Being at work and actually working are very different animals. Here are the top five known barriers to getting things done and the easiest ways to work around them.
1. You have mail
Sure, email is a necessity and social media keeps you informed, but in the workplace, both can undermine your productivity. According to 2019 Adobe Email Usage Studypeople spend about five hours a day checking email – a figure that is unlikely to have decreased since the widely accepted move to hybrid work.
The remedy is a self-imposed schedule in which you only allow yourself to check and respond to email at certain times of the day, such as early morning, lunchtime, and late afternoon. If you know that nothing urgent is likely to end up in your inbox, turn off email and social notifications on your desktop computer and on your phone.
Unsubscribe from email lists that don’t serve you or have them automatically filtered to a directory that you can dive into at your leisure during downtime. And put that neighborhood WhatsApp group on mute.
If you’re really struggling with the cold turkey approach to using social media, a distraction blocking tool like Freedom can help, while for Mac users who are hardcore about focus, the Self-control Distraction Blocking cannot be undone once the timer has been set.
2. Juggle task
At first glance, multitasking seems like the ultimate productivity hack. As you throw yourself into several tasks at once, you feel the epitome of efficiency: you’ve got this done.
Unfortunately, spreading your focus across different tasks can lure you into one of the deepest time sinks: self-distraction. As your cognitive bandwidth runs out, you lose control of the power state you need for maximum productivity.
Instead of juggling items on your to-do list, it’s time to switch to monotasking. Smaller items can be tackled first using the Two-minute rulemeaning completing tasks of two minutes or less, and taking two minutes to get started on small tasks that you may have been putting off, leaving uninterrupted time to concentrate on the most important tasks.
Your workday can be transformed with the help of the Pomodoro techniquea time management hack where you set a timer for a task, take a break, then repeat, followed by a longer break after four sessions.
3. “Have a minute?”
Phone calls and colleagues passing by your desk slow down your pace and affect your productivity. Try allocating small windows of your day to call back, while gently warning colleagues that you’re too busy to chat if you use headphones and set your online status to “busy” or “do not disturb”.
4. Encountering fatigue
Meetings that are too regular have long been a productivity drag, getting in the way of the workday and limiting the ability to get back “in the zone” before the next one is scheduled.
As a rule of thumb, internal meetings should be a last resort when other means of communication fail. For example, the team’s daily stand-up can be made up on a weekly or every other day.
Meeting invitations should follow the “prepare and share” principle: include a clear agenda, specify talking points, and provide a definitive goal. This should avoid pointless discussion or, worse, the need for another meeting.
5. Job apathy
If you find your usual self-motivation diminishing, you may have outgrown your role. People often feel happiest when challenged and even the most consistent performers will eventually discover that they have been doing the same job too well for too long.
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