Work design is a major aspect in pinpointing how productive your work is. It influences the amount of work you possibly can finish along with how successful you'll be at accomplishing your own goals and objectives. Working intelligently is clearly far better than just working hard.
In a world of information overload, we are always multi tasking and have too many things that are considered a high priority. The problem with this is that we can only handle a couple of high priority things at any given time. If you have more than a couple of projects that are considered high priority, then you cannot be effective at successfully achieving all of them. If your priority list is very long, you should kill a few projects or temporarily narrow down your list.
In large corporations, workers are generally given too many projects. Each project is classified as being extremely important. An employee seldom says no even when he or she understands that it's impossible to complete everything to his or her best ability. In this case, there are generally two choices. First, you can complete every project with none of them being great products. Or, you can do a great job on one or two of them with the rest either not getting done at all or finishing late. Your manager will try to squeeze every drop of productivity out of you, but there's always a limit.
Assume you've got a couple of initiatives that happen to be essential to your ability to succeed. Everything else is either unimportant or is merely an action towards attaining that objective. Big initiatives need to be split up into basic steps and goals. This can help keep you on course. Also effectively achieving milestones can help keep you motivated to go forward and finish the next phase.
Your workspace should give you comfort and should not make you feel like you're going to prison everyday. Cubicles are not human friendly. If you can design your workspace to have a high degree of inspiration, the quality of your work will improve.
Once you get a grasp on how to prioritize effectively, you need to allocate distraction free time to get things done. This can be really difficult. We have cell phones going off, email messages popping up, and people walking in the door assuming we're working in a public place. The real issue lies with the fact that a single distraction will interrupt our flow. During a critical focus time, a single interruption can completely throw us off. Then, we have to spend at least 5 minutes or longer just to get back to where we were.
Having said that, you need to figure out a way to get yourself some distraction-free time. For many people, this can be early in the morning. For example, if you get to work at six o'clock, there are few, if any, other workers in the office. No one is there to distract you. Whenever everyone else comes trickling in, between 8 and 9, you will already have 2 hours of productive work done. Compare this with the fact that most employees only deliver about 2 hours of quality work per day. This is because of things like distractions and meetings. By the time they arrive to work, you will have already equaled or surpassed your coworkers. The difference is a matter of discipline and workflow design.
In a world of information overload, we are always multi tasking and have too many things that are considered a high priority. The problem with this is that we can only handle a couple of high priority things at any given time. If you have more than a couple of projects that are considered high priority, then you cannot be effective at successfully achieving all of them. If your priority list is very long, you should kill a few projects or temporarily narrow down your list.
In large corporations, workers are generally given too many projects. Each project is classified as being extremely important. An employee seldom says no even when he or she understands that it's impossible to complete everything to his or her best ability. In this case, there are generally two choices. First, you can complete every project with none of them being great products. Or, you can do a great job on one or two of them with the rest either not getting done at all or finishing late. Your manager will try to squeeze every drop of productivity out of you, but there's always a limit.
Assume you've got a couple of initiatives that happen to be essential to your ability to succeed. Everything else is either unimportant or is merely an action towards attaining that objective. Big initiatives need to be split up into basic steps and goals. This can help keep you on course. Also effectively achieving milestones can help keep you motivated to go forward and finish the next phase.
Your workspace should give you comfort and should not make you feel like you're going to prison everyday. Cubicles are not human friendly. If you can design your workspace to have a high degree of inspiration, the quality of your work will improve.
Once you get a grasp on how to prioritize effectively, you need to allocate distraction free time to get things done. This can be really difficult. We have cell phones going off, email messages popping up, and people walking in the door assuming we're working in a public place. The real issue lies with the fact that a single distraction will interrupt our flow. During a critical focus time, a single interruption can completely throw us off. Then, we have to spend at least 5 minutes or longer just to get back to where we were.
Having said that, you need to figure out a way to get yourself some distraction-free time. For many people, this can be early in the morning. For example, if you get to work at six o'clock, there are few, if any, other workers in the office. No one is there to distract you. Whenever everyone else comes trickling in, between 8 and 9, you will already have 2 hours of productive work done. Compare this with the fact that most employees only deliver about 2 hours of quality work per day. This is because of things like distractions and meetings. By the time they arrive to work, you will have already equaled or surpassed your coworkers. The difference is a matter of discipline and workflow design.
About the Author:
Eileen Jacobs is a tax accountant from Las Vegas. She has over 30 years of experience in accounting. Eileen's Blog
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