10 ways to increase productivity in your business

Bin that meeting

There can’t be many of us that haven’t sat in a meeting and wondered why we are there and we all know someone who hasn’t found a subject yet that they can’t convene a gathering to discuss.

The truth is though that meetings in some companies are rarely productive and so you need to make sure that you;

• Be selective - don’t go to every meeting you are invited to
• Ask what the purpose is before accepting - if your organiser can’t express clearly and succinctly what they are seeking to achieve then politely decline
• Adopt the rule of no agenda no meeting - if there’s no structure it won’t be productive
• Ask what input the organiser thinks you will be able to give - often you are being invited out of politeness
• Think about sending a deputy - is it a development opportunity for a junior?
• Ask what you want to get out of the meeting - don’t attend just to ‘show your face’, have an outcome in mind
• Turn up on time, leave on time - impose a rule, if the meeting doesn’t start on time then you won’t take part. And make sure you set a time limit as unlimited meetings end up being talking shops
• Don’t diarise regular meetings - often they have no real outcome in mind, it’s just a weekly chat.

Meetings can be an awesomely creative exchange of views or they can be a dreary talking shop that drags on for what feels like a week. But it’s in your power to change it.

Take a break - concentrated work is a productivity killer

Have you ever worked for hours and hours at a time and realised later that actually, you didn’t really achieve much? So often the problem is that people simply plough on without taking regular breaks to allow their mind and body to recharge.

The general advice is that you need to move away from your screen for at least 5 minutes each hour and you need to be pretty religious about it. Productivity reduces the longer you sit in front of your computer so make sure you get up once an hour and preferably go for a walk and get away from the screen.

You may well also find that the answer you were searching for suddenly occurs to you as you are walking around the block as activity is great for encouraging creativity.

Use tech to up your productivity

There are so many products on the market now that there really isn’t any excuse for not using something to up the productivity of yourself and your team. Boards like Trello or Asana can be used to efficiently capture tasks and marshall resources and are 100 times more useful than sticky notes. Think about using the collaborative potential of Google or Microsoft teams to share information and organise documents.

And if you have tech already in place then make sure that you check out all of the features that are available as you may well find that there’s something there that can make your day much more productive by automating tasks.

Make a list

Research shows that making a to-do list works. It reduces stress, increases productivity and makes people feel much more positive about what they have achieved. Combine this with a tech solution like Trello and see your productivity rocket.

Use accountability partners

In the workplace environment checking up on every task to make sure it has been done is called micromanagement and is hated with a passion. But using accountability partners works really well and doesn’t have half the pushback.

By simply getting people to team up with their peers in either the same or another department and asking them to send an email with their to-do list in the morning, and then check in with each other before they leave you’ll be surprised at how much more gets done.

It’s fairly light touch and relies more on trust than heavy-duty control but it works.

Choose the right work-time for you

Some people are early birds, some are night owls but the fact is that we all work better at different times of the day.

The 9 am - 5 pm workday seems to have developed during the nineteenth century as a form of compromise and as a way of making sure that people from different companies could know that their counterparts would be available at the same time as them. But we’re in 2020 now and it seems anachronistic to suggest that everyone should do the standard workday every day.

If you are more productive at 5 am then why not test out working early and leaving at lunchtime? Or turn up late and work into the evening. With the number of tools out there that help with collaboration, there isn’t really any need to be in the office at all times.

Just say no

Do you find that you are the person in the office that everyone comes to with their problems? Every office has its problem solver and you may find that if you are it you have trouble actually getting your own work done because you are always helping others!

There’s an answer that’s simple to say but more difficult to do. Just say no. Or say you don’t have the bandwidth. Or say that you are learning to limit your commitments. But whatever you do, don’t agree.

Seriously though, if you get a reputation for always taking on other people’s tricky jobs then they will form a habit of always coming to you, even if it’s something they really could and should deal with themselves.

Give yourself a productivity boost and tell people you can’t possibly help until you have done all the tasks on your own to-do list. You may magically find that the urgent need disappears.

Focus, focus, focus

Efficient multitasking is a myth. Sorry, but it really is. All of the research shows that if you focus on one task at a time it gets done much faster than if you try to do a few things at once.

In fact, the time lost due to moving between tasks (called switching cost) can amount to up to 40% of the time taken to do the task itself.

You are far better to carry out one task to completion then move on than try to be some form of superhuman multitasker and increase your stress whilst reducing your effectiveness.

Get comfortable with delegation

Can you imagine the CEO of a FTSE 100 company deciding who got what car parking spaces in each of the company facilities? It doesn’t make sense yet even amongst executives, 35% say they have problems with delegation. But really productive people delegate tasks down to the lowest possible level.

Senior managers should be doing senior tasks, even if they love producing the weekly sales figures on excel. Junior staff should be doing the simpler tasks but their development also benefits from having higher-level task delegated to them.

So delegation gives senior staff time to do more value-add activities and junior staff benefit from gaining more experience. It’s a win-win.

Got a recurring task - make it routine

One of the biggest drains on your time is the cost of switching between tasks (see focus, focus, focus) and a lot of this is down to the decision making process.

Choosing what tasks to do takes a lot of mental effort and increases stress so the best way to remove these is to do the same tasks at the same time every week or month.

You’ll also find that if you have to do a series of tasks first thing on a Monday morning, for example, you will launch into them quicker and you’ll get through them in a much faster time than if you sit there wondering what to do.

Bonus tip - give yourself a treat

Got a task you simply can’t face? Then make it a challenge with a prize. Can you do it by a certain time? Can you complete with no errors? Promise yourself a treat at the end and unsurprisingly you’ll find that you get through things much quicker.

We’d probably say not to use chocolate or crisps as treats otherwise you’ll be putting all that lockdown weight on again!

Productivity is a frame of mind

We hope you enjoyed our 10 (11?) tips, all of which we’ve used and we know work really well. The one thing that seems to shine through is that productivity is a state of mind and if you get yourself in the right headspace then you’ll be much more efficient.

Good luck with increasing your productivity and remember - don’t use chocolate as a treat!

 

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