Whether you’re working from home or in the office – maintaining productivity throughout the day proves to be difficult for a lot of people.
Employee productivity is an assessment of the efficiency of a worker or group of workers. Basically, hours worked divided by output.
How can you increase productivity in a world of distractions?
Here are some game-changing hacks:
1. Implement Time Batching
Time batching is a productivity system that helps individuals focus on a group of similar tasks during a dedicated time period without interruptions.
It requires every task to be batched including checking and responding to messages, socializing, social media, meal times, using the restroom… maybe not that. But essentially, whatever time you decide to work on a task means you can only work on that one task. Batching time helps minimize distractions and interruptions for more concentrated workflow and attention to detail.
To do this successfully takes discipline and setting expectations for everyone else who expects immediate responses. Like your kids – tell them to kick rocks until 10:45am. But most things that pop up are not emergencies and can wait.
2. Turn of Notifications
This one is hard, but is probably the most important. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb or silent for you non-iphone users, turn off notifications on your watch, turn off desktop notifications for email – in fact close the app or window all together until it’s time to check messages. The time it takes to see a notification then have to decide to respond to it or not is enough to take someone out of focused work mode. Once you’re out of focused mode or flow state, it takes time to get back into it.
Just turn those suckers off!
3. Listen to Relaxing Music
Maybe this one sounds silly, but it works. When you’re listening to music that you’re familiar with, it makes you want to sing along which can be a distraction. Listening to a podcast is worse. Podcasts bring you to the present by hanging on to every word that is being said. If you’re focusing on completing a project, you won’t be able to focus on what is being said on the podcast. You see, you can’t do both so you either have to listen to the podcast over again later or you have to stop what you’re doing absorb the podcast. Either way, it’s time wasted.
Listening to “Chill” soundtracks or radio with minimal words being sung keeps you in a groove without removing a person from flow-state.
If you feel you or your team are in a productivity funk, share these tips and let us know if they worked!
