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There are many reasons why you should try to be more productive at work, beyond the personal satisfaction of a job well done! Productive employees are most likely to be noticed for all the right reasons, leading to salary increases, bonuses and promotions. Productive employees are good for business, and as an employee of a successful business you enjoy job security and the possibility of increased benefits in the work place. And, being productive can give you more job satisfaction and can help to alleviate stress in your work and home life. In a basic way, productivity is greatly enhanced when you are organized at work, and if you want to try to increased your ability to get the job done, there are many tools out there, like those gathered by Blake Rubin, to help you achieve that goal.
Here are 2 key areas in your work life that might need a productivity boost.
Planning
While a certain amount of flexibility must be allowed in your schedule to respond to unexpected issues or meetings, planning is one of the things that productive workers know how to do. This doesn’t mean that you need to plan out every task down the minute, but it does mean that you should have a plan to accomplish the things that you need to get done. Depending on your preferences and the requirements of your job, you may like to plan in small blocks of time, or maybe you prefer to think in terms of a complete day or week. The key is that you have thought about what needs to happen in that period of time, and you know what steps are involved in achieving that goal.
Prioritizing
Developing a list of priorities is closely related to planning – it is hard to do one without the other. Prioritizing involves making decisions about the relative importance of competing demands on your time and attention. How you prioritize these things will be up to you, based on your own goals and preferences. Prioritizing should happen with short, medium and long term goals in mind. Take a few minutes each morning on your commute to think about what your most important tasks are, and then devise a plan for accomplishing that task. Do the same for your goals next month, and next year. Importantly, priorities can be reordered when they need to be – for example, you may have planned to accomplish a product review by the end of the day but your boss asks you to put all of your focus on finishing a different task instead. Priorities get reordered and plans change. But on a regular basis, having a clear sense of what is important will give structure to your day, and will help you filter out the tasks that are less important.
Giving some thought every day to what you need to accomplish and how you will to accomplish it will help to keep you on track – with this in mind, you can evaluate other things over the course of the day with a mind to whether they help you accomplish your goals or whether they are more likely to distract you instead. The result is a more productive day at the office!
