6 Actionable Strategies to Maximize Your Work Efficiency

2 Boost Your Ability to Focus

Research shows that setting goals is one of the most effective ways to improve your work efficiency since they show you what you need to focus on each day to be successful.

To achieve positive results, your goals must:

• Be specific and offer you a clear picture of what you’re striving to achieve
• Challenge you to learn new skills and try new approaches
• Offer intrinsic and/or extrinsic rewards

Setting quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals that meet those criteria will maximize your productivity by ensuring your short-term activities are aligned with your long-term objectives.

Despite working toward clear goals, you’ll inevitably have days where it’s difficult to focus. To be more efficient, follow these tips when you’re feeling distracted:

• Complete your most important task as early in the day as possible. This prevents lower value tasks from consuming all of your time and attention and ensures you accomplish something meaningful every day.
• Limit the amount of trivial decisions you make. Your willpower is limited so, you shouldn’t waste it on trivial decisions like what to wear, what to eat for lunch or how you should respond to an unimportant email.
• Turn off notifications. Email, slack, and other notifications are a huge distraction. Turning them off while your working is an easy way to boost your efficiency.
• Schedule time for daydreaming. Daydreaming at work is difficult to avoid but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Psychologists have found that when professionals allocate time to daydream – such as during brief periods of time between meetings, while they’re working on basic admin work, etc. – they’re able to work more efficiently. Daydreaming helps your brain refresh and contemplating work in an unstructured way often enables you to come to conclusions that you often wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

As you take actions to improve your ability to focus, you’ll become increasingly efficient at work.

3 Communicate More Efficiently

A study published in the Journal of Communication found that professionals spend an average of 50%-80% of their time at work communicating. This includes all time spent interacting with others – responding to emails, chatting, attending meetings etc.

With so much of your time spent communicating, you need to take actions to ensure that time is used productively.

Here are some ways to communicate more efficiently:

• Opt out of meetings that you don’t play a role in. Atlassian found that the average professional attends sixty-two meetings a month and about half of those are a waste of time. By opting out of unimportant meetings, you can immediately gain a dozen or more hours of extra time. Those hours will go a long way in boosting your work efficiency.
• Prevent miscommunications. A Siemens Enterprise Communication study found the average employee at mid-sized companies wastes seventeen hours per week dealing with miscommunication. This includes conversations spent clarifying messages and setbacks caused by them. To prevent poor communication from slowing you down, include all necessary information in all of your messages, ask clarifying questions, and verify that you have a mutual understanding before moving forward with tasks.
• Mute chat notifications. Though chat is often seen as a more efficient alternative to email, the constant pinging can be incredibly distracting. Muting your notifications and checking in every half hour to an hour ensures you receive messages in a timely manner and are better able to focus on your work.

If certain communication channels or people consume lots of your time, think of additional ways to limit the impact that those channels/individuals have on your work efficiency. For example, you might remove yourself from distracting group chats or give direct reports access to resources so that they’re less dependent on you.

4 Limit the Amount of Time You Spend in Your Inbox

Your inbox is one of the biggest inhibitors of your productivity. An Adobe survey found that the average professional spends five hours per day in their inbox. While a portion of that time is spent engaging in critical conversations, much of it is wasted reading and responding to non-urgent emails.

Here are some email hacks to reduce the amount of time you spend in your inbox:

• Check email in batches instead of checking notifications throughout the day. This enables you to work more efficiently since your attention isn’t constantly being pulled to your inbox.
• Unsubscribe from all newsletters you haven’t read in over a week. This reduces the clutter in your inbox, making it easier to find important messages.
• Write lengthier emails that include all necessary details the other person needs. Though they take longer to write, these emails are more efficient since they limit back and forth questions and miscommunications.
• Don’t reply to emails that don’t require a response specifically from you. If the message requires a response, forward it to an appropriate colleague. If not, delete/archive it.

To learn more about how to efficiently manage your email, download our inbox management guide: