‘Productivity’ is one term that every individual, as an efficient resource; and a manager, as an effective leader; should expect from oneself and the team. Time is money and making efficient use of time will not only enable you to gain more, but as a team you can achieve higher goals.
Productivity is nothing but doing things more efficiently, timely and getting most of your time.
There are different sets of people in an office atmosphere. Some like to finish their work before their day ends while others are bound to procrastinate. In such a scenario, how will you ensure that all the team members are on the same page? As an efficient individual, how will you ensure that all your roles, responsibilities and tasks are organised and managed effectively?
Although measuring productivity and its evaluation process for each and every role is different, but the basic format and underlying process of designing your work-day are the same across all job roles. Considering the growing demand for improvement in productivity in small companies to large business houses, we thought we will list some of the tips and tricks to maximise productivity in your workplace.
1. Plan in Advance, never hurts!
Whether you are a small company or a large business house; planning is the first step for productivity. The common notion or misunderstanding among people is that productivity is constantly being busy, crunching numbers or chasing targets. This misconception just leads to ‘getting less done’.
Boost your productivity with proper planning and have a to-do list for each day.
Setting up tools in your workplace will reduce ad-hoc tasks and bring in every team member to a centralised platform. With the help of such tools you can not only align team, assign tasks and allocate timeline, but also ensure the quality of work and generate evaluation reports.
Thanks to the SaaS uprising in the past decade that has given birth to several pay-as-you-go time tracking tools like Rescue Time, beautiful calendars like Cal, conversational email tools like Mail-time and team productivity tools like Gridle; you can now have them up and running in no-time!Thanks to the SaaS uprising in the past decade that has given birth to several pay-as-you-go time tracking tools like Rescue Time, beautiful calendars like Cal, conversational email tools like Mail-time and team productivity tools like Gridle; you can now have them up and running in no-time!
Why would you call a team meeting for a status update? Or involve everyone for trivial decision making? We all love to hate meetings and get this straight: A 1 hour meeting of 10 people is essentially a 10-hour meeting! And more importantly, 7 in 10 people believe that meetings are unproductive.
“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings.” — ­Dave Barry, Pulitzer prize winning columnist.
When it comes to assigning resources, it is pointless to waste time of other people in the discussion. Just add those resources who are essential for the task. Define a plan of action and get things grooving. This will help you to efficiently utilise the time of all the resources and scale up your expectations.
4. Great Time to Automate; because, why not?
Automating the regular processes will not only make your delegation simple but also easy for your subordinates and team to understand. When you know how to manage and team has a clear vision of the path to follow, your productivity scales up.
Zapier has been the go-to platform to automate things!
5. Define a Working Model.. It works.
It is easy to get caught in the in-efficient patch-work of Emails, apps, excel-sheets and chat clients. And once this happens, it’s almost impossible to come out. Before you start something, set a process and adhere to that. It will be hard for a while; but you’ll thank yourself later!
Defining a step-by-step process for the team will enable them to grasp it faster and get in action without much of trial-n-error.
With a defined process, you can get things done faster, better and more efficiently.
6. Re-size the Project; Da Vinci did too..
When you are working on a large project it becomes difficult to focus on smaller things.
In such a case, it is recommended to break such tasks in to smaller chunks. You will be able to define a clear roadmap to cover all the chunks within the given timeline and concentrate on each task.
Think how a Lion singles out an elephant and concentrates on it while hunting rather than leaping on the whole herd.
7. But they are good!
All of us have faced it and very well know the pressure of deadline, but they are good. Nobody is going to kill anybody for missing the deadline, but it motivates us to finish our task before time, quickly and efficiently.
You must be wondering that how sharing information can effect productivity. The simple secret is that when team starts sharing information with each other, they spend less time researching and emailing. So instead of holding the information to yourself, share as much as you can.
9. Wave out Distractions; they kill too..
Whether we browse internet, take emergency calls, quick chat, or have a coffee break; distractions are a part of our work life.
Probably before you end reading this statement, you already know list of distractions that affect your productivity, so just try to wave it off.
At each and every workplace, when everything is planned and smooth, the major problem is created when unplanned and ad-hoc tasks come up that interfere the process. Should these tasks be avoided or we should be prepared for such unplanned tasks!?
The simple answer is to be prepared for them. Planning and preparation walk hand in hand. When you are planning for new tasks, you need to also be prepared to tackle the unplanned efforts.
It often happens that while you are working on important things, you are asked to work on trivial ones; although you are not ready for that but you are unable to say ‘No’ and ultimately it impacts your productivity.
So, the best way to survive such invitations is by building right boundaries and declining the offer smartly.
Enough said! Check this out, thank us later.
Because not all tasks are ‘urgent’ so when you have the list of tasks, define the priority of each task. This will help you to finish the major and priority task at the earliest and spare time for others.
13. Relish your Hard work, always!
When you have a defined deadline and important task on priority, then you will have to sprint and ensure that it is finished on time including all the crisis management.
*At the same time it is also important that once you finish the task, you need to take a break, relax and relish your hard work!
Improper sleep can badly affect your health and hamper your productivity. Taking complete sleep relaxes your body and brain which is very necessary for increased output.
We have listed these tips and tricks based on our experiences and research which can be further updated based on your reviews, so keep sending us your views and comments so we all can benefit out of it.