How to Achieve Greater Productivity at Your Place of Employment:
1. When you’re feeling strong, that’s when you should do the hard work.
There’s infinite advise to not do mental sludge things like checking email or routine chores in the morning but to start with creatively taxing work, which is excellent if you’re a morning person. Night owls like myself won’t like this.
Productivity expert Tony Wong advises, “Use your morning to focus on yourself… Ignore your emails and have a good breakfast, read the news, meditate, or work out.” Do your most demanding work during your highest productivity time, whenever that is.
2. Put an End to Your Multitasking
This kills productivity. Research suggests that switching tasks might impair productivity by 40%. In a London University research, multitasking men’s IQ decreased by 15 points.
Proof? A UK study suggests that multitasking may impair your brain. Multiple-device addicts showed reduced grey-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with emotional control, decision-making, empathy, and reward response.
So quit trying to do everything at once. Focus on one work at a time to boost productivity. When your eyes and hands wander, remember to keep your grey cells.
3. Make a list of things that need to be done every night.
To-do lists boost productivity. They help you get organised, focus, and feel accomplished when you tick off items.
Making (or revising) a to-do list every night saves time in the morning. You could also discuss your list. In “What Multitasking Does To Our Brains,” Buffer co-founder Leo Wildrich describes this strategy.
4. Reduce the number of tasks on your list.
What’s on your to-do list? Seven? Eighteen? When you finish each one, you’ll feel terrific. You’ll never be a productivity rockstar until you cross off certain tasks before you accomplish them because attention is key.
Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs, describes how Jobs’ insistence that Apple makes only four computers rescued the company in “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs.” Jobs utilised to-do lists to stay focused, he says.
