productivity lifehacks to help you be more successful combine measurement with tracking and elimination. David Allen's fourth step is to reflect and review frequently, and you should put this into action with your task list before anything else.

To put this lifehack into action, you need to:

  • Write out your daily and weekly task lists.
  • Review each item objectively. What do you get out of completing each item and is it worth it?
  • Are you doing some tasks that others can accomplish more efficiently and with higher quality?
  • Are you doing some tasks because you feel obligated to take on these extra responsibilities from the person who asked?
  • Finally, eliminate three items off your daily and weekly task lists. Preferably things that aren't actually "your job" or you've been doing as "a favor" to help someone else out. You can worry about helping people with all the extra time you'll have later!

Wake up earlier in the morning.

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Although no one wants to admit it, most people aren't at their best in the morning. So why would you drag yourself into work half awake and reliant on break room coffee? You probably spend your first 15 to 20 minutes at work waking up! Instead, start your day slightly more prepared.

Instead, set your alarm for five minutes earlier. No one is asking you to become that person that wakes up at 4 AM even though they start work at 9, but just that extra five minutes will boost your productivity and give you an extra five minutes to be productive to your your workday. Waking up early has all sorts of other benefits, but getting ahead of the amount of time it takes you to "get going" isn't going to change, so set the alarm forward by at least five minutes.

To really boost your productivity, wake up at least two hours before you're supposed to arrive at work. Studies show that the most successful people have time to do everything they want to accomplish before work!

Make the phone call now.

How many small, teeny-tiny tasks do you put off later because "it'll only take a second?" Phone calls, updating your companies social media pages, and booking a conference room are the tasks that we're talking about here.

For a real productivity lifehack for work, look no further than the one minute rule. The one minute rule is simple: If you can say a task "only takes a minute," then you should do it now. Literally, the time it takes for you to write down the task on a post-it takes longer than the task itself. Stop wasting time and make the phone call, schedule the catering, and update the company's LinkedIn page!

Prepare for everything from dead pens to the zombie apocalypse.

A famous quote from Benjamin Franklin; an authority on habits, planning, and productivity aside from his other accomplishments; is, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." There isn't cause to pretend that your entire project will fall apart so you should have a second on standby, but you can save time and boost your productivity for preparing for the little issues that derail your day.

I bet you've gone out on your lunch hour only to get back to work and realize that you don't have the necessary plasticware or a straw. What about when you're working your way through your notes and your pen dies? These are the little things worth preparing for because they are sure to happen, and usually at the most inconvenient of times. Stop wasting time looking for a good pen or asking around the office for sugar packets and napkins. Did you suddenly contract a cold, and wouldn't it be great if you had Alka Seltzer or emergen-C in your drawer? Why don't you?

To put this productivity lifehack into action, add a few office supplies, over-the-counter medications, and plastic cutlery onto your shopping list. Just make sure the items make it into your desk drawer.

Productivity lifehacks for work always mention The Pomodoro​ Technique.

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We're mentioning this hack even though you've probably heard it before because you can't hear it enough! The Pomodoro Technique goes by another name: time-blocking. Scheduling a block of time for any event is standard behavior for humans, but planning a block of time for every task can transform your productivity.

The argument with the Pomodoro Technique is that you spend more time transitioning from one task to another than you would otherwise, but that's not entirely true. This effective technique increases productivity because you're telling your brain that the task at hand is the only thing it needs to worry about right now.

In the long term, you're saving time even if you're switching tasks every 20 minutes, which is the traditional use of the Pomodoro Technique. To put this productivity lifehack for work in action, break your day down into 20 minute blocks of time and assign tasks to each block. Ideally, you'll only accomplish one or two significant things in each block, but at the end of the day, you'll see a long list of completed tasks rather than an untouched to-do list.

Clock your hours spent working.

For many people, work is right at home or in an office all alone. It's not only hard to stay focused and productive, but it's hard to know where your time goes. This lifehack is simple, and whether you're self-employed or not, you'll learn exactly how you spend your day.

Use an app to "clock" hours of your day. There are plenty of time management apps to optimize your productivity, so set up your daily activities and track away. Once you know where your time goes, it'll be much easier to manage and increase productivity!

Invest your time into creating templates.

It's hard to focus on the task at hand when you have alarms going off because it's time to check your email or you worry about the other dozen things you need to accomplish before you call it a day. For long term success, build yourself a few templates. Microsoft sticky notes and Apple's Notes will both stay on your screen at all times, and make it easy to copy and paste a chunk of text at any given moment.

Templates might be for emails or corporate documents that use the same header information. You can use them for anything, and they'll take you less than five minutes to put together, while they'll save you five minutes every time you use them! As far as productivity lifehacks for work are concerned, this has an instant return on investment, and can be used in any number of situations.

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About the Creator

Patty Ramsen

Just another 20 something trying to break the glass ceiling one blazer at a time. Get your own coffee...

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