Productivity is an important topic in the corporate world. But out of the many factors affecting it, these 5 form the main foundation. These include emails, the way we reply to them, our time management skills, meetings, and distractions. The way we control and manipulate these five sectors of life plays a huge role to increase your productivity.
Increase your productivity by fixing these 5 sector of your corporate life
Here are the five sectors how we can improve how we spend our time in them to increase productivity.
1. Controlling Emails to increase your productivity
Emails are a regular part of the way we communicate in the corporate world. Dealing with old emails is in itself an art to increase your productivity. Here is a sure way to deal with emails- both old and new- without spending too much time and patience.
(1) 2 days old emails
These are the emails that are the most recent in your inbox. These could be either work emails, personal emails or newsletters. Personal and newsletters can be either deleted or forwarded to your personal email. This gets rid of clutter and lets your work inbox be exclusively work related.
Work emails can either be replied to immediately, applying the ‘2 minute rule’. This rule states that if an email requires less than 2 minutes to reply to it, do it right away and increase your productivity. Whereas if an email takes longer, then schedule it for later. Thus you can pay due attention to important email tasks later. This helps you to easily process inbox to zero.
(2) 5 days old emails
Second most recent emails. One might be a little late in replying to these but not too late. These would include emails that pass through the 2-day checkpoint and are still not responded to. More often than not, these will be the email tasks that are under process.
These emails can be dealt with by prioritizing them as these tasks might soon reach their deadline. Flagging these emails, adding them to your tasks list, or converting them to a task is the best way to increase your productivity.
(3) Get rid of 5 to 60 days old emails to increase your productivity
These are perhaps the most difficult batch of emails to deal with. Emails in this batch have been procrastinated upon over and over by you. No matter the restrictions placed by the above two batches have worked. The only way out of this cycle of procrastination is to just do it.
Get to responding, deleting, archiving these emails like there’s no tomorrow. Do not schedule them for later or flag them. Just put your patience to a test and get through this batch to increase your productivity. Your inbox will definitely thank you later.
(4) More than 60 days old emails
The oldest of them all. This is easily the easiest batch to deal with. How? Because you delete them all. Why? Because the older an email gets, the more redundant it becomes. A time span of over 60 days clearly means that the agenda of that email is long obsolete. This obviously applies to work emails which you can choose to archive, just in case. Newsletters and spam from this batch though can be guiltlessly deleted to increase your productivity.
2. Reply better to increase your productivity
With so many emails needing our attention, it can be difficult to prioritize one’s response. But does this mean you must reply to all emails you receive to increase your productivity? No! By responding, we mean you need to not leave an email unattended. These responses could be:
- Reply to the email if it will take you less than a minute, or requires no other action.
- If it needs a quick action in order to reply to it, do it right away or star the email to pay attention to it at the earliest.
- If the email will require a longer task to reply to, star it or move it to a ‘respond to later’ folder.
These responses make sure that no email is left untouched or unattended. Thus you are always up to date as you increase your productivity.
3. Better time management for increased productivity
(1) Effective Planning
Beginning each day with a list of targets for the day can put you at the forefront of having a productive day. These targets could be anything that you need to get done that day. Arranging them according to their priority level will help you know what you need to get done first. This would be your agenda for the day that you will need to get done as far as is possible to increase your productivity.
(2) Setting goals and objectives
Deciding our goals and objectives before we start working makes sure that we have clarity about our goals. It also makes sure that we work while keeping in mind what our priorities are. A physical list of targets for the day enables us to manage our time better too.
(3) Setting deadlines
When we set deadlines for our tasks, we understand with clarity that a particular task has to be done within a stipulated time period. We are at liberty to work in whatever way we see fit in order to achieve our tasks before the deadline. A deadline makes sure that we remain accountable for the completion of our tasks to increase your productivity.
(4) Delegation of responsibilities
Delegation is the distribution of tasks among people. This delegation should be ideally done based on the person’s abilities and experience. When you receive a task that might be better delegated to someone else, doing so is the best choice to increase your productivity.
(5) Prioritizing activities as per their importance
When we begin prioritizing tasks as per their importance, we gain clarity about what we need to focus on first. Thus we know where to direct our full attention and time in order to stay on top of our set of work tasks and goals to increase your productivity.
4. Meetings
Meetings are an unavoidable part of our corporate life. But meetings have often been touted as a productivity killer because of the amount of time they consume and how little they contribute to increase your productivity. Here are some ways of making meetings less time consuming and more productive:
- Decide the agenda of the meeting beforehand. This helps in setting better priorities for the target of the meeting.
- Try to have a walking meeting where the conversation is held during a walk. This not only helps the meeting parties stay fit but also has been found to improve concentration throughout the meeting.
- Keep the meeting short by only talking about the decided agenda and not introducing any new topics midway.
5. Distractions
Increasing your productivity is all about creating a distraction-free environment during deep work. Distractions like social media notifications, emails, etc deter our productivity like nothing else. This in turn ruins time efficiency too. With the distraction-free environment created during work, one can use these rules as a tool for productivity.
The various notifications we receive every day like a text, a call, an email interrupt and distract us from work. Putting our notifications off and focusing on the task at hand is an important way to increase your productivity. Since interruptions also increase the amount of time taken to complete a task, they form a major obstacle.
Increase your productivity in these 5 sectors
The above sectors are the main influence that can reduce or increase your productivity. Controlling the amount of time and energy we spend in these can help improve our productivity overall too.
FAQs
1. Assign Tasks with deadlines
2. Keep track of employees work performance
3. Check the quality of employees work
4. Monitor employees engagement
5. Check employees inbox management
The successful performance of any company depends on its employee performance. Good employee productivity is responsible for many key factors in a company’s success. These may range from company revenue to team satisfaction. Thus it is important to actively motivate it and reap its benefits.
1. Have the Right Tools and Equipment
2. Turn off notifications
3. Routines and rituals
4. Change up your routine sometimes
5. Know when to take a break
1. Job Satisfaction.
2. Training and Development.
3. Employee Engagement.
4. Goals and Expectations.
5. Tools and Equipment.
