Finding yourself little overwhelmed with work? Feeling like you’re not as good and productive as you should be? Don’t worry – sometimes little changes bring big results. We’re pretty sure you’ve already read about the prioritizing, the distractions, the delegating… If none of them helped you, try our productivity tips that people sometimes omit.
Do the worst first
Whatever’s the worst, the biggest, the hardest piece of work – do it in the first place.
You might dread it and you might keep postponing it. The mental discomfort it causes will make you procrastinate over and over again. Soon, it will spiral out of control. You’ll get stuck with meaningless tasks that don’t move your workload forward at all.
Instead, do the biggest and most important piece of work first. While it may not be the best or most pleasant way to start the day, it’s worth it. We promise you that once you finish that horrible task, you will feel relieved and energized. It will be as if the burden was lifted from your shoulders. And that’s a real boost to how you’ll work for the rest of the day.
Have a not-to-do list
We often focus on what we must do so much that we forget what we shouldn’t be doing.
Meanwhile, it’s quite useful to just write down the bad habits you want to avoid. List everything that according to you gets in your way and disrupts your workflow. Make a not-to-do list and keep it before your eyes throughout the day until you memorise it all.
You can put there anything that makes you less productive, from instant email answering to discussing things that you can talk about later.
Devote days to tasks
One of the smartest productivity tips is to put similar work items together. You can expand this technique and work on particular tasks only on the chosen days.
For example, you can set taking photos for your Instagram channel for Wednesday and writing blog posts for Monday. This will create a valuable routine – and we humans are creatures of routine and habits, believe it or not. Thanks to this trick, you won’t switch the working modes from one task to another. It will set your energy on the right track from the beginning to the end of the day.
Stop striving for perfection
One of the biggest things you can waste your time on is to chase perfection.
Alright, true – some things need to get as good as they can, but we bet it’s not the case for most of your tasks. Learn the difference which things need to polished up, and which don’t. Don’t waste hours on tasks where perfection doesn’t matter. Not to mention, you don’t have to polish the grammar of your emails to your marketing department colleague.
You get the idea.
Have a backup task
Sometimes you’ll get stuck waiting for someone else to deliver something you need. Make sure you don’t spend that time watching cat videos on YouTube. Instead, proceed with the next task that you have ahead of yourself. You don’t have to start anything big, but at least tick off several of the smaller assignments. This way, you will get ahead of the schedule with something else.
You can also start checking off things from your tomorrow’s task list if you’re left with some time at the end of the day. This way, if things go out of control, you won’t miss deadlines because you completed your tasks before.
Change your working place and position
Standing desks are all the rage recently. If you didn’t hear about it, it’s all because the scientists discovered that switching between sitting and standing while working improves your blood flow, boosts your energy levels and prevents a number of diseases. Working while standing has quickly become one of the most popular productivity tips out there.
You can go further than that – sometimes simply grab your laptop and work in a cafe, on a balcony, in a garden. Wherever, just leave your desk for a moment and change your surrounding.
Improve your job-related skills
You will find yourself working faster if you develop skills related to your profession.
For example, if you work with text editors often, make sure to improve your typing speed and the ability to write without looking at your keyboard. Also, learn all the useful shortcuts for the software you work with.
These small changes will push you forward and make your effective on the plainly technical level – and so they will save your time and energy.
So what do you think? How many of these productivity tips have you tried or will try out soon? Let us know what you think and what are your secrets of the productive workday!
