We’re all about productivity at Snipply, an after some self-reflection on my habits and what I do to stay productive, I’ve realized there a few things that our team does to remain on schedule and productive. Let’s dive into them below.
We’ve implemented OKR’s for all team members.
OKR — or Objectives and Key Results — is an increasingly popular way to set goals, and progress towards reaching those goals, in an agile way. It’s super simple to align short term tasks and long term strategy around goals that are quantifiable and measurable when organized into OKR’s
The big difference from other methods is that OKRs are frequently set, tracked, and re-evaluated at predetermined time intervals. We do ours every two weeks, and it’s something we’ve loved implementing from the start.
This one has especially been a lifesaver for the team. By implementing OKR’s our CEO always has insight into what everyone is working on, what is expected to get done each week, where projects are stuck, and where we are in terms of short term execution moving the company towards achieving long term goals.
If interested in setting up OKR’s for your team make sure to subscribe here, as we’ll be releasing a guide to set everything up the right way.
Not only is the way we work standardized, but we document everything we do.
It’s always best to have a documented, standardized way of working that you can consistently add to and refine as projects move forward. By documenting what we do we not only build a level of transparency into all of our projects, we create a living FAQ for all of our tasks. Everything you and your company works on that is ultimately going to be collaborative, handed off, or hired into should have a living handbook or FAQ. This eventually makes it easier to delegate work, but also empowers others to find answers to their own questions and solve their own problems. Also, having a workbook where everything lives for a project can save a ton of time in terms of educating new team members on projects, finding information related to tasks that need to be completing, and standardizing workflows.
We own our calendars and block off “me time”.
We all utilize our calendars, but all do so differently. We learned to set boundaries for when colleagues could book time, block extra time for our work, make sure we’d have overlapping windows with distributed team members, and made sure to have time to spend together digitally on collaborative efforts.
BUT, we all make sure to schedule time where we can’t be reached by people outside of the team — we turn off notifications to group chats, social networks, and other apps at certain times during the day. The worst thing possible is to lose an idea or delay a project because someone is sending you a picture of their cat. Especially when organized with an OKR, it’s necessary to have time to yourself to make sure your delivering results for the goals you are working towards reaching.
So those are the three main ways we stay productive that shouldn’t be too challenging to implement. We’ll be releasing a guide to setting up OKR’s so make sure to sign up below, and if interested in the other ways our distributed team stays productive check out our article “Our Secrets to 🚀 Productivity as a Distributed Team” here.
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