Have you seen some people who are
super fast and efficient at work that they can finish in 5 mins something that
would take you ages? Have you ever wondered how they did it? Here are four tips
that would help you to be more efficient at work.
First, preview the work that
are going to come, and prepare for it. A lot of our routine activities are
predictable. We know that we need to prepare a budget at a certain point of the
year. We know that we need to do an analysis of the past quarter or past month performance.
So why not create a template, or even better, automated template so that
next time it will save you a lot of trouble.
Second, concentrate on finishing one
thing at a time. By “at a time”, I mean finish one thing after another,
instead of switching from one thing to another. The reason is that every time
you switch to another piece of work, you need a “transition” time to get into
it. Imagine you are writing an email, and you received an email notification.
The good practice is to just quickly scan through the notification, but
continue writing your email, instead of opening the new email that you have
received. The exception is if the new email is related to what you are writing
about. Although multi-tasking skill is in high demand these days, when it comes
to finishing something, it’s usually a lot better to focus on one thing at a
time.Otherwise you may end up still writing the email at the end of the working
day.
Third, take time to organize your
emails and documents. I have seen people whose desktop is filled with
different documents, and whose inbox has hundreds of unread messages. Imagine
how much time you would spend trying to find an email or a document. I have
seen some highly efficient people’s mailboxes. They create sub-folders, classify their emails by putting them into the sub-folders, and label
the email if it’s important. This way, it’s so much easier for them to find all
email exchanges related to a subject. The same goes with the files and
documents. Create folders, and classify your files by subject, and year. Name
your files appropriately so you could at least know “what” and “when” of
it.
Fourth, prioritize your tasks
based on urgency and importance. As it’s mostly the case, we need to deal with
many trivial tasks everyday which is urgent but not important. The good practice is to focus on a few important and valuable tasks which would take lots of time and effort,
even if it’s not that urgent. They are mostly long-term projects that would last
several months. Most often than not, we simply do everything that drops on our
shoulders, without thinking of prioritizing them. The likely result is the
trivial tasks that are urgent would take up most of our time. Then we don’t
have much time left to deal with the really important work, which can generate
most of the value.
I would say for the trivial tasks, if
you can delegate, give them to others, and focus on the important ones. If you
can’t delegate, talk with your manager, and explain what you need to do the
most, and why. You need to first have a clear overview of your own workload and
the value it generates before you can convince your boss. So stop doing just
what you are requested to do. Instead, try to be more self-initiated and
have more control of what you do.
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