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Written By: Kevin Gardner
From food delivery to laundry to ordering socks, everything today is aimed at being as efficient as possible. If the tenets of personal life are now skewed toward efficiency, why shouldn't professional life? Efficiency in the workplace can produce quality work while giving you more time to take on more work or get home earlier and fit in time for other non-work priorities. While you may be worried about the notion of efficiency causing rushed or sloppy work, the truth is that if done correctly, striving for efficiency in the workplace can be a major benefit to your work experience. Here are the best ways to increase efficiency in the workplace.
Use New Technology
There are plenty of emerging tools you can enlist the help of in order to be more efficient in the workplace, from task management software to mobile printing. What these tools will do is not change the base of your job responsibilities, but the ease at which you are able to accomplish them. Task management software gives you a digital interface where you can map out all of the projects you're working on and track your progress, as well as loop in colleagues for collaboration.
It's simply an online to-do list that makes it easier to see what you've accomplished so far and what you've yet to do. Mobile printing eases the process of printing by allowing you to print directly from your mobile device instead of going through the process of logging into a computer and scrolling through various pages of printing settings. The time these new technologies save you in the workplace can be worth hours of extra time for focused work instead of logistical processes.
Schedule Your Days in Advance
If you want to be efficient in your job, it's best to know what you have to work on in a particular week and how long that work will take before the week begins. Accomplish this goal-setting by scheduling out your week before it begins. First, list out all of the tasks you would like to work on in order of the urgency they have to be done. Then, write in all of the meetings you have scheduled for the week in a calendar.
From there, you can see where each task fits in your week based on how urgent it is and how much time you'll need to work on it. So much efficiency is lost in the workplace from simply not knowing what direction to go in after completing a task. If you have all of your tasks written out and scheduled for yourself, you'll be able to move right on to another task after the completion of a different one without any lost time.
Block Out Distractions
In an age where almost every device we have is connected to the internet and has the potential to be a distraction, it's important to try to eliminate the use of them for anything that doesn't work as much as possible. Consider using online tools that limit the amount of time you can spend on social media sites and apps. Of course, these technological distractions are added on top of the traditional distractions of chatter in the workplace.
Investing in noise-cancelling headphones is a great way to block out anything going on in your workplace that shouldn't be the current focus of your attention. Of course, you can always make time to talk to your coworkers, but wouldn't you rather separate the time you work and socialize instead of combining it and not being fully invested in either activity? Focus all of your attention on your work, and when you're done, then take the time to get along with your officemates.
Making use of new technology, scheduling your days in advance, and blocking out distractions are all effective ways to increase efficiency in the workplace. With efficiency maximized, you'll be able to reap the benefits of your hard work with more time to yourself.
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