2019 – The Year of Productivity
Welcome back to the blog here at MoneySoft.com! It’s that time of year again when everyone is looking to make those earthmoving changes to their lives, to lose weight, learn a new language, or save more money. One of the most popular resolutions is to be more productive, so here it is, a collection of tips and recommendations pulled together from life-coaches, NYT Business, and more. Whether you’re CFO, broker, or anyone else on the totem pole, there is sure to be something to help you!
Improving Productivity
Start Your Week on Sunday
Adding on an additional day of work seems like a way to ‘cheat’ for more productivity. After all, anyone can do more work if they have more time! But that’s now what this is about. Productivity isn’t about doing more work, it’s about producing more with what you have. To that end, make every moment you’re in the office count towards something.
Sunday night, before the week really kicks off, take a look at your schedule, what’s in the pipeline. Make a quick plan for the rest of the week, with whatever tasks need to be touched on or completed. Knowing what you’ll be doing Monday morning, you’re not wasting any time trying to get started. Not a bad way to jumpstart the workflow!
Know what you need to get done? Now you need to figure out when you’re going to get it all done!
Strategize Your Schedule
Productivity schedules are rarely a one size fits all solution. Some people are naturally more productive in the morning, while others find a spark right after lunch. If you work in an open concept office or share desk space with a coworker, you might not even know when you work the best what with frequent interruptions, check-ins, and meetings. So how do you get started and maximize your own schedule? Here’s one way some offices combat the open concept conundrum!
Set Focus Time. Break up the day into Focus and Open times for the entire office. Something like this might work:
8:00 – 10:00AM Focus
10:00 – 10:45AM Open
10:45 – 12:00 Focus
12:00 – 12:45 Open
12:45 – 2:30 Focus
2:30 – 3:00 Open
3:00 – Close Focus
It might feel a bit micromanage-y at first but by putting everyone on the same schedule of focus times, individuals (including yourself) can find what times they work best and produce the best work. Allowing everyone to think about their schedules much more strategically and adjust for when they will produce the most, and best, work.
Pre-Lunch Hustle
This might be a bit counterintuitive given our last one, but again, not every suggestion is one size fits all!
Many find that by tackling their most important task of the day before lunch they are able to get through their work in a timely, effective manner. By having a built-in micro-deadline of ‘Lunch,’ tasks that are a higher priority or have tight deadlines can get tackled faster.
For example: If you have to have a report put together for your supervisor to present tomorrow morning, getting it to them before lunch means they have the rest of the day to analyze and prepare, as opposed to overnight or a worse, a few minutes in the morning.
Disable Distractions
Did you know the average person checks their email every 5 Minutes? For some, that may absolutely be necessary for the great majority of us it simply isn’t. We allow ourselves to be pulled away from our tasks at hand because they are challenging, or simply not what we’d rather be doing at that moment and when that notification pop-ups on the bottom right of your screen you quickly click to see what’s new. After all, we tell ourselves, it might be important!
The truth is, emergency communication that needs an immediate response is never done through email! Turn off those noisy notifications from Gmail, Facebook, etc. and set aside a standard time that you check your emails. This will allow you to maintain your focus on the task at hand!
Avoid the Mistake of Multitasking
Being productive means doing more at once, right? Wrong! When juggling multiple tasks at the same time, everything will take longer to get done and the quality will suffer as you constantly have to reshuffle and refocus on the tasks. Our minds only have a limited amount of bandwidth to support juggling tasks and the more and more stress we put on it the less focus, attention, and care anything gets. Learn to monotask, and learn to deliver your best work yet!
We hope this has been useful for your productivity goals. There’s more out there of course, and you can find any number of different strategies and tools that might fit your needs. Another tip? Having the right tools and strategies to make prudent business decisions as soundly as possible. That’s where the MoneySoft suite of software comes into play. View our library and find the product that fits your company’s needs today!