Underground Journal

Five Tips for Office Productivity

In today’s frenetic world, people are quite literally deluged with responsibilities and a seemingly unending series of tasks. Human beings are drinking deep from a metaphorical fire hose of information and the tendency to feel a sense of overwhelm is often inevitable. Here are five productivity tips that should help break the cycle.

1. Work with not against your energy cycle. Human productivity tends to be cyclical, since energy depletes during the day and is then replenished through sleep and rest. So work with your body and not against it. Deliberately schedule core tasks for those times of the day or night when you are naturally most energised and focused. Take rest days.

2. Remember the magic of the Pareto Principle. Richard Koch showed that Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto had an exceptional insight when he realised that 80% of the output of any process often derives from a mere 20% of the inputs. So identify the “vital few” causes that deliver tremendous value and multiply these. What really matters? What tasks and activities can be discarded as dross? These are vitally important questions that can shape the course of an entire life?

3. Turn off email. You are its master not its slave. Have extensive “email vacations”, turn off your smartphone, and realise that the world may not actually fall apart in you absence.

4. “Don’t sweat the small stuff… and it’s all small stuff”. This may be a cliche but it also a timeless truth. Excessive negative stress (“distress” rather than “eustress”) materially degrades job performance and results will inevitably suffer. A relaxed but confident approach, in contrast, will usually yield dividends.

5. Attack bottlenecks consistently and relentlessly. The “theory of constraints” (Goldratt, 1986) suggests that a few things hold up performance. Work first up to the level of these bottlenecks, and then work at full speed to “elevate” these constraints, which in simple plain English means removing them. Think of every task you do, every piece of work you undertake, as a business process that can be improved significantly through diligent process analysis. A continuous focus on improvement is worth its weight in gold.

These five key techniques can deliver substantial results. Apply them daily and the cumulative results will surely arrive. Work with your energy cycle, apply the Pareto principle, turn off email, forget the small stuff and attack bottlenecks. These are strategies that can be applied in all kinds of contexts and all workplaces. Do they really work? This will be yours to discover.

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