In a modern, busy world, everyone is looking for ways to work smart and do things more quickly. There are some very easy ways to ensure your productivity is at it’s finest, you won’t believe you didn’t think of them first!
- Define your Most Important Tasks. By taking a few moments to identify the things you must accomplish each day, preferably before the day starts, you will begin the day knowing what needs to be done, and hopefully feeling motivated to do it.
- Don’t multi-task. Scientists tell us that none of us are truly very good at multi-tasking. Working on one thing at a time will make you faster and less likely to make mistakes.
- Create a morning routine. Defining and sticking to a morning routine can help to ensure a smooth start to the day. If you know you operate at your best when you have exercised and had a good breakfast, making those things a priority will positively affect the rest of your day.
- Edit your input streams. Edit your media streams to only contain the most valuable and important sources of information. This will avoid you getting side-tracked.
- Get to the point. When writing emails, get to the point quickly. A good limit is five sentences or less.
- Do important work. In the classic “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Steven Covey presents a matrix that divides our activities into four categories: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent and unimportant, and not urgent not important. Try and keep within the first two!
- Do similar tasks together. Choose to process your emails once or twice a day at a time that is convenient for you, rather than replying everytime you get a new one; as this can be time consuming. The same can be said for phone calls and meetings, if this is easy to do.
- Eliminate unnecessary tasks. Eliminate anything you can from your to do list; determine if any tasks don’t need to be done, or need to be delegated to a co-worker. By eliminating these tasks, you will already feel as if your to-do list is going down.
- Work offline. If you have difficulty avoiding the Internet’s distractions, work offline or take your work somewhere without an Internet connection. You will find you will focus a lot more on the task at hand.
- Do the thing you want to do the least, first. Prioritize those items you are most likely to procrastinate—your day will go much more smoothly when the phone call you’re dreading or the report you don’t want to write are finished and no longer weighing on your mind.
