3 Ways to Increase Productivity
You’re not alone in feeling like there are not enough hours in the day. It seems like every consultant has some hack they’ll sell you to unlock your productivity. This blog is not that. These are tips our consultants use that work for us. Contrary to popular belief, there is no magic formula for productivity. Find what works for you and do it. We hope a few of these tips might be helpful for you.
Set A Few Daily Goals
We have found setting a few goals every day helps us focus on the things that matter. We’re not alone in this experience. A recent study suggested that setting goals can increase a person’s productivity by 25%. We also recommend doing these few daily goals first. Working on these goals first ensures the most important things get your peak energy and focus. If you practice calendar blocking, block out the first couple of hours of your day to focus on your daily goals. And, while working on these goals, put your phone on silent!
In setting goals, it’s important to make them measurable, concise, and achievable. We found the questions on this blog from Paychex to help form and phrase our goals.
Eliminate, Delegate or Automate
Every couple of months, our consultants check their workload with their teammates. In these sessions, they look for tasks that can be cut, delegated, or automated. This practice ensures we focus our time on the tasks that only we can do. To cut means to ensure that tasks you are doing are still meeting a need. These are especially important for routine tasks. To delegate means to search for tasks that can be given to or combined with another team member. To automate means to look for simple technological solutions to manual processes. Automation might seem scary to some. But, with software like Zapier or Integrately, most people can create simple automations to save them quite a bit of time. You can read more about automating here.
We’ve found this practice helpful to do with our teams. By doing this evaluation together, we’ve benefited from the troubleshooting our teammates have done.
Stop Multitasking
It’s common for busy people to try to get ahead of their to-do list by doing multiple things at once. However, this can have a disastrous effect on productivity. Studies have found that multitasking can decrease a person’s productivity by up to 40%.
To help us stop multitasking, many of our consultants have implemented working in thirty to forty-five-minute work bursts followed by a short break. During these work bursts, it’s important to silence your phone, your computer, and anything that gives you notifications. If you share an office with other employees, try this practice together. By syncing your work bursts, it’ll be easiest to avoid interruptions.
These are the tips we’ve been implementing recently to help us. Let us know what you think and what works for you!
