Do you find yourself staying late at work, or coming in on weekends to finish your job load? An important aspect to consider is if you are truly overworked and boggled down with too much to do, or if you are simply not productive with your time.
For example, do you spend your time at the office chatting with your employees, checking personal emails or daydreaming?
This is all valuable time that you can be putting into finishing your work so that you can use your personal time to relax. Follow these tips on promoting efficiency at work.
Keep a Diary – The first step in stopping yourself from wasting time at work is to recognise how much time you are actually squandering. The best way to do this is to keep a diary where you notate what you have done every 15-minutes of the working day. Do this for one week, and then calculate how much time you devoted to work versus the time you spent on other, non-work related activities. Analyse your findings and make a chart of how much time you have spent on things that could have been avoided.
No Personal Business – One of the best strategies to promoting efficiency at work is to hold any personal business for lunchtime or after work. Leave your tablet or mobile phone in the car; if there is a true emergency, your family or friends can reach you at the office, and all other personal errands can wait. If you use your time at work to focus solely on your projects, you will not need to use your evenings and weekends to finish your workload.
Time Idle Chat – Another big time-waster at work is idle chat with employees and colleagues. It’s easy to spend half an hour discussing who did what on the weekend, or a good part of the morning reminiscing about a recent holiday; but that is time you can use to work. A great strategy to employ is to limit personal conversations to five minutes. After that, excuse yourself and go back to your work.
Stop Procrastinating – One of the biggest causes or working late is the time needed to finish a project. However, could you have started it earlier? Many individuals procrastinate until the last minute when they could have started and finished way before deadline.
Every day, working individuals waste valuable hours on checking emails, idle chat and other pastimes that prevent them from concentrating on their workload. Eliminating these time wasters will cause you to be more productive and efficient at work.
