In a commercial world where time is money, everyone seems to need to master how to lift their productivity. Yet in our day-to-day work, low efficiency often means tasks pile up and get delayed. One of the reasons our efficiency drops may be that we are constantly interrupted — by ourselves, by others, and by competing demands. Happily, plenty of psychologists have devoted themselves to studying how to improve productivity and help us perform better at work. In this article, we share four ways to get more done.
Method one: write down your goals
No doubt many people are in the habit of setting goals — but do you ever write them down? For those of you who don't, do you find yourself struggling when you try to reach them? As it turns out, writing your goals down can help you achieve them.
British professor Cheryl Travers once ran an experiment with a class of students. She asked them to identify areas they could improve, to picture the outcomes they wanted, and to map out how to get there. Over the following three months, the students kept a daily journal recording their progress towards their goals. The students who journaled made markedly greater progress in their academic results — and it helped even those who had set abstract goals (such as reducing worry). Cheryl Travers went on to say: "Writing goals down makes people more accountable to those goals, and through writing people can help themselves overcome the difficulties they face in achieving them." This shows that writing down your goals and your progress can boost confidence and self-efficacy, helping us reach those goals.
Method two: sharpen your focus
Attention span refers to the length of time a person can stay focused and undistracted on a single task. We often mistakenly assume our concentration is pretty good, but in fact most people are fully focused for only around 72 minutes a day. What's more, we tend to spend time on trivial, unimportant things, which makes our focused stretches even shorter. One experiment found that secondary school students who were meant to revise for 15 minutes ended up revising for noticeably less time because they were distracted by phone notifications, emails and the like. Although today's society champions so-called "multitasking", in reality we are merely switching between tasks non-stop, finding it hard to sustain a longer attention span and needing to spend more time on each task just to get into the zone. And because technology floods us with vast amounts of information, the problem of distraction has worsened dramatically. The advance of information technology makes us more prone to distraction at work from rings, vibrations and other notifications; our attention span falls, and so does our productivity.
There are two directions you can take to focus at work. On making good use of time: since our genuinely focused time really is this short, we should concentrate it on the big goals, and use the spare or interruption-prone hours to complete work that doesn't demand much creativity. On extending your attention span, temporarily putting technology aside is a good approach. The psychologist Dr Larry Rosen suggests that, while working, you can switch off your phone's rings, alerts, emails and so on for 15 minutes, then gradually lengthen the time you keep your devices off. That way we can keep enjoying the convenience information technology brings while staying more focused at work — the best of both worlds.
Method three: work standing up
In the United States, a research team split the staff of a customer service centre into two groups: one group used traditional office desks and chairs, while the other was allowed to work standing up at height-adjustable desks. Six months later, the team found that the staff who could stand were 42% more productive. Dr Mark Benden, who led the research, believes this is because blood circulates better when you stand, so efficiency rises. He further suggests that employees should not merely sit or stand in one spot, but be able to stand and walk around — and that companies could even consider installing footrests so staff can take the weight off while standing. Next time you feel weary at work, consider standing up and taking a walk. (This writer also finished this article standing up, and the effect really is good.)
Method four: discuss things together
For many people working in a team, one of the most tiresome things of all is probably meetings. On the surface, meetings waste time and are a stumbling block on the road to our goals — but as it turns out, meeting to discuss things together does, in the long run, help a team reach its goals.
Dutch professor Michaela Schippers and her team carried out research in the medical industry and found that teams which met regularly to assess their progress were more likely to come up with innovative methods. Reflecting on how the team is performing helps lift work performance significantly. Michaela Schippers adds: "The goal of discussing things together should not be to point fingers at one another, but to discuss together how the team might make progress as one. It is best to have a facilitator as well, so the team has the space to think about how to bring about change." This shows that constructive discussion within a team helps it reach its goals.
Reference: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/09/boosting-productivity https://hbr.org/2019/11/5-mental-mistakes-that-kill-your-productivity
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