6 Productivity Tips

Here are the 6 most time consuming winners!

Avoid checking emails too frequently: Emails are a productivity killer! The average worker spends 28% of the workday dealing with email. It is easy to keep checking for new messages every five minutes. But doing so means you spend all day writing emails, instead of focusing on your work. Force yourself to check emails at a certain time throughout the day and close your mailbox for the rest of the day. To be sure to keep emails below one hour a day use this great tip: measure how much time your spent on emails with RescueTime. It is a tool that allows you to easily track and optimize how you spend your time and attention online.

22/06/15 – “Stop Checking Email So Often” via the NY Times- Is email overload bad for you? This is a complicated question. Although researchers have found a correlation between dealing with email and adverse well-being (for example, feeling stressed or emotionally drained), this does not mean that email itself is necessarily the culprit…

   Mismanaging your to-do list: If your to-do list is in a mess then so is your mind! Do the “big” task on your to-do list first, no matter how tempting it is to tick off the smaller tasks on your list first. If you can commit your focus and energy on your most important tasks, you will get success a lot faster and you won’t be thinking about it all day. Have you ever heard of Eisenhower’s matrix? It is a simple strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks, using a decision matrix where you separate your actions based on four possibilities. With a productivity tool such as Beesy you will be able to plan you week using this matrix and set the most important things first.

23/06/15 – “Do Your Most Important Tasks In The Morning” – via AsianEfficiency-“One of my favorite books on productivity is Eat That Frog (review) by self-help guru Brian Tracy. The main idea behind the book is that if you do your most important task (MIT) first thing in the morning, the rest of the day is going to be easy in comparison…”

Stop long lasting meetings: As we attend more than 60 meetings per month let’s keep them short, but with higher frequency. That forces you to simplify the purpose of the meeting. Start stand up meetings! The whole team meets every day for a quick update. They are an effective way to get everyone up to date and to identify potential obstacles ahead. Sync the team, less unfocused hour-long meetings and less interruptions.

23/06/15 – “It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings” via MartinFowler-“Daily stand-up meetings have become a common ritual of many teams, especially in Agile software development. However, there are many subtle details that distinguish effective stand-ups and a waste of time…”

Stop multi-tasking: It decreases your productivity by as much as 40%. Commit to a single task: according to George Miller our short-term memories can only store between five and nine things at once. Single-tasking forces you to sustain your focus and work through complex problems, you’ll feel less stressed and by consequence manage your time better. How about trying the Pomodoro Method?: Set a timer, usually for 25 minutes and simply focus till the buzzer goes. Completing Pomodoro after Pomodoro, you’ll feel happier, more productive and will be able to build the kind of strategy that will help you get many more things done.

23/06/15 – “Single-Tasking and Productivity” via George A. Miller- “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable…”

Avoid interruptions:They put you off your stride, you lose your train of thought, your creativity hits a wall, you lose your flow and it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to the task. No matter what the interruptions are, you can prevent them with a strategic game plan: Say no, turn notifications off, share your calendar with others.

23/06/15 – “Worker Interrupted: Cost of Task switching” via FastCompany- “How often is the modern office worker interrupted? We had observers go into the workplace and we timed people’s activities to the second. We’ve been to various workplaces, all high-tech companies. We wanted to look at information workers. We had observers shadow each person for three and a half days each and timed every activity to the second…”

Take breaks: Most productive employees do not work full eight-hour days and take a least 17-minute breaks for every 52 minutes of work.

23/06/15 – “The Rule of 52 and 17: It’s Random, But it Ups Your Productivity” via The Muse- “Everyone has that person in the office. You know, the one who always seems to get way more done than everybody else, but who never seems stressed or frantically trying to finish an assignment. How does he or she get it done? And can you steal those secrets to improve your own productivity?..”

Hope these tips will be useful and keep you productive, I know they were for me! Feel free to add more to this list and share your different ways on staying productive via the comments section.