As professionals, it is easy to get caught up in lots of shallow work that feels productive. However, a lot of times these menial tasks do not help with long-term goals or tasks that require a lot of deep and analytic work. It is easy to get trapped in this busywork.
Kristen Rampe, a CPA from Rampe Consulting in Michigan states that you need to create strategic pauses and breaks in your day between activities. In order to create real productivity in the workplace, she argues that you should stop filling your days with busywork.
If you are someone who is continuing to find yourself in this busywork cycle, here are 5 steps to take to help boost productivity for your business.
- Step back and reflect on your priorities.
A lot of people spend their days working on things such as clearing all of the emails from your inbox. This is an example of one way you might fill your day with busywork and therefore procrastinate work you should actually be doing. While clearing your inbox might make you feel good and productive in the moment, it is fleeting. It is very unlikely that responding to all your emails is actually contributing to growth and success for your company.
Instead, we recommend that you find a time that you can go somewhere and really reflect on your big goals for your company and what you can be doing daily in order to achieve those goals. Figure out your goals for the week, month, year, and even 10 years. Find a spot to think through these goals that is away from where you normally work; a different room, building, or office. Somewhere that is going to help get you into a different head and thinking space.
- Avoid operating out of your inbox.
What is the first thing you do when you start working every day? For many people it is checking their inbox. This is an easy way to start the day and try to start getting things done. However, for most people this turns into how they fill every space in their day between meetings or other important tasks. What many people do not think about is that using your inbox as a to-do list is not an effective way to go through your day as it prioritizes what other people need to do over yourself.
It is recommended that instead of having your email open and checking all day, that instead you have set times in your day to check your email or do other “invisible tasks”. This way you still have time to do these things, but it is not running your whole day. This will help you be able to focus more of your time on the important jobs you need to complete and set times for menial tasks that work for your schedule and role.
- Schedule chunks of time for focused work.
Once you have had the chance to figure out your main goals that you are working towards, figure out when you are most productive throughout the day. In those times, actually schedule on your calendar 45 minute sprints where you focus solely on working towards those goals. In these sprints you want to be free from distractions, this includes your phone being away and email being closed. If these are actually scheduled on your calendar you will be more likely to avoid scheduling meetings or doing other things instead of them.
Once you have made it through your 45 minute sprint, you can reward yourself. Maybe you can spend some time on your phone, get a snack or coffee, or maybe that is when you schedule responding to emails for a short time. Take that break before getting back into another sprint of deep work.
- Create actionable to-do lists.
Possibly one of the simplest, but most effective tools of productivity is a to-do list. When creating a to-do list you should have already figured out your goals and be able to break it down into actions you can do daily/weekly in order to attain them. It is important to avoid goals that are general such as, “Finish Project”. Instead make sure your goals are small steps that are actionable such as, “spend 1 hour uploading new content” or “Reach out to 5 new LinkedIn connections”.
Once you have a to do list of things for the day or week you can prioritize the order to accomplish those tasks based on the goals you had set out ahead of time. Often these actionable lists fall into a simple order to follow.
- Automate or delegate busywork.
Oftentimes many of the busy work tasks that you work on are things that you should not be spending your time doing, but instead could be automated with technology or delegated to someone whose time would be better spent on it than yours. Implement technologies that can do tasks that you should not be focusing on so you can spend time on the items that will help you grow your revenue.
You need to find out how you can add the most value in order to effectively do your job. Once you know that you can delegate lower-level work to other people or programs and spend your time focusing on those goal-oriented tasks, you can spend time on things that will truly make a difference in your business.
