Each of us is like a hardworking bee
The Translation Bureau is a compilation team that focuses on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on foreign new technologies, new ideas, and new trends.
Editor’s note: Contemporary fast-paced life places increasing demands on our work efficiency. Efficient work means reducing the number of times you look at your phone, prioritizing your tasks and finding your goals. In other words, when you consciously improve your work efficiency, you will consider achieving more effective collaboration, and will be prepared for results while being prepared. This article is translated from medium, article author Joe Martin, original title 10 Principles for Improving Productivity at Work.
In today’s work and life, external pressures require us to improve efficiency and save time. When time equals money and work output equals performance, we not only need to work, but we also need to work efficiently.
In this article today, I intend to introduce you to the ten principles for improving work efficiency.
Enhancing efficiency can improve our work-life balance, job satisfaction, personal accomplishment, and pride in our work. The problem is that efficient work is easier said than done. Fortunately, you can remember some of the ways to improve efficiency and put it into practice, and then let yourself be “reborn.”
1. Remember the law of diminishing returns
Whenever we talk about work and efficiency, remember that not as much as possible. The study found that enterprise business employees use an average of 60 productivity tools to achieve efficiency and collaboration between work. Consider how much time each employee spends to learn each tool, and then consider the time it takes to complete each task with so many tools.
This seems to make the staff a versatile, but in fact the potential energy consumption far exceeds the benefits. From this we know that by reducing the number of tools used and delving into some excellent and easy-to-use tools, you can significantly improve your efficiency.
2. Reduce switching between tasks
One of the most time-consuming things in the work process is task switching. Task switching cost is the time wasted when switching from one outstanding task to another. Task switchingIt will seriously distract your attention and prevent you from focusing on a task for a long time. When you receive too many notifications and feel the need to deal with the problems caused by these notifications immediately, you may inadvertently find that your efficiency is greatly reduced.
A study by RingCentral found that the average daily switching cost between different tasks and tools is one hour (equivalent to 32 working days a year). While minimizing the email window, opening the project management system and then switching back to the email window seems to take only a short time, but think about the extra time required to refocus, and you know where the potential losses are. The time that is actually lost during the task transition is not very relevant to a simple page transition, because the key is how long your brain takes to re-identify the new target to focus.
It’s better to focus on one task than to switch between browser windows or tools. If you need to take a break in a task, instead of starting another task, I suggest you take the time to drink, circulate around the office, or turn off the laptop, not thinking about those for the time being. Lao Shizi.
3. Limit external interference
While smartphones may be one of the greatest innovations of our time, they can sometimes be perceived as a scourge. Many of us are suffering more or less from the addiction of mobile phones, and we find it difficult to completely get rid of social media, text messages, games or any other applications and web applications we use. The “social control” or “fear of missing” psychology has driven this trend to some extent, but many of us may just be browsing Instagram instead of working on to-do items at work.
Your phone may be an important reason why you are inefficient, procrastinating for too long, and can’t seem to focus on one thing for a long time. Therefore, you first need to determine how serious your problem of indulging your phone. New features on most smartphones allow you to see the actual time you use the screen and what you are doing with it.
If you have a hard time getting rid of the habit of playing with your mobile phone, try using the blocking feature to restrict access to certain applications on your phone. This way, even if you can’t help but want to play with your mobile phone, you can’t play because of the limited objective conditions.
4. Efficiency should be driven by goals
An important reason for the lack of productivity among many people is the lack of goals. When we not only know what we need to do, but we know why we do it, we become more motivated. When you’re trying to achieve a goal, you may often think of the reason you want (or need) to implement it. When we lack direction, don’t understand our needs, or are confused about results or follow-up activities, we lose our sense of purpose.
Most of us don’t like to be busy. We want to know that everything we do is for a certainContributing to things is still part of a larger vision. When we have no goals in our work, efficiency will plummet. Sometimes these things are beyond our control, but in order to improve efficiency, try to think about the goal of accomplishing something and use it as a driving force.
5. Determine the order of tasks
An important reason for the lack of efficiency (and switching between various characters) is that we may not know what we should do first. In order not to delay and to ensure that you can make breakthroughs on important things, you need to prioritize things.
