13 Tips To Be More Efficient at Work
Do you feel like you’re always behind on your work? It doesn’t matter how little or how much work is put on your plate, there’s always more to do at the end of the workday. Whether you succumb to the temptation of overtime or just push that extra work along until the end of the week, you’re stuck in a situation that won’t really work in the long run.
Sometimes this is something you can fix at an individual level; with a few changes, you can power through your workday and close out tasks like no one’s business. Other times, leaders need to step in and fix efficiency problems at a team level. That’s enough to make anyone start asking themselves how they can be more efficient.
Let’s break down that quest for efficiency, along with finding how both individuals and teams can learn to become more efficient.
What is efficiency?
Put simple, it’s about doing more with what you have. When you’re an individual collaborator, efficiency means getting more work out of your eight-hour workday — that’s right, efficiency isn’t about overworking yourself. For a team or department, it’s about making the most of everyone’s time and whatever budget you’ve been assigned.
There’s a lot you can do to improve efficiency, both within a team and for individual collaborators. Sometimes, it’s a little trick or tip that makes your life easier. Other times, it takes a team to come together and crunch numbers until a plan emerges.
How you can be more efficient
Everything in its place
When you are about to get some work done, make sure that you have every tool you might need at your disposal and easy to find. Whether that is physical items or digital ones such as files on a computer. Nothing can make you lose your focus and get you off track more than having to start looking for something. This is why it is important to have a clean working environment on your desk and your desktop. Have a fairly good idea of what you will need to get your task done and make sure it is available to you in a snap.
Time activities
Technology easily allows us to track anything we would like to. You should take advantage of this to figure out exactly how much time you are spending on the various activities of your day. There are a multitude of apps such as Toggl that allow you to tap when you start and stop an activity. But what about more granular information? You should check out RescueTime, which tracks everything you do on your computer and then provides you with reports to show you exactly how much time you are spending on everything you do. With this information, you can easily see what is taking much of your time and what you can fix/update to be more efficient.
Project planning
Carefully planning out the completion of a task or breaking it down into smaller parts shouldn’t only be reserved for teamwork and enterprises. You can apply this technique on your own to track your individual efforts as you get things done. As you see your tasks into broken down parts, it will become easier to focus on each one at a time, while maintaining a clear higher-level view of what you are aiming towards. There are many tools available so we suggest you read Which Project Management App Is Right For You?
Focus at work
Regular, everyday distractions in the workplace lead to many hours lost in productivity per worker. While it is very nice to be friends and chitchat with your coworkers, never lose sight of the primary reason you are there. Make time for such interactions with your colleagues (at Unito, we have team Friday lunches to bond together!), and instill a system to minimize disturbances. Turn off notifications, wear headphones to prevent distractions, and shut off social media.
Finish what you start
In an age where demands are higher than ever and information overload is the norm, it is almost normal to think that the only way to be more efficient is to do many things at once. Wrong! Trying to wear too many hats at once leads to significantly less efficiency, as focus is depleted and scattered. Do one thing at a time, do it well, complete it, and move forward. This process is far more efficient than bouncing around multiple tasks and never getting anywhere near the finish line for any of them.
Optimize your breaks
Depending on the type of person you are, you will be using your breaks differently. Some like to disconnect from everything, others will plow through and continue working. The key here is to use this time wisely. For example, if you are having a breakthrough and are almost finishing up an important task, might be wise to forego your break until later or entirely. If you need to disconnect because that makes you a better worker, then make sure you disconnect completely.
Measure against yourself
The wrong approach is to compare your work rate or work ethic with others. Everyone has their own unique approach to how they work best. What you should do however, is compare your work rate against itself. A good analogy is the gym. Your goal at the gym might very well be to get stronger, so you would track your progress over time to see if you are lifting heavier weights than you used to. That makes more sense than comparing how much you lift with others.
By tracking your time and using tools to simplify your work as we mentioned earlier, you now have a baseline to compare yourself against. If say for example you measured that you had 45 minutes of distractions on average per day last week. Your goal this week would be to lower that to maybe 25-30 minutes on average. There are countless methods to measure your efficiency against itself, but what you need to keep in mind is a mentality that is centered on continuous optimization of what you are doing.
