We only have 24 hours in a day, so productivity-boosting is a must to keep up. While we can’t make the day longer, we can make the hours count.
Here are a few ways you can start productivity-boosting the hours in your day:
1. Track Your Time
As a remote worker, I was always kind of weary about any job that required employees to track their time. There’s an element of control in time tracking. But it’s highly beneficial for your productivity.
First, you’ll be able to see where your time goes. If you work in an agency or freelance, you could find out there’s a client that eats up 70% of your time and resources at work.
You can also use time tracking reports to bill clients more accurately and predict how much time something will take in the future.
Finally, the practical side of time tracking is that once your timer is on, you will become much more focused and productive. As I start writing and hit my timer, I won’t stray away to Instagram, YouTube, or looking for a new pair of sneakers.
There’s a variety of time-tracking apps out there nowadays, but my personal recommendation would be Toggl. It has a free version, and it’s super intuitive and simple to use.
2. Get Some Exercise
We all know exercising is good for our bodies, but it also affects our minds in positive ways. As it turns out, getting a good workout can also improve your productivity at work.
Researchers at Bristol University ran a study with 200 participants who did 45-minute workouts during their workdays.
The results were nothing short of impressive. 72% stated their time management skills improved, 79% claimed improvement in mental and interpersonal performance, and 74% of participants stated that they managed their workload better. The overall scores were significantly in favor of doing exercise on workdays.
At our company, we recognize the power of exercising for our productivity and health, so we take 10 minutes each day to exercise in the office. It’s improved our productivity and morale, and we no longer lose our breath while going up a flight of stairs – definitely worth it.
To truly increase your productivity, you will have to change how you think about work and adapt to the new work environment instead of going around it.
3. Have Fewer Meetings
One of the remnants of the old age of corporate meetings is still around, and everyone still dislikes them. They are unproductive (67% of all meetings are a failure, according to executives), and they cost a lot of time and money.
We improve our productivity by decreasing the time spent on meetings as much as possible.
We have one weekly general meeting and one meeting for each department – so each of our team members has two meetings per week in total. Meetings take 15 minutes at most, which makes the entire team super productive.
Instead of meetings, we communicate using our own team chat app, as well as email.
4. Kill Your Notifications
While many work processes have improved in the past decade or so, some things have changed for the worse. There are now countless ways to get interrupted at work, including emails, messenger apps, and notifications from just about every other app on the planet.
For maximum efficiency at work, turn off all your notifications when you want to dive deep into your productivity mode. When I don’t want to get disturbed, I turn off my email and set up my notifications to only show up for direct messages.
That way, I can get a few hours of continuous work without interruptions. There are also specific productivity tools you can try out to make yourself more focused.
5. Introduce Some Flexibility
The 9-5 schedule is the reason why many people simply hate their jobs. Some people perform at their best at 8 PM in the evening, others like to sleep in, while some simply want to pick up their children after school during the day.
In other words, the 9-5 schedule is simply too rigid.
To maximize your productivity (and your employees as well), introduce a flexible schedule. We have tried it ourselves, and the results were generally positive.
If you can’t introduce a completely flexible schedule, you can have sliding hours so that employees can start anywhere from 8 to 11 AM, for example. This will help employees by letting them work when they are most productive, and they’ll have more freedom around their work.
Conclusion
Becoming more productive will be more than just automating as many processes as possible.
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What is Your Productivity Boosting Strategy?
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