As humans, it’s only natural for us to have some productive and some not-so productive days, but if the spell continues for a long time, it might be the time for you to rethink your work strategy. To change your habits, you must invest your time and habits in some hacks that boost your work performance.
Productivity Hacks To Boost Your Work Performance
1. Exercise In The Morning
An active morning leads to a productive day. Studies show that exercises energize your body for the entire day. Your muscles feel energized and less tensed throughout the day when you exercise in the morning.
Exercises have many physical as well as mental and emotional benefits, they uplift your mood for rest of the day, which releases dopamine in the body, causing you to be happy. In fact, studies have shown that exercises decrease stress levels as well. Moreover, happy and healthy people are more productive than sick and tired people. In short, exercising in the morning has multiple benefits for your body as well as your work life.
2. Reduce Your Meeting Time
Jeff Haden, a life coach, states that long meetings that have become a norm in the corporate culture tend to reduce productivity. Meetings should not be longer than thirty minutes, he states, and hour-long meetings are wasteful and lower employees’ productivity. In fact, when we are sitting through most meetings, we realize that information could have been passed on via email.
Unnecessary meetings not only waste resources (time and money), but people get bored and tired sitting through some people boring PowerPoint presentation or a few people rambling in the corner.
Thus, to increase your and the team’s productivity, the best practice is to reduce your meeting time to fifteen minutes or thirty minutes, at maximum. Instead, if you wish to increase your employees’ productivity, you can organize ice-breaking games and give them a creative outlet to utilize their energy and brains.
3. Say No When Need Be
Our culture teaches us to be respectful and never say no to someone, especially when someone assigns us a task. However, when we accept every task, we do a disservice to ourselves and our work if we say yes to everything. Therefore, if you wish to submit your work on time, you must say no to your colleagues and supervisor, when need be.
When working, you must remember that your job is not to agree with everyone all the time, especially when your hands are full and you can’t always keep everyone happy and it is not your job to keep everyone satisfied and happy at all times. If you go out of the way to help people, you might miss on your own work and end up lowering your productivity. You may end up missing deadlines, and despite good intentions, you could end up disappointing others when you are unable to meet the extraordinary expectations you’ve created for yourself. Sometimes you just have to say no, and there is nothing wrong in doing so.
If you work according to a plan and politely say not to people, when need be, you’d see a sharp rise in your work productivity. You will soon observe that assignments that take you two days, you would be able to complete them within a day. However, if your boss urges that you take-on the extra load, ask him or her to give you more time for the work that will suffer. If you are tired all the time, your productivity will take a dip and extra work is physically and mentally tiring.
4. Stop Being A Perfectionist
Fresh workers, especially new graduates tend, to be overly perfectionist. While perfectionism is a good trait to show-off during the interview stages, it is not sustainable in the long run.
As a perfectionist, you are always hard on yourself, you are always trying to please everyone around you, when you do that, you actually stress yourself more than usual. So, if you wish to be more productive and stay like than for a long time, stop being too hard on yourself and give yourself a break. It is not bad being a perfectionist, but you need to keep it in balance and give yourself a much-needed break.
If you are a habitual perfectionist, it is advisable that you alter your work habits in the sense that the work you submit be flawless. In other words, do not be a perfectionist to appease people, do so in your work.
5. Join a Coworking Space
One of the best ways to enhance your productivity is by collaborating with likeminded people who inspire and encourage you to achieve your dreams. And one of the ways to do so in by working in a coworking space, which you can easily find anywhere near your home.
A coworking space increases your productivity since you are working in a dedicated working space with little to no distractions, your productivity will skyrocket! Also, a coworking space does not put a huge dent on one’s pocket. A co-working space has numerous benefits. It’s cheap, you do not have to worry about paying exorbitant utility bills, or renters’ insurance, and neither do you have to invest huge sums of money in buying office supplies and furniture. Rather, you get all of that in a coworking office against a minimal rent fee.
In addition, a coworking space has an additional benefit of allowing you to unleash your creativity by working in a different office space-environment- every day. For instance, one day you might choose to work in a cubicle, while the other day, you might choose to do your work in the café in a bean-bag. Such freedom is not afforded in one’s home or a traditional office. Moreover, if you are looking to advance your career or choose a different career path, a coworking space might just prove to be ideal since you get to interact with a diverse group of people from different professional fields.
6. Make a Schedule of Everything
To-do lists are redundant and do you no good, all they do is tell (remind) you of the tasks that you’re supposed to accomplish, but don’t help you in completing those tasks. A better way to boost your productivity is by scheduling everything beforehand.
This one is specifically a useful tip for startups, especially when young founders submit startups in incubation centers and pitch to investors for a deal. Keeping things in order is a strong variable of success here.
Once you schedule everything, it gets on your calendar and you receive reminders until you do not complete your tasks. With a to-do list, you have to rely on yourself to complete everything, which is inefficient and wasteful. In fact, studies have shown that scheduling does you better than making a to-do list. A study conducted in Taiwan showed that workers that scheduled their play or free time performed better at their jobs than those that did not.
More so, when you schedule breaks in your daily schedule, they motivate you to work diligently and complete tasks in a timely manner. Think of it this way, to-do lists are like a game plane and schedules are like the actual match, and things can get extremely different than what you intended to happen and what actually happens.
7. Plan Your Day Backwards
Most of us make the mistake of planning our day from 9 am onwards and think we’ll stick around the office until we don’t get our work done, but that’s a huge mistake that we make.
Instead, you should plan your day backwards. You must set a target for yourself for completing your work. Let’s suppose you have an eight-hour work routine from 9-5, and you intend to come home by 5:30 to spend time with yourself or your family. So, the best way to boost your productivity is by planning your day backwards.
Your target should be: Finish Work by 5 PM. So, plan your day backwards, once you do that, you will observe most unimportant and obsessive habits will wear-off on their own. The rationale behind this technique is that anything that increases your perception of control over your work schedule will increase your productivity, and this technique does it best.
Conclusion
One day or another all of us suffer from bad and demotivating days, but the problem beings when such days become consistent and affect the quality of your work. When that happens, you must make some amendments in your life and incorporate new habits in your life that shift your mood and increase your productivity.
The afore-mention hacks might just do the trick for you, and if they don’t, it might be the time to return to the basics, which is that you let inspiration come to you. After all, not everything works for everyone. It’s just a matter of practicing, testing various solutions and then simply sticking to what’s working the best for you specifically.
An interesting way to motivate yourself and enhance your productivity, which we didn’t list above in the list is by putting-up pictures and quotes of people that inspire you, their struggle, pearls of wisdom, and hard work can become a source of motivation for you and thus boost your productivity.