Clean food & snacks
What you ingest during your day has a direct impact on how you feel and therefore on how efficient you are. To make sure that you feel physically great throughout your day, you need to snack on healthy clean food that are rich in vitamins (veggies, fruits are good examples). Your lunches should be large enough to give you proper energy to continue your day, but not large to the point that it makes you feel lethargic. When you eat too much, your body takes a lot of its energy to digest, and this makes you feel tired. It’s that dreadful part of the afternoon after lunch. Try to eat smaller meals spread out throughout the day instead of one big lunch. As well, make sure you drink plenty of water to remain hydrated, as a lack of water intake is one of the primary reasons for feeling unnecessarily tired.
Automate/delegate
In an ideal scenario, the granddaddy of all efficiency hacks is to remove it from your slate entirely! Take a good look at what you do and what you spend your time doing. Even the most menial tasks, make a note of them. Then ask yourself, what could be removed from this list by sheer automation or delegation? You will be surprised at how much can actually be! Today’s technology allows us to automate even the most mundane of tasks, so dig around and you are likely to find a solution, tool, or app that already exists for what you are trying to accomplish. In regards to delegation, you need to assess what your time is best spent on. Focus your time on the most important & lucrative tasks and delegate the ones that you feel are not providing you a proper ROI. With the rise of human intelligence tasks such as Mechanical Turk by Amazon, the sky is the limit of what you can now delegate!
How teams can be more efficient
Plan for (beating) failure
When you make a plan for your project, you shouldn’t just focus on what needs to get done or how much money it’s going to cost. You also need to know how that project might fail. Before you start, ask yourself what kind of damage Murphy’s Law might cause to your project and what you can do to prevent some of these worst-case scenarios. By going through this thought experiment, you can find some of the most common project management pitfalls, from scope creep to insufficient resources, and mitigate them before you start. That means you won’t find yourself working for weeks in the wrong direction or suddenly having to pivot when a critical resource runs out. Both are examples of inefficient project management.
Avoid micromanagement
If you’re leading a team for a big project, you might be tempted to check in on them often, make yourself as available as possible, and follow up on every single deliverable. That’s how so many leaders fall into micromanagement. And while it might seem like micromanagement is an efficient way to make sure everyone’s doing what they need to do, it’s actually working against you. Every time you send an email “just to check in,” your team has to take time away from their tasks to respond. When you tap them on the shoulder multiple times a day, you’re potentially pulling them out of deep work and slowing down their progress. Instead of micromanaging them, use tools that foster asynchronous communication, learn to delegate, and hammer out a RACI chart that’ll make you feel more at ease.
Streamline your reporting process
Reporting is a big part of modern work. It’s a complex, resource-intensive process, but it almost always provides actionable insights that leaders depend on to make better decisions. Note the “almost.” Problems can arise when teams are asked to continually report on their performance in ways that don’t serve them or really give their leaders anything to work with. If the end result of your report is someone looking at it for a minute before discarding it, that report probably didn’t need to happen. If you’re concerned with how you can keep your team efficient, you can try these reporting tips:
- Ask yourself if a specific report really needs to exist before you make someone create it.
- Use reporting tools that minimize manual work and, ideally, integrate with other tools.
- Keep reports on the short side. No one should have to crunch data for hours on top of their regular responsibilities.
- Try having a rotation of which team members contribute to specific reports.
The status quo of the reporting workflow is inefficient almost by nature. But putting a bit more time and effort into yours, you’ll help your teams be more efficient.
Make sure everyone has the right tools
At the individual level, one of the best ways to make sure you never need to read another “how to be efficient” article again is to have the right tools for the job — and know how to use them. But when you’re looking at managing resources more efficiently at the team level, this gets a little more complicated. No matter what team you’re running, it’s unlikely that every member performs the exact same job the exact same way. This is especially true of the smallest teams, where each member has a flexible skillset, and can be called on to perform a wide variety of tasks. But even the largest teams will have subgroups of individuals who specialize in specific areas of their work.
That’s why leaders have to make sure they’re picking tools that can reasonably perform for the entire team, no matter what they’re doing in their day-to-day. A task management system can’t be so specialized that it only really works for some team members but not others, or so general that no one can really make the most of it.
Either way, you’ll quickly find that your team accumulates a stack of specialized tools — sometimes without consulting anyone else — and wrangling these tools might fall on you. You’ll need to stay in the loop so you know which tools work best, which ones need to be cut, and which ones absolutely need an integration solution like Unito to help efficiency rather than hinder it.