Almost 70% of our time at work are really non-productive work. Clearing emails, answering phone calls and document housekeeping add little or no value to your work. If we can increase our time to do productive work, we can contribute a lot of value to our companies. A lot really means two to five times more, and the best thing is that achieving such increase in value does not mean you will need to spend the equivalent amount of time at work! Here are five great ways to start thinking of how you can better use your work time.
Review work-life boundaries.
Almost everyone is talking about work-life balance. How to segregate and dedicate time for ourselves, spending some quality time with family and friends. Yes this is important but don’t limit yourself to a strict rigid quarantine at work. Instead of trying to squeeze yourself into the 8 to 9 hours of office hours and adjust your lifestyle to fit into this clockwork, why not try to blur the boundaries between work and leisure times?
Most successful workers are more productive with living in a single “life”, not “work life” and “personal life”. Accommodate your emotions and feelings, and do work as and when you feel it is needed. Soon enough, you will see that in fact more productive work are done! If you feel like doing up some slides or presentation after dinner, do it. If you want to come to work early just to avoid the jams in the city, grab your stuff go to work. The idea is not to force yourself to work and productive work are usually done when you are feeling good.
Yes. There will be deadlines and rigid office hours. But always try to strike a balance, you will find that time expands tremendously that way. Work-life balance is still important but don’t just look at a daily balance, but a larger perspective like over a week or month.
Full use of To-Do Lists to create momentum
To-do lists are forgotten tools that help us manage our work. Not only that, it also give us a great sense of accomplishments when we ticked off our lists! The ideal use of these lists is to include personal and work to-do lists, again blurring the boundaries between work and leisure. And they best thing is, most likely a digital version is already available in your laptop! Outlook, Mac calendar, Google Calendar are great tools available.
Outsource your work
Outsourcing your work? No kidding, that’s where secretaries come in for bosses right? You don’t need secretaries to help you out with it. In fact some work are better off done by your fellow colleagues, they are more familiar, faster and efficient in their own ways. Of course you should be able to help them out with your own set of skills you have. You don’t have to know everything, but you need to know everything that others might be better. Leverage your time and do things that you are fast and good at it. If you are really busy and you see that you can triple your value at work, why not talk to your boss and consider getting an assistant, which might cost less than the value you can contribute. I bet your boss would say yes!
Reinvent your way of doing work
There are sure better ways to do some of your work. Many times, work can be quickly done through a different set of processes. Eliminate redundant steps or reduce manual work is a great way to improve efficiency. Learn some quick excel macros that can quickly help you out with the manual manipulations and calculations that you had to do manually previously. Try doing process maps too. Complicated work that involves lots of stakeholders can be easily refined into efficient processes and hence reducing non-productive time, allowing you more time to focus on productive work!
Great resources that I personally read and to all of you who feel you can do more at work, try these, I am sure it helped you as much as they helped me:
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Getting Things Done: A Time Saving Summary of David Allen's Book on Productivity
- The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play
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