The Coach SpaceA lack of productivity, for the most part, isn’t a failure to get things executed and completed once you start work. What is the most dangerous thing to positivity in the workplace? Simple, it’s not knowing how to approach your workday or having too many steps in place to get a simple task completed.
And honestly, all you likely need is a few tweaks to help you move past a block and get things done each day.
Organization is the name of the game here, and we’re going to look at a few fixes that can help you get more productive every day without complicated processes in place.
Track Time
If you aren’t tracking time, then you’re already losing time. Sounds a bit like corporate jargon, but it’s true. It’s not knowing how long things take in the real world – replying to emails, making calls, chasing orders, checking in with staff, will eat into your day.
In the first instance, make a note of how long you spend doing these tasks as you do them each day. From here, you can assess your workload and then assign an appropriate amount of time. If your emails usually take you an hour at the end of the day, give yourself regular time slots in the day to check your inbox and reply. 15 mins every couple of hours could work. Apply this to all your daily tasks.
If you’re not finding that you can’t condense your workflow, and time is still running away from you, it’s highly likely you need tools or apps to help you streamline things. Document management tools where you can keep everything in one place, work effectively here, so you are not jumping in and out of different software to find what you need to reduce wasted time, or you might find that automating certain tasks is beneficial to remove the repetitive actions that take up your workday.
Finish Tasks Fully
Multitasking isn’t the best way to be productive. To really get more efficient when you work and make a dent in your workload, you need to fully complete one job before you move on.
Don’t rely on being able to “come back” to something. Don’t move on, don’t stop, stay focused and complete it from beginning to end, then move on. Even if you need to delay something else. That is, unless it is urgent and needs immediate attention. Otherwise, file it for your next task and tick this one off first.
Batch Tasks
A great way to help you be more productive is to break down your workload and then tackle it section by section.
So this could be replying to emails or customer queries together. It could be replying to calls, undertaking staff-related admin, or even blocking tasks that you need to support growth, so you sit down and do them at once.
Let’s say you’re creating social media content. How you would batch this is to shoot the content at first or make drafts for written content. Then, from here, you edit everything together in the same block. Then you do the final tweaks, and then schedule. Instead of doing these steps one by one for each piece of content, you’re bulking the process.
Block Time Properly
Scheduling time into your workday for specific tasks means everyone knows what you are working on and when. The same can be done for your staff if required. Setting time blocks means you can stop anything impacting your workflow, like phone calls. Or emails you “reply to quickly.”
You get around this by taking time to do different tasks. If you block out 3 hours of your day to compile files for client presentations and gather information, then only check your inbox for 5 mins per hour, and then go back to the job at hand. It might not feel right at the beginning, but it works.
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