Productivity is the combination of intelligent planning and focused efforts designed to help you do more, better. Productivity can be continuously improved, not by multitasking (which only clogs your mental pipelines), but by doing the following.
1. Leave Early: If you're putting in long hours and are not feeling productive at the end of the day, try shortening your work day by 30 minutes or even an hour.
2. Constantly ask yourself if you what are doing presently is productive: I often catch myself spending a lot of time using Facebook or participating in irrelevant conversations while at work. When I realize that I am not working on something productive, I mentally scold myself and get back to the grind.
3. Weed out distractions: I know a few people that have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Hootsuite, Tumblr, Foursquare, Shutterfly, Pinterest, Google Chat, Reddit, and StumbleUpon account. When they are not using these social media tools, they may be checking their e-mail on their smartphones or reading random facts on Wikipedia every 5 minutes. Disconnect from these tools while at work, it destroys your productivity!
4. Set ambitious, yet realistic goals
Les Brown, a motivational speaker and radio DJ, once said “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” If you can cross everything off of your to-do list in one day, you need to create more ambitious goals. Some goals should take as long as 1 week, 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. People that set higher goals have a tendency to be more satisfied than those with lower expectations, according to research published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
One of the major reasons why people fail a goals is because they did not set a deadline. Goals have to be very specific and they should be written down. It is good to get feedback about the goals in order to refine them.
Goals should be personal and professional. Spending time balancing your budget can be a personal goal and putting together process flow charts to make certain recurring tasks easier at work is a professional goal.
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