How To Be More Productive At Work
Do you ever feel like you’re sprinting on a treadmill when you’re at work? All of us are asked to do more with less.
If you’re in sales, you’re always filling your pipeline and working on closing deals. If you run your own business, you’re managing your customer experience and balancing that with profitability.
To be more productive at work, let’s focus on key action steps you can take to improve your productivity today.
Set Your Priorities
People who are the most productive are clear about their priorities. You can be more effective if you are crystal clear about your own priorities. You know what’s important to you.
When we set priorities, we’re acknowledging that some of the things we need to do are more important than others. When we’ve identified what’s most important, we’re able to attack those most important things first.
If you don’t consistently identify your priorities, try this. Start each day by making a list of tasks that you need to accomplish for the day. Next, put the items on your list in the order of their priority for you. This will help ensure you get the most important things done first. You may even find that you drop things from your list because they are not aligned with your priorities.
How to Get Clear About Your Priorities
- Open to a blank page in your journal, get a blank piece of paper, or create a new note on your phone.
- Write/type this sentence on the page: What would make today great?
- Write down the 1-3 things that you know you should do today to make it a great day.
- Check this note at lunch, at the end of the workday, and before bed.
- Mark the completed items.
- For items that you didn’t complete ask yourself whether they were really prioritized correctly. If they were prioritized correctly and you merely ran out of time, consider adding that item to tomorrow’s list or blocking time on your calendar to complete that item later in the week.
Finally, when you understand your priorities, it is much easier to either delegate tasks or to avoid time wasters that keep you from reaching your goals.
If you’re hung up about writing your thoughts on paper, consider using an app on your phone. The notes app on the iPhone has some great features. You could consider an application like Evernote or Notion, too. I’ve been using Notion for about a year. It works well for me…
Start with a plan
Productive people plan their work. They may schedule their prioritized actions for the next day at the end of their current workday. If you plan tomorrow’s work at the end of today, you’ll start the day with a clear idea of what you’ll be doing and when you’ll do it. All the work you did today is still fresh in your mind. You won’t take time tomorrow thinking about what you left undone yesterday or deciding to what to put on your task list for the day. This makes it easy to jump right into your work the next day.
Own Your Outcomes
People who are productive take responsibility for both their successes and their failures. Rather than looking to point the finger at someone else, they make sure to stay accountable for their work.
Do you own your outcomes? When’s the last time you failed at something important at work? Did your boss set your sales quota too high, again?
Did you try to blame someone else? To become more aware of how accountable you are for your work, try this:
- Review the situation from someone else’s perspective. Consider it from your colleague’s perspective or maybe your boss’s. What might they see that you didn’t?
- Consider what you else you could have tried. By developing different options or scenarios you’ll expand your perspective of what may work when you face a similar situation in the future.
- Take notes about what you’ve learned about your accountability. This will be helpful as you learn from tough situations.
Actively Manage Yourself
Some people think it’s possible to manage time. I don’t. We manage ourselves. It’s what we do with our time that determines our effectiveness and efficiency.
If you are not managing what you do with your time effectively, you will have a hard time moving yourself and your business forward. You will miss deadlines and feel like you’re always playing catch up.
Think of a recent time when you missed an important deadline or two. This adds stress to your day and may cost you business.
Eliminate Timewasters
Just “Don’t Do It.” Every day we’re confronted by things that threaten to limit our productivity. Productive people know how to put those timewasters on the back burner and stick to the important work.
Timewasters come in all shapes and sizes. They could be social media accounts, chatty coworkers, emails, text messages, phone calls, or reading online news that prevents you from getting your business done.
How To Deal With Time Wasters
- Identify time wasters. A time waster is anything that distracts your focus from the task at hand – the work you prioritized.
- If some of the time-wasting items you identified are important to you, that’s ok. Schedule a specific time when you’ll allow yourself to participate in those activities. For example, I travel a lot for work. I created a rule that I won’t turn on the television until after 9pm. This ensures I have uninterrupted time to catch up on work or to write.
- Create a “To Don’t” list. If there are activities that you know are nothing but giant time wasters, put them on a “to don’t list.” I have a list like this that I review each morning. It keeps me from doing things like checking my phone when I’m in a meeting or trying to multitask during conference calls.
Learn Intentionally
It’s been said that “earners are learners.” Always be on the lookout for how to improve your skills, your behaviors, your job, or your teams’ performance. This often requires learning new skills. The more you learn, the easier it will be to find alternative methods of work that work better for you.
