Boosting office productivity begins with eliminating inefficiencies from your own workday. Slightly changing your daily activities can result in resounding effects on your organisation’s productivity.
In order to improve productivity at work, stay relaxed while you’re working, and you’ll find you can accomplish more. Keep notes in a cloud-based application to avoid wasting time, and plan your daily tasks with set deadlines. Learn how to identify necessary meetings, or a collaboration tool when it’s a viable alternative.
Continue reading to learn our four ways to improve productivity at your workplace:
1. Avoid burning out
When you’re feeling overwhelmed by your workload, rather than focussing on high-pressure tasks and critical decisions, try to relax by actioning the easiest tasks on your to-do list.
While pushing past frustration is a prerequisite for success, you must know your limits. According to psychologist, Sherrie Bourg Carter, chronic stress and frustration leads to an ‘inability to successfully function on a personal and professional level’.
Therefore, leave the challenging activities for when the frustration has subsided, and action easier tasks, which won’t amplify your stress levels. Conducting small work, like responding to emails or organising files generates a sense of accomplishment, without extreme mental exertion.
Gloria Mark, a professor at University of California, suggests that if you do the smaller tasks first, it will give you a feeling of fulfilment, without any frustration or stress.
Remember, work shouldn’t be arduous all the time. Avoid burning out and you may discover greater capacity to get more things done in the day, inevitably increasing your organisation’s productivity.
2. Store your notes in the cloud
Resist the temptation to jot notes down on whatever’s convenient at the time, and get into the habit of accessing and updating notes in the cloud.
Consolidating your notes in the cloud means you can update forgotten errands and responsibilities, regardless of your geographic location on any device. Nothing gets missed, there’s no duplication of effort, and you’re not wasting time sifting through various types of devices or media.
There are free and paid cloud-based applications, which often come equipped with a range of features targeting increased efficiency.
For example, you can create customised tabs in Microsoft OneNote to classify your thoughts, ideas and screen captures. Additionally, you’re able to share notebooks with colleagues via the web, saving you travelling back to the office to updates employees.
The other option is Trello, an incredibly easy to use tool that you can use to track all your notes.
Consolidate your notes in the cloud, and you’ll notice fewer time-wasting actions, quicker execution of tasks, and overall, a more productive day.
3. Don’t multitask
No doubt you’ve experienced the productivity pitfalls of trying to respond to emails, oversee operations and strategically plan your business’s future all at the same time. Avoid splitting your focus across multiple tasks by allocating time blocks to individual activities.
Unsurprisingly, the American Psychological Association found people who multitask experience a 40 percent drop in productivity. Therefore, it’s critical to work through individual tasks with set deadlines.
Remember to keep time limits on the short side to create a sense of urgency, as tasks can sometimes expand in complexity to fill the time block.
Use a time-tracking application like Toggl to analyse and optimise your use of time. Generate reports or charts to identify and eliminate time-wasting activities, and reprioritise how you consume time.
Don’t get sucked into the trap of multitasking. Instead, adhere as best you can to the time brackets for each individual task to maximise your impact on the day’s activities.
4. Stop unnecessary meetings
Avoid holding meetings when there are better ways to get information. Only hold meetings when the purpose and benefit of them is absolutely clear, to ensure you’re not negatively impacting the day’s productivity.
A study by 3M Meeting Network found executives believe 25 to 50 percent of the time spent in meetings is wasted.
In order to reduce this time wastage, consider using communication and collaboration tools as an alternative to physical meetings. For example, Microsoft’s SharePoint allows you to collaborate without meeting face-to-face. You’re able to swap notes, link resources and have online discussions in real time.
Microsoft’s Lync gives you the mobility to hold a web conference from anywhere with an Internet connection. The annotating and whiteboarding capabilities mean there’s little difference between a virtual meeting and a physical one, except there’s no time wasted due to travel.
Unnecessary meetings wear a mask of productivity, but detract from the volume of work you and your workforce can accomplish.
Are you interested in learning which cloud-based tools can help your organisation improve office productivity?
R & G Technologies is a Brisbane IT Support and IT Consulting firm that helps organisations across Australia. We can help you make better use of new cloud technologies - like Microsoft OneNote and Trello – to increase productivity. Call us on 1300 562 886 or contact us via this page.
