Best Tips for Increasing Productivity
Hi friends! Do you know that everyone can be 80% more productive? Do you know that you can finish tasks twice faster with the right approach? Are you aware that all this doesn’t require titanic efforts?
Since Collabio Spaces is our efficient productivity tool, we decided to share with your our TOP productivity tips. Use them and your efficiency will increase while you’ll save lots of time! Get ready to discover new productive YOURSELF!
Btw, you can start thinking about what you will spend saved time on! ;)
Global How-to’s:
As every task in our life, becoming productive has to be motivated by some inner needs and goals. Understanding WHY you want to save time and become efficient is the first thing to do.
Next, continue learning your own preferences, as productivity is a custom thing.
Discover Yourself
Without knowing the reasons and traits of your behavior, you won’t be able to enhance them. So, what should you do?
Increasing self-awareness is key. Only you are aware what activities drive the best results. First of all, you should have a To-do list and a tracking list with your daily activities. You have to realise whether expectations meet reality.
These questions require your answers to boost productivity:
- How do you spend your time? Which tasks do you handle and which websites do you visit (regardless of whether you need to visit them or not)?
- How often do you distract and why? How much time do you spend on these distractions?
- How is your progress towards the goals going? Do those distractions become serious obstacles?
- When are you the most focused?
Answers to these questions will become your insights to a productivity boost. Once you discover your strengths and weak points, you’ll know how to work efficiently almost all the time!
Set Measures
Everyone has a kind of ‘productivity benchmarks’ and certain limitations such as resources, attention, skills, and time. You won’t be effective all the time, so you should know how much time you’ll dedicate to a task and how your success will be measured.
What’s more, tracking progress motivates!
You might use your insights from the previous points and task tracking software. They will show you whether your expectations meet reality. Alternatively, you can create lists in a common note-taking app or Collabio. ;)
Follow the 80/20 Rule
Now it’s time to identify what drives more results. Compare an hour spent on a meeting and an hour of fruitful coding or writing an article. The latter will mean more for productivity, and it’s quite clear. These tasks have more practical value, so it’s obvious you should concentrate on them. What’s more, you should be careful with meetings, as Atlassian states that unnecessary discussions cost $37 billion in salaries for US businesses every year. So, let’s save money for the project and calculate the effectiveness formula:
The 80/20 rule also known as the Pareto principle shows that 80% of our results are driven by 20% of work. Consequently, we spend 80% of working time on tasks that bring us only 20% of value.
Can you change that? You may try, but some time-consuming activities are just unavoidable. That’s why the main lifehack is the right prioritising. Find your 20% of tasks that give you that 80% of results:
- Identify your core responsibilities. What were you hired for?
- Start with the most important and urgent ones. Keep in mind that ‘important’ doesn’t always equal ‘urgent’.
- What activities fade into the background all the time?
Nevertheless, calculating your 80/20 formula can be a challenge. In some cases, you have to spend time on non-urgent tasks that will pay off in the long run. For example, account managers should maintain good relationships with clients all the time. Though this activity won’t drive results at once, it will be effective in months when those clients will decide to buy more from the company. This is only one example, every sphere has its own.
How to Be Productive at Work and at Home:
So, we are already done with a global strategic decision on your productivity:
- You know what’s effective for you personally.
- You have decided on how to measure success.
- You are aware which 20% of effort gives 80% of the result.
Let’s focus on simple actionable tips that you can implement in the framework of the above-mentioned lifehacks!
Plan your work and work your plan!
Planning should be part of your everyday tactics. Look at your tasks and decide which ones have top priority by considering your own productivity schedule. Those who work more efficiently in the morning prefer handling the most important and complex tasks from 8 AM to 12 AM. Night owls prefer working hard in the evening. Thanks to the remote work format, companies can afford asynchronous cooperation.
Without a proper plan, you’ll only be distracted from tasks, which might result in losses for the project. According to Hubspot, an average employee spends 28% of his/her workday, focusing on unnecessary distractions. Even worse, workers spend 27% of office hours feeling disorganised. That’s why planning is essential!
Use work time effectively
You will have your spare time to have a rest. So, your everyday schedule must contain periods of fruitful work and breaks when you can distract and have a cup of coffee.
