By Mai Nguyen, VKOOL
There are various ways to get success in life. The key comes from you, including your experience, your passion, your hardness for your job. However, to achieve the best working output, you should prepare or learn working techniques. This writing will show you different techniques and tips on how to be efficient at work.
33 Surefire Ways On How To Be Efficient At Work And Increase Productivity
1. Prioritize Your Workday In Advance
Prioritize your to-do tasks before a night, and start doing each one in the morning. Think about important tasks first. List them in the order of priority either on sheets of paper, or in computer. Do the same for your weeks and months, as well.
Spend about 15 minutes designating your action plans at the end of Fridays. Note to know what to do at the next month and what your final goals are. This organization can help you streamline your daily work and give you strong motivation to complete all tasks. Remember that, you may never plan to fail, but just fail to plan.
2. Organize Your Workspace
How to be efficient at work organize your workspace. Photo from VKOOL.
Piles of work can have a negative affect on productivity. Therefore, take time to organize and file your important working items. File them to right places so that you can easy to access, find and remember them.
You should follow 1-month rule, cleanse your recycle bin regularly per month and start new working month with new tasks.
You also need to have certain tools and supplies to do your job such as staple removers, hole-punches, calculators at the ready. Outside of office jobs, working tools are different, yet the fundamental principles are not different. Have your tools become ready when you start working.
Besides, when it comes to ways to be efficient at work, you also should pay attention to your working environment. Keep it become clean and orderly.
A disorderly workspace can hinder your work and lower your productivity. If you are struggling to seek some documents or a tool in a mountain of clutter, your work time is being wasted. Just keep items and tools you use daily out and other things can be squirreled away, but also easily and quickly retrievable.
Arrange your desk and workspace in your office so that you can easily find whatever you want. If you are not an officer, this principle still applied because any job needs to have tools to work. So organize your working items in the logical order and keep your tools clean, then you can find them immediately when you need.
3. Set Deadlines
To prioritize your workday, set realistic deadlines for all your tasks. If you can complete it at the right time, they never get done. If you are in a work team, push the tasks of the team to a schedule.
4. Upgrade Technology
In general, more gadgets go with more stress. Technology can bring us huge benefits as a digital assistant and a time saver. Hence, learn to apply new technology that helps you become professional and work more efficiently.
5. Avoid Doing Personal Affairs At Working Time
In fact, you can have occasional personal calls on your workday and some personal affairs may impact your working efficiency. However, you should control not to do personal affairs at working time as they can interrupt your concentration so that the productivity can decrease.
6. Thought-Intensive In The Morning & Labor-Intensive In The Afternoon
Arrange your though-intensive tasks in the morning and labor-intensive task in the afternoon. This is powerful way to work more efficiently. For instance, in the morning, you can do scrutiny or intense examination while you can schedule conference calls and schedule meeting in the afternoon because this is good time to share ideas and interact with others.
7. Delegate
Delegation is very important. You may don’t work in a team but it’s necessary to maximize potential of you to do better work. So, find your peers to help you save time, manage different tasks, set an agenda, and increase your productivity on working.
8. Cut The To-Do List
Just plan a realistic schedule with the tasks you can complete it in the right time. For instance, you list out 10 tasks to do in a week but you can cut down 3 or 4 tasks that you are not sure that it will be well done. As a result, you can be free from working pressure and get disappointed for your schedule.
9. Take More Breaks
You can get headache while working or after a long workday, so take more rest to “heal” your brain. There are different ways to relax. You can take a nap to balance your mental conditions. You can have a cup of coffee to get awake, eat snack or you can listen to music at the breaking time or even gossip with your colleague. Recharge your energy to get ready for the next task and work more efficiently. It’s not too hard to do!
10. Follow “The 80/20 Rule”
Have you ever heard this rule yet? Simply, you can understand that only 20% of what you work can produce 80% of your productivity. So, eliminate all things that do not matter during your day. Actually, they can have a minimal impact on your working results. For instance, you can break the next project down until you complete 20% of the task that gets 80% of the overall productivity.
11. Work Hard In The Morning
Doing some stuff in the morning just makes you become a productivity killer. Instead of checking email or calendar, you can start your day by going out to have a healthy breakfast, read news, mediate or work out. Actually, this is a way for you to get fuel for your productive day.
12. Tackle Challenging Tasks
When your brain is fresh, knock out your challenging task. If you have meetings or busy work, save them to work in the afternoon. With this scheduling way to manage your time, you will be able to be more productive at work.
13. Improve Email Etiquette
Email is actually a productivity killer and distraction from work. So, don’t fall into this trap. As a rule, when receiving an email with many recipients, do a favor by BCC’ing them on the reply. If the email chain goes more than 2 replies, it is time to pick up some calls.
14. Create A Work System
You might develop your productivity-ruining habits years by years. Manage distracting ways by creating a more productive work system: what time to check emails compulsively, how to plan work each morning, afternoon and evening. Otherwise, you will get distracted from accomplishing important tasks and goals throughout a day.
15. Stop Laziness
Laziness is the number-one contributor to productivity loss. In fact, emails and meetings are just ways to stop doing real work. Instead, you should focus on doing main work efficiently as possible.
16. Stop Doing Multi-Task how to be efficient at work stop doing multi-task
Focusing on a single task well is more efficient than doing 10 multi-tasks at the same time. So, work smarter! If not, you are going to wasting more energy and time to fix your mistakes of uncompleted tasks.
17. Use Appropriate Communication
Next to the tips on how to be efficient at work, you must know the importance of appropriate communication. You may waste your time if your communication or presentation is poor or ambiguous. As a result, people cannot understand your words, get wrong your purpose, even, cause serious consequences.
Read the full article by Mai Nguyen from VKOOL.
