Have you ever felt very tired at the end of the work day and yet you found out that you didn’t really accomplish anything? You worked half a day for a report that your boss didn’t accept because it contained the wrong information.
You worked the rest of the day with different projects and when you looked at the time, it’s already evening and time to go home. You’re tired. You’re stressed out but you haven’t really finished anything. How do you become more productive at work?
Contrary to common thinking, working your ass off is different than working productively. You may exhaust your energy in those things that are important and put very little time for the things that are really important. Here are some ideas to help you achieve more at work without being more tired.
First, when you come to your work area in the morning, take a few minutes clearing your table. Throw away papers that you don’t need. Organize your papers and documents. Make a mental list of the things that you want to finish at the end of the day. You can even write it down and post it somewhere visible.
Take a look at your list and choose the most important things. Start with those things first. Don’t spend too much time perfecting them. Just finish them and then when you are finish and you still have a lot of time, you can improve on it.
Don’t do tasks that you don’t need to do like checking e-mails, reading the online newspapers, surfing the internet and gossiping with colleagues.
(SEE ALSO: Positive Relationships with Work Colleagues)
List down the time you start doing your first task. Every hour, check what you have done so far. Make a deadline for every task and work to finish the task before that deadline. The deadline is your own set deadline, not the boss’s, not the client’s.
It should be a shorter time than your boss’s or client’s deadline so that you have allowance for final touches.
Let’s say you need to write a report for tomorrow’s meeting. You can spend the whole day doing the report or you can set a deadline for yourself to finish it before lunch time today.
If you finish it before lunch time today, you’ll have plenty of time to prepare for the meeting tomorrow. You can start on other tasks that you needed to do like start with a new project with a new client or work that your boss has been waiting for some time now.
You don’t need to work for longer hours to produce more. You just need to be conscious of the time-wasting habits that you do.
Being time-conscious will push you to work more effectively and more efficiently. At the end of the day, you’ll feel satisfied knowing that you did your best at work and it shows in the number of tasks that you have accomplished and in the quality of the tasks that you have accomplished.