Determining the order of tasks at hand based on the urgency of the event may be a good start, but by considering the sequence of things, you can completely eliminate things that you find are not important at all. This is also important for determining the tasks that need to be completed first and for subsequent tasks.
You can set a standard for prioritization, such as what is most important to your efficiency. Since efficiency is different from person to person, some people will consider completing the tasks they least like before and then doing other things. For others, leaving the tedious project to the end can ensure that you are motivated to start other things. You can also find easier or more interesting tasks from the tasks at hand. There is motivation to continue.
6. Let everyone work with you, not against you
We’ve all experienced meetings that are meaningless (or don’t see the end), we all work with team members, and sometimes they make us feel that we don’t finish everything. These situations are very common, but in most organizations, collaboration is an essential process.
In order to ensure that collaborative projects do not make you and your work more efficient, there should be a clear mandate within the company, as well as a set of workflows or systems to ensure the completion of tasks and the classification of issues.
When you can create an environment where your colleagues or management team can help you improve your efficiency rather than compete with each other, and with effective communication, you will find that the efficiency of the entire team is qualitative. leap.
7. Prepare an alternate plan
Another major barrier to productivity is the lack of alternatives when things don’t go as planned. At work, as in life, things rarely happen as planned. In order to complete a task or stay productive before the deadline, it is important to know what to do next when your first plan fails.
If there is no alternative, we may spend a lot of time overwhelmed and racking our brains to figure out what went wrong. Then we will start a new stove, create a new solution or come up with a new action plan.
So, it’s best to do it right from the start.The worst plan is to make sure you know what to do if something goes wrong, or just take action if you need to change your plan.
8. Know how to measure efficiency
As with most other business areas, you also need to measure the level of efficiency. If you don’t know how to measure efficiency, or at least don’t know what an effective indicator is, it’s not easy to know if your efficiency is high or low.
The measure of efficiency varies widely between companies, industries, and individuals because it seems to everyone that efficiency is not the same. However, it is important to have a measurable standard, at least you have to have a set of expectations or methods of judgment.
It can be to reduce the time spent staring at the screen of the phone every day, to process as many tasks as possible within a given time period, or to record the time it takes to complete a single task, and then compare the completion times of different tasks. For some organizations, efficiency may be directly equal to a certain amount of money, so if possible, you can also try to calculate the amount of money you save (or earn) because of efficiency gains.
9. Less blind optimism
We all know those time optimists — for example, people who are always late just because they don’t have an intuitive perception and estimate of how long an activity takes. Increasing efficiency can also be abandoning commitments that we may not be able to achieve, and a more realistic and clear understanding of our capabilities, our efficiency, and when we can achieve our goals.
Sometimes, when you are too optimistic about the time it takes to complete a task (which means you estimate a little less time), you lose efficiency because of the pressure to complete the task. Or, what you are worried about is whether the task can be completed rather than the actual quality of the work. So, to improve efficiency, you might want to consider more realistically what activities you need to complete and the time it takes to complete them. Then, if you complete the task in a shorter amount of time, you can remove it from the task list at hand.
10. Diligently taking notes
Do you feel that the experience of your meeting was great and it was fruitful? You are very focused at the meeting, seems to explain a lot of good ideas or have a lot of action plans? But then you thought you could put every detail in your mind, and when you wake up the next day, you find yourself forgetting everything you said.
Recalling these things is not only a waste of time for you, but also a waste of time for others, because they need to put down the work at hand to remind you what you have done and what you said. To get started right after a productive meeting, you need to know how to take notes and make sure that when you look at these notes later, you know what they mean and what you need to do to get the job done.
Another skill to improve efficiency is when you haveWrite down the idea as soon as possible. Nothing is more frustrating than having a coffee at home in the morning, come up with a good idea, and then sit down at lunchtime and spend 30 minutes racking your brain to remember what it is. It only takes a few minutes to remember two strokes, which can save you a lot of work time. Why not?
Efficient can often be attributed to reducing the number of distractions, while prioritizing and finding goals. When you consciously make decisions to improve your productivity, you will consider which productivity tools to use, emphasize more effective collaboration, and prepare for alternative results while being results-oriented.
Translator: Xitang