How To Be More Productive at Work

TechsPlace | Have you ever realized at the end of the day that you have not done anything productive at work for that day? That you wasted your time with things with no value? That you spent countless hours on your phone going through your social media feeds and watching YouTube videos?

Have you found yourself in a situation at work where the concentration you had on the task you were doing is magically gone? And where your concentration (and with it your mental productivity) begins to decline from hour to hour even though you know you have a long list of tasks to accomplish?

We have good news for you – all of this is perfectly normal. There are several mental ‘hacks’ that you can perform when you find yourself in such situations and plenty of productivity tools you can use to bring your productivity back to normal.

Use Technology for Your Advantage not for Procrastination

Depend on how you look at it, and technology can be used either to help you work more productively or to procrastinate. For example, playing games, watching YouTube videos, or going through social media feeds at work is not a good use of technology. On the other hand, using document conversion tools, note-taking apps, or time-tracking software is a good use of technology. Here we will mention some of the best tools to use to increase your productivity:

EasyPDF – If you deal with a lot of PDF documents on a regular basis, this tool is a must. It will effortlessly convert any PDF and make it editable again. Even scanned documents are supported.

Evernote – Keep all your to-do lists, notes, tasks, and more in one centralized place easily accessible across all your devices. It is truly the best tool for managing tasks making your life easier and more organized.

Clockify – One of the most popular time tracking tools for teams or individuals. You can use it to track productivity, attendance, and billable hours. An unlimited number of users can be added, and the tool is completely free to use.

Define a Specific Time of the Day to Check Email and Notifications

Limit the responses to emails and messages, learn to ignore them, you don’t have to answer every email the moment it appears in your inbox. Dedicate a specific part of your workday to do so. If you do not understand what is being asked of you or don’t know what to answer, do not send the answer right away; wait and think about it for a while; it will flow better.

Prioritize, Prioritize and Prioritize

When everything is equally important, the reality is that then nothing is important, and when nothing is important, then it is impossible to know where to start. Prioritizing is one of the rules that you must stick to firmly if you want to achieve more and be productive at work.

Many times we tend to confuse important with urgent – A good method to measure the tasks that require immediate attention is to think about the consequences that not fulfilling them in a specific period of time will bring or look at which tasks are closest to expire by previously established deadlines and get down to the first.

You can also use the Pareto 80/20 principle when starting to organize your week. Ask yourself, what are the 20% of the activities you do that give you 80% of the most satisfactory results? Distinguish the urgent from the important, set your priorities and focus on them. Invest time doing what really matters, instead of just surviving with what is urgent, and little by little, it will make a real difference in your life.

Set Clear Goals

Sometimes we want to do so much in a day that we end up not doing even 15% of what we set out to do. That is why it is crucial to set specific objectives and goals for ourselves. It is simply impossible to do 50 different things when there are only 24h in a day, and at least 8 of them should be spent sleeping and resting.

Depending on the time period you want to accomplish something (a day, a week, a month), you should make a list with your goals and the dates you want them to be fulfilled. Lastly, it would be best to break down the goals into smaller tasks you need to do to get there in hours, days, or weeks.

Establish a Routine and Stick to It

Another great way to improve your work productivity is to build your own routine, tailored to your own needs, to cover everything we mentioned above. Little by little, your brain will get used to fulfilling more efficient and productive work cycles in each of its phases, and in no time, you will subconsciously end up work more productively.

Do you have any more tips on how to be more productive at work? Would you like to share them so that we can all win the battle against distractions? Comment your experience!