Sometimes it can be impossible to get work done in the office with so many distractions and interruptions.

1. Daily status meeting

• Start the day with a status meeting first thing in the morning
• This allows everyone to discuss what tasks they will achieve during the day, and what assistance they might need.
• It also maximises efficiency when working on tasks that require group input.

2. Top 3

• Write down the top 3  tasks you hope to achieve throughout the day to greatly improve your chances of actually achieving them.
• Have team members share their top 3s in daily status meetings to allow them to gather all the input they need from the team.
• A harvard study shows that the 13% of Harvard MBAs to write down their goals, are currently earning twice as much as those who didn’t.

3. Dark Time

• Implement a period of time where team members know not to bother one another with calls, emails or meetings unless it’s extremely important.
• Research has shown that office workers are interrupted or need to switch tasks on average as often as every 3 minutes.

4. Grouping Internal Meetings

• Batch all internal meetings and schedule them during a set block of time. i.e 11am-2pm.
• This ensures that all the little, spontaneous meetings throughout the day don’t get out of hand and that employees’ work doesn’t get constantly interrupted.
• From a 2017 survey of 182 senior managers, 71% believe meetings to be unproductive and inefficient.

5. Standing meetings

• Standing up during meetings is not only beneficial for your spine, it also keeps meetings shorter.
• Standing up has also been proven to improve concentration and productivity.
• A study published by Business Insider showed that increased standing led to up to 10% more productivity.

6. Regular breaks from your desk and screen

• Taking regular breaks prevents boredom  and is better for your spine and your vision
• Allows you to take a step back and re-think processes and objectives
• Improves concentration
• Desktime believe that optimal productivity takes place at working for 52 minutes, followed by breaking for 17 minutes.

7. Schedule your day the night before

• This prevents wasting time in the morning from not knowing what to do
• We use the 5 minutes at the end of every day to write out and share our plan for tomorrow.
• We’ve found that just a few minutes of not knowing what to do in the morning can drastically decrease productivity.

8. Put tasks in the order you’d like to complete them

• This allows you to quickly move onto another task if you hit a roadblock in your previous task.
• Just like the above, not knowing what to do is shown to have a negative effect on productivity.

Resources:

How to Get Your To-Do List Done Faster (for similar tips from Salesforce)

https://desktime.com

https://www.inc.com/neil-patel

https://www.entrepreneur.com

https://www.forbes.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com

Tags: company culture, infographic, productivity