Effective Productivity Tricks To Try at Work

Efficient project management is critical to ensure workplace clarity and focus. While a lot of your time can be wasted in trying to manage projects and teams, delegate as much as you can.

Good leaders master delegating to their teams, knowing it’s the key to productivity and some tools can make the task easier for you. Asana for instance, is a great tool for delegating your projects and tasks. It can be updated in real-time to let your team know the status and progress of the project, and when they need to pitch in. By empowering your team to take on projects this way you avoid micromanagement and gain a “can do” attitude.

Do you get carried away by social media or get dragged into a website while working? Do you often multitask and lose focus on individual tasks?

Time blocking can be an effective tool for cutting out distractions and boosting productivity. Take your to-do list and schedule time to work on a priority tasks in your calendar. By scheduling distinct times for emails, catching up on phone calls and social media into your day you can cut out distractions and focus on the task in hand.

Tools like Strict Workflow, a Chrome extension that blocks time-wasting websites, while Time can help you to keep track of your tasks.

With multiple things to manage at the workplace, we tend to block our calendars with meetings that sometimes can be quite a time consuming and add little value in the overall scheme of things.

Use technology to do it for you instead and conduct Web-based meetings. These allow you to do so much more than just sitting in a room with people discussing things which can be easily done via emails or over a phone.

To avoid meeting fatigue, include a weekly “No meetings” day in your schedule allowing yourself uninterrupted periods of time for important tasks.

Remaining aware of where most of your time is being spent while at work is a valuable piece of information, especially when your deliverables are timed and you know you need to abide by it. Maintaining control of your time is critical for improving efficiency and productivity.

Work out what really matters to your business and learn to say ‘No’ to the less important things. Dedicate time to your priority tasks throughout the day so you can tick off the important jobs and leave work at a reasonable hour. Furthermore, don’t forget to take effective breaks and try to apply the 52/17 rule.

Researchers have found that the most productive workers work hard for 52 minutes and then take a 17-minute break before moving on to the next task. Tools like Harvest and Rescue Time can help you achieve that. Harvest is a browser extension that shows you the time you spend on different activities and allows you to make informed decisions based on that. Rescue Time provides you with an overview of your time spent, broken down into percentages.