HOW TO AVOID MISTAKES AT WORK — 10 best ways to do it

The best way to deal with a mistake is to avoid making it in the first place. Though we don’t make mistake intentionally and we know that they are evitable but it doesn’t mean that you become so carefree towards everything we do. There are some mistakes we make and think after making them that this mistake could easily be avoided if we paid a little extra concentration in what we were doing.

So, how can you stop yourself by making mistakes or can decrease the probability of making the most of the time? There are some effective strategies for this and by applying them in work life, I am sure that the count of the daily mistakes you make at work can be reduced.

I still remember the moment when I used to work in a consultancy firm and I mistakenly sent an email filled with the files of confidential data of our client to another client because their names were the same. It was my first week of working there when I did that and felt so much embarrassed as the data was so crucial for our client and had to apologize from many ends: from my boss, client of which I sent data and from the client to which I emailed by mistake.

Mistakes are part of our life. We all make them, especially at our work. We all have made such mistakes on which we mulled over for lack of attention and our silliness. One of the key importance of mistakes in our life we all know is that we actually learn from our mistakes and they lead us towards better consequences when we do our task after having a bad experience we learned from our mistakes. But if someone is repeated then it is not something encouraging. Some mistakes can lead us towards bad performance turning into a hindrance in our successful career. So it is important to avoid them as much as possible by making ourselves more concerned about our work.

Some of the simplest 10 ways to avoid making mistakes at your workplace are:

1. AVOID MULTI-TASKING

Do one job at a time. Although multitasking is sometimes considered a good thing. It does affect our job by keeping us distracted. If you keep jumping back and forth between many tasks then there are more chances of mistakes in any one of them or more worse in all of them. Because at the end of the day, getting a single job done with perfection is better than doing many jobs with many errors in them.

2. LEARN FROM OTHER’S MISTAKES

Before starting any new project, try to ask some colleagues to get to know if they have done that kind of project before and can share their experience and mistakes from which they learned. No matter how you, learning from the mistakes of others is always important. Try to take notes of the important things your colleagues tell you to avoid and try to apply them during your project. In short, pay attention to learn from what they did wrong and what right.

3. KEEP YOUR RESEARCH UPDATED

In this fast-growing world, everything keeps evolving. No matter how well you know about your given task always make your research before starting it. Learning from your trials and errors are now old-school thoughts if you do it wrong that means you didn’t have your research right as now almost everything can be found on the internet.

4. ASK QUESTIONS & CLEAR ALL YOUR DOUBTS

Try to make yourself crystal clear about the given task by asking as much as questions you need to understand the given task. The main reason that we normally find errors in our work is that either we are too afraid to ask or our ego doesn’t let us ask the most important questions about the given work. Don’t think about what my boss will think if I ask this. If you aren’t sure about the next step to be taken in your task you can also ask your seniors for directions. This will help you in getting clarity about your next steps to be taken.

5. TAKE BREAKS

There’s a reason that breaks exist. If you indulge yourself in the nonstop working schedule where you cannot even find out some time to a take break and chill then there are chances that you are ruining your physical health.

Harvard Business Review writes: “Overwork may hasten the aging-related decline in memory and thinking skills, according to a long-term study of British civil servants.”

Too much work can harm your brain and when your brain will not work in the right way then you are certainly going to make mistakes. Try to ease your stress response, interact with your colleagues, and connect with your friends or family or anything that makes you happy for a break from work.

6. MAKE CHECKLISTS

To keep the track of all your steps you have to do to complete your task, make the checklist. This will help you whether you have completed all the procedures or any one of them is remaining that you skipped mistakenly. This will also help you to review the final work.

7. REVIEW AAND REVIEW

Often we make mistakes because we were working on a tight deadline and we didn’t give ourselves even time to proofread or review. Don’t ever send forward your work without proofreading or reviewing it. This often feels irritating but it is as important as that.

8. ALLOW ENOUGH TIME

This is my personal experience that whenever I work in tight deadlines, I am most probably going to make a few mistakes in my work. Try to manage your time in such a way that you don’t have to do work in a great rush or with a pressure of time running out. If you think that the deadline is too short for you to work then try to ask for some more time from your boss at that exact time when your task is given to you. In this way, you will have enough time to work without pressure and stress which will lead you towards your work without any error.

9. EXTERNAL PROOFREADING

Even you have given your best in reviewing and proofreading your work still there are chances of minor mistakes. So try to get a second eye, especially from the one who is seniors from you and you think that has enough experience of the work that you have done. Getting the other set of eyes to check any mistakes will be quite helpful.

10. BE CLEAR OF YOUR ROLE IN THE ORGANIZATION

Be clear about your role and position in the organization. Always try to be sure about your roles and responsibilities in the organization. If you are not sure about your role in the organization then you are certainly going to make big mistakes. When you know what and how you are supposed to do your work exactly then things get much easier at work.

CONCLUSION

After all the above-mentioned ways of avoiding mistakes at work, keep in mind that we are humans and mistakes are inevitable. Our mistakes let us learn from our bad experience and if we know how to cope well with our mistakes and what we learn from them is where you know how to avoid them in the future. I mostly write about technology and how it is affecting our lifestyles in all the best possible ways. I have previously written about the internet and its providers mainly, Viasat Exede, HughesNet, and Xfinity