Productivity Hacks for the Busy Professional

Being productive at work is important for every busy professional. With enormous to-do lists and demands coming in from colleagues, co-workers, and managers, it can often be difficult to get everything done and still be home for dinner with the family. Fortunately, with a few tweaks to your normal routine to improve productivity, you can efficiently manage your time and your tasks and still have time to relax and rejuvenate when you walk in your front door. Here are some productivity hacks that will help you become one of the most accomplished people in the office.

Put Your Phone Out of Sight

Have you ever noticed how distracting your phone is? Every time it makes a noise, it takes your attention away from the task at hand. If you have alerts for your next meeting, changes in your investments, sports scores, and more, your phone could be distracting you hundreds of times per day. Before you settle into a task, silence your phone and put it somewhere you can’t see it. You’ll experience fewer distractions and will be able to get down to business in a productive way.

Plan 30-Minute Meetings

Do you find that your day gets eaten up by unnecessarily long meetings? Most people have it in their heads (and their calendars) that meetings take about an hour. However, most meetings can easily be accomplished in 30 minutes if you run them efficiently and eliminate small talk and distractions. If you have an average of six meetings a week, you can free up three hours of productivity with this simple hack.

Identify Your Top 3

As soon as you get to the office in the morning (or even the night before), identify the three big tasks you need to accomplish that day. This keeps you on track for a productive eight hours and eliminates many of the smaller, not as important tasks that can suck up your time. Keeping those three tasks somewhere visible—such as on a white board in your office—will keep you on track and help you say no to other projects and tasks you don’t have time for.

Schedule Social Media Time  

Social media can be valuable for marketing and research, but it can also be an enormous waste of time. Many people find they waste hours a day scrolling through feeds of people they barely know without even knowing why. Though it’s usually unrealistic to think you can eliminate social media time altogether, you can schedule it into your day. Plan to check your social media for half an hour in the morning and fifteen minutes on your lunch break (or whatever works for you schedule). You won’t feel deprived, but you’ll also keep yourself from losing hours of productivity.

Wasted time at work leads to stress, poor performance, and the need to work extra hours on nights or weekends to make up for the time lost. With the above four productivity hacks, you can increase the time you spend on important work and reduce unnecessary downtime that can cause anxiety.