When you have an idea about how to improve your skills or behaviors, make a note of it – either in a journal or in your phone. Review this list and decide how to incorporate it into your daily or weekly actions. The work you did earlier with priorities may help you here.
A great place to identify areas for improvement is learning from your mistakes. When you’re working to be more productive, it helps to understand that mistakes can be learning opportunities.
As you progress along your journey to improved productivity, be aware that you’ll continue to make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes bring a lot of emotion to the surface. That’s ok, too. You can begin to control this emotion and move forward by answering a simple question: “What can I learn from this?”
Have you ever seen a professional golf tournament on TV? I attended a PGA event several years ago. What was most impressive to me was not the perfect shots that many of the professional golfers hit.
When a pro makes a bad golf shot, it can be tough for them to get their ball back on the fairway closer to the green. I was impressed by their recovery shots.
I am not a golfer, but I saw some shots that were so bad that they looked like a shot I may make! Almost without exception, the pro golfers I watched approached their next shot calmly, planned the shot, got an opinion from their caddy, selected the correct golf club, and struck the ball. Often their recovery shot put them in contention to score well for the hole.
When you make a mistake. Evaluate it, then make your own recovery shot.
Use The Right Tools
Have you ever tried to tap in a nail with the handle of a screwdriver? My experience doing that is not a positive one. Screwdrivers are not designed to drive nails.
The handle is not strong enough or weighted well enough to do the job well. Hammers work perfectly for this task. They’re designed to drive nails, aren’t they?
Productive people also know it’s important to have the right tools to do the job. That means that for whatever work you do, you should have at least the basic tools required for success.
For example, if you’re a writer, you need a laptop computer or at minimum a tablet with a keyboard. You may benefit from a program like Scrivener, but you can get started with a free word processing program like google docs.
Consider the work you do. Do you have a designated space where you work? Is it functional?
If your work environment is cluttered and there is no sense of organization, your productivity will suffer. There are professionals who can assess your current situation and make recommendations on how to improve work the environment. They can help with things like desk clutter, filing, and even ergonomic issues and proper placement of fixtures or furniture.
If you’re looking for a quick way to get started with your organizing, check out David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. I don’t do all that he recommends, but I use many of his principles and ideas to stay on top of my work.
Do Less
What? That’s right. I’m not saying that you should accomplish less. I am saying that you should do less. Below are three ideas to help you accomplish more by leveraging your time and effort.
Automation
Another way to leverage your time is to automate certain tasks. Automating tasks frees you and your staff to work on more important tasks.
Mundane tasks that eat away the time of your staff are the best candidates for automation. It is possible to go overboard with automation which can cause slowdowns when the automation processes fail. Try to determine the best tasks to automate without overdoing it.
Delegate
“Send in the micromanagers.” That’s one of my favorite lines from The Lego Movie. What are you micromanaging? Are you trying to “do it all”?
If you are micromanaging the work of your team, you won’t have time to handle your own tasks. Your team won’t respect the fact that you are doing tasks that they should be doing.
You hired them for a reason. Let them get their jobs done. It’s okay for them to come to you when they get stuck. Be sure to guide your teammates. Don’t do their work for them.
Take a look at all of the work on your plate, then answer the question, “could anyone do this quicker or better than me?” If so, delegate the work to that person – unless you’ve been told it’s your job to complete the task…
Outsource
With corporate cutbacks, delegating may not be easy to accomplish. Companies expect their employees to do more with less, but we still need to get their work done.
Are there any tasks you could outsource? I’ve found the marketplace Fiverr to be helpful when I need to do some design work. I could do the work myself, but the professionals at Fiverr are quicker.
Design work is not a revenue generator for me. Outsourcing to Fiverr allows me to invest my time in ways that drive my business further faster.
When we outsource, we leverage our time without increasing our company’s headcount. This makes us more efficient, doesn’t it?
Ask for Help
Do you have a mentor? Is there anyone you can ask for specific feedback about the quality of the work you do or can give you insights into ways you can be more efficient within the framework of your company’s business?
Asking your supervisor for specific feedback is a great place to start. If you don’t get specific enough feedback from her, consider asking a peer that you work alongside or who has a similar role.
Think about your own productivity levels. Where can you make changes in your mindset to become more productive? Where will you start? Which actions above will give you the biggest improvement today?
Small changes can lead to big results. Leave a comment with your insights.
Summary: How to Be More Productive at Work
- Set your priorities
- Build your plan
- Own your outcomes
- Actively manage yourself
- “Just don’t do it”
- Learn intentionally
- Use the right tools
- Do less
- Ask for help
