10 Tips to Improve Your Work Efficiency
I found this interesting article on how to improve one’s work efficiency. I practice some of them, but not all, since I have a different work environment. I work from the comfort of my home, and I have children to take care of. But, I do keep a daily to-do list, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to check off each item as the day progresses, and to find that at the end of my working day, all the items I’ve listed were accomplished.
For my e-mail management, I’ve created auto filters in my e-mail accounts. I’ve created different labels for my clients, so that if any one of them sends me an e-mail, that goes to his own label (skipping the inbox) and I can tell at a glance which of my clients has sent me a communication and needs my attention. Everything that remains in my inbox will have to wait until my free time.
And tip #6 is a no-no for me. I need to get up every once in a while to keep my blood circulating. So since I keep a regimen of 2.5 liters of water intake daily, I do get up almost every 30 minutes. But hey, it’s not as if it’ll take me more than a minute, since the fridge is just about 7 steps from my workstation. So that does not count as a work interruption.
So here are the tips that you may apply to your own work situation, and I hope you find them helpful.
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Write your daily schedule. A list makes it impossible to forget tasks.
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Filter your e-mails. Learn to discard unimportant e-mails, not only spam. Set your priorities (including the most important mails) straight.
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Don’t check your personal e-mail in the morning. It’s so nice to waste time reading all the jokes, interesting articles and videos sent by your friends… till you realize you have lost about an hour. Do it during the break (lunchtime) and this way you can also relax a little. And answer to all those messages after finishing the program.
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Ignore sites with jokes, sport news and blogs. They only serve to make you waste some more precious time. In many companies, the IT service restricts your web access if you spend too much time on it.
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Limit the duration of personal phone calls while at work. Telling your friend what you did yesterday after you got home from work is definitely not an emergency.
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Always keep a bottle of water on your desk. If every 30 minutes you go get some water, there’s the risk of starting some long ‘discussions’ around the same habit of yours: never wasting any change of killing time.
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If you have to ask something or talk with your colleagues, establish short breaks for this. If all the time you interrupt your work to ask, laugh, talk with the others…at the end of the day you’ll realize you haven’t worked at all.
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Use your headphones. This way, you’ll be ‘immune’ to all the background noise made by typing, phones ringing, printers, and to improving your knowledge with valuable information like how your colleague’s cat is feeling lately, when she had the last menstruation. But, watch out: songs with too many lyrics can distract your attention. That’s why jazz or chill out music genres are recommended. In the end, from time to time you can also pause the music.
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Close programs you do not use: many open applications will make searching for those you need at a certain moment much more difficult, plus: they eat a lot of RAM, which slows down your computer.
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You may get bored of doing the same long tasks. Work for one hour on a certain task, then continue with another, especially if you have no urgent task to finish.
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Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/10-Tips-to-Improve-Your-Work-Efficiency-66679.shtml