If your schedule is moved by your business partners, do something useful! For example, your colleague is late for a meeting and you have 10 free minutes. Take your iPhone and check the inbox or make notes of new business ideas. Leastwise, you have the Collabio Spaces app where you can do almost everything you need:
- make text notes and work with documents;
- create and edit spreadsheets;
- work with presentations;
- scan documents (take pictures and recognise texts) and annotate and highlight PDFs soon;
- and many more.
Dealing with small tasks on the go is key to save more time for assignments that need a serious focused approach.
Prioritise tasks
Do you remember we said that ‘important’ is not the same as ‘urgent’? That’s it! Let’s see what to do with, for example, 5 important and 5 urgent tasks.
We’ll start with urgent ones. Dedicate half of the day to them. If they require more time, distribute them to the following days or between team members. The rest of your time should be dedicated to strategically important tasks. Always start with the most important ones that will positively affect the overall company’s success.
For example, you can take 3 urgent tasks first and continue with a couple of important ones. If some of them have the highest priority by all the parameters, start your day with them! ;)
Learn to say ‘No’
We mean saying ‘No’ to all urgent activities that distract you from important duties. Small projects are great but only when they don’t interfere with crucial goals. Otherwise, you will pass by long-term projects — they will stay undone, and in the end, no one will measure your success with dozens of micro-tasks.
If someone from your team or even management will ask you to do something urgently, you have the right to say ‘No’. Still, include their assignment to your plans, for example, for the next day or week.
Don’t put off complex tasks until tomorrow
People often wait for a better moment to start tackling tasks they find too complex or boring. Still, when you put it off, you just delay the moment of truth — you will have to cope with that work anyway! Why not start right away? Do this when you’re the most productive and creative and leave other (= more pleasant) tasks for the dessert.
What’s more, taking the first step usually shows that the task itself is not so difficult. As appetite comes during eating, so motivation comes in the process.
Introduce the system of baby steps
A great long-term job might seem impossible. Baby steps are the solution! Every great project should be divided into parts, which already seem not so daunting. Everyone can accomplish small simple steps.
You will be surprised how fast you can deal even with impressive projects when taking baby steps. The key to success is your realistic expectations. If you notice that some task is still complex, break it into even smaller pieces!
Get rid of procrastination
Having all these social media and entertainment at hand, it’s extremely hard to focus on work. Are they keeping you from the maximum of productivity? You can deal with it!
Make a habit of checking your personal email and socials two or three times a day. Sure, if you are an SMM specialist or a PR manager who needs to check socials and mailbox every hour, let it be. In other cases, keep yourself from those distractions.
Use your phone only for checking necessary documents (probably, in Collabio as well), not for replying to friends’ messages.
Review your daily activities
Conduct a brief daily retrospective:
- What was great? Which tasks did you do the most efficiently?
- Which 20% of effort gave you 80% of results?
- What was done wrong? What could be done better?
- What mistakes ate your time and held you from the productivity peak?
Write down the outcomes and decide what you’ll fix tomorrow. If you have found your success formula, think of where you can implement it in the future.
The constant analysis will give you a chance to learn about strong sides you had no idea about!
Don’t forget to take breaks
According to Connect, the most high-performing employees (10% of all workforce) take breaks throughout the workday. Your energy doesn’t come from a perpetual motion machine. Taking breaks between focused work is essential. Without them, you will lose your energy after a couple of days of extra-productive work.
What’s more, if your job is IT or office related, you might be gazing at your screen all the time. So, breaks are crucial for your health. And don’t use mobile devices to entertain yourself during the break. Forget about screens at least for 5–10 minutes!
Find motivation everywhere!
Inner motivation is what keeps us productive at work.
So, a positive attitude and looking forward to getting results can help you cope with almost impossible tasks!
- Treat every new day as unique.
- Focus on the experience you get on the projects.
- Listen to favorite music while working, if that helps.
- Find the best practices that will inspire you.
- Look at competitors and make sure you can do better!
Don’t you believe this works? Robert Half has proven that 71% of people become more productive at work thanks to the music! So, turn on your favorite song and start rocking with the most challenging tasks. They will seem much simpler!
