Be More Productive At Work
August 13, 2008 – 6:12 am
I strive for efficiency at work, and I’ve realized that improvement in this area must be personalized to the individual. The following changes have helped me improve my productivity at work, and I hope they will give you some ideas on how to improve your own performance!
Get Rid Of The Never-Ending ‘Emergencies’
I’ve noticed an interesting thing at work recently. I get a lot more done if I don’t answer the phone. And to be honest, I hate the phone. I would much rather meet in person with my coworkers, even for short meetings, than talk on the phone and I find the phone a constant interruption with my train of thought. What I find even more interesting is that most people don’t even leave a message! I get out of probably 30-60 minutes a day of needless and disruptive conversations simply by choosing to let my phone go to voice mail. Of course I do answer my phone sometimes, but caller-id allows me to answer selectively based on the caller and based on what I’m doing at the time. Therefore I am more able to manage my workload.
Don’t let email distract you either. Turn off your email notification if it bothers you. You don’t need to read every email as soon as it comes in. Better yet, don’t even open up your email until 10am, and tell your boss and coworkers that you’re going to do this. That way if there is a real emergency they will come find you in person. Otherwise you’ll be working to complete your existing tasks, which is what you should be doing most of the time.
Show Up Early To Work
This will only help if you’re truly a morning person (like me), but I’ve found that getting to work a little earlier in the morning allows me to get a number of things done before the rest of the office is asking me to do other things.
I also think management notices such things, and the interesting thing is that they don’t even know whether you arrived ten minutes before them or three hours! I don’t necessary agree with the “get in before your boss and stay after your boss” mentality. Rather, what I’m suggesting is that you find time that is free from interruptions to complete some of your work load.
Manage Your Time and Calendar
If your employer uses Outlook to schedule meetings don’t be afraid to block of sections of your calendar to do your work. My job can be heavily meeting-focused, and if I don’t pro-actively manage my calendar I would be in meetings all day and produce very little. Granted, some people’s “work” occurs in meetings through making decisions, but mine does not entirely work that way. Therefore I block off times for specific tasks, and I work hard to ensure that meetings are necessary. Does the requestor really require an hour? Can they just send out a summary email of their proposal? This can be difficult with coworkers that don’t know how to run meetings, but I try to gently help these types of people improve their meeting and decision making skills.
Keep A Task List
Keep an up to date task list, or better yet implement the Getting Things Done approach. You must have a fair amount of discipline to implement and maintain this system, but it will yield extraordinary results if you’re willing to stick to it. Regardless of how you track your deliverables and work load you will need a system that works for you and one that can be relied upon.
I recommend spending the last 5 minutes of your day summarizing where you are on your projects so that when you arrive (early!) tomorrow morning you’ll know exactly what needs to be done.
Stop Waisting Time
When you’re at work, WORK! I’m all for networking and getting to know your coworkers, but there’s a fine line between being friendly and wasting your day away at the water cooler. Most of us have a lot of time-wasting activities each day, most of which involve others that simply suck time away from us. And for some of us it’s our boss! You need to find a way to politely stop people who are wasting your time. Something like “I apoligize, but I’m really under the gun to complete XYZ in the next hour. Can we continue this discussion later?” It’s likely that after doing this once or twice the person will learn to shorten their discussions.
If you want to improve your performance you need to take an active approach to managing your time. Just think about how much better you could perform if you had 30 minutes “extra” a day to learn something new, make more client calls, or work on your long term career plan. Every job has some inherent inefficiencies. Find them, and fix them, and you’ll be on your way to improved performance.
Image Credit: david.nikonvscanon
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3 Responses to “Be More Productive At Work”
very informative post. these r those important points one should take in account to give 100%
at work.thankz for sharing
By Amrit on Aug 13, 2008
I agree absolutely with the task list.
We should made a list of things to do the day before, prioritizing the most important items first, and if we can focus on completing two or three items, then we are set for success.
By jeflin on Aug 16, 2008
Too bad arriving to work early would cut into my most productive time of the day; why would I give my employer my best hours when they are better used for myself.
By Bcarter on Aug 17, 2008