Working during Summertime: How to Maximize Work Performance
Optimization of working time is an issue that worries many people, both at managerial and managerial levels. Achieving increased efficiency through a good time management is essential to achieve the goals you set.
There are many reasons why productivity may go down. Sometimes, companies focus on activities that do not meet essential goals instead of performing important tasks; or perhaps employees manage their time poorly and do not fulfill their tasks within the deadline.
In any case, it is paramount to have control and to manage time in order to organize the workload and to achieve personal, professional and company growth. For that matter, Gran Via Business & Meeting Center shares 5 tips to achieve the highest time optimization at work, based on their experience as event planners and workspace consultants in Barcelona.
How to achieve time optimization?
- Plan activities and goals
Planning the tasks that need to be performed can save large amounts of time in the execution of these. Someone who spends a few minutes reflecting on how to perform the daily tasks can in fact save much more time than someone who improvises the completion of his tasks and makes more mistakes in the process.
It is also important to plan the week in advance to have a daily list of activities; this way, you must not decide every morning what to do or risk doing less important tasks leaving the urgent ones for later, creating chaos and more limited windows of time.
Finally, it is a good idea to organize the goals or objectives that you want to achieve in a weekly or daily basis; setting achievable deadlines to complete specific tasks will help you not to waste time.
- Prioritize and organize tasks
Once the week is organized, it is recommended to start each day by prioritizing the tasks on the list. To do so, you can use a fairly simple system: only the urgent tasks should be differentiated from the important ones.
The urgent ones are solved out firstly (as soon as possible), then the important ones (not to be done immediately, but must be done), and finally the ones that are neither important or urgent. By prioritizing tasks this way, it will become easier to decide what to do first, a better time optimization will be achieved, and the established goals will be achieved.
- Eliminate distractions
During the workday, time is wasted on activities that may seem to be important, but in fact aren’t: for instance, phone calls and emails, which while part of the work, can make lose valuable minutes if the time we dedicate to them is not organized. A study showed that, in the office, email is checked more than 20 times an hour, making it one of the biggest distractors of the working day.
Therefore, it is good to establish a moment in the day to answer emails. If absolutely necessary, it can be checked once every hour, but only to answer urgent or extremely important messages. The same thing happens with phone calls: it is better to set a time in the day to make them, so as not to steal time from other important tasks. Also, limiting the number of useless or unproductive meetings will be a big help to optimize the working time.
Another option is to hire a service like the one Gran Via BC offers to the users of the center, based on management of correspondence, as well as visits and personalized attention to calls.
- Be flexible
By having a well-ordered schedule with every task of the week on it, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you can’t meet your goals. That’s why it is important to be flexible with the work plan and to understand that it is a guide that does not need to be complied verbatim.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot control everything, and unforeseen events or emergencies can always make us have to change priorities. If this happens, the only thing you can do is reorganize the time and keep working. It is advisable to set a small window of time in the agenda of the day to cover unforeseen events; if you do so, you’ll be prepared for anything.
- Give me a break
Last but not least, it is important to remember that we are all human that need time to rest. If you work long hours, the brain will get tired and will require much more effort to perform simple tasks, and therefore more time will be spent.
A technique called “Pomodoro” consists of performing a task every 25 minutes, and then resting for 5 minutes; every four “pomodoros”, you are allowed to rest 15 minutes, but it is important that during each interval of 25 minutes, concentration is total in the performed task.
This is an excellent technique to keep the brain awake that can be customized to each person’s preferences. And having facilities such as a terrace or communal spaces in the work areas will allow you to make these very necessary breaks without having to leave the facilities.
