Four Tips to Enhance Office Work

Working in an office is the modern reality for many people, but it doesn’t need to be a distressing one. There are numerous ways to make life easier while working in an office. Let's go over review four simple adjustments you can make to streamline your time throughout the workday.

1. Show Up on Time, If Not Early

Want to simplify the workday, while also keeping your bosses satisfied? One of the simplest ways to do so is to merely show up on time, prepared for the day.

Management tends to see prepared workers as more conscientious than their coworkers and, as a result, will often score them higher on performance reviews. Whether or not it can be considered fair, those who perform at their best later in the day are often viewed less favorably than those employees who do their best work in the early morning.

Attendance in general is usually a concern. We’ve all known someone who seemed to miss days of work until they just stopped showing up altogether. This isn’t always because this missed time has caused them to fall behind, either. Many businesses will look to people who are in regular attendance at work (but may not perform as well) as better employees than high performers who frequently miss time.

As Woody Allen said, “90 percent of life is just showing up.”

2. Set Aside an Hour to Handle Your Most Pressing Problems

For a place that is designed for accomplishing work, the office can sometimes be a difficult place to actually accomplish work. You just get into your swing, when suddenly… emails, phone calls, instant messages, office chats... all start popping simultaneously. I don’t have to tell you how irritating these interruptions can be, and how they can throw a day into flux. This is one of the reasons that it is so imperative to schedule yourself for one hour of uninterrupted work to address your priorities. Leveraging your office’s scheduling system to help manage this time and set aside this hour has shown to be an effective means of enhancing productivity.

One of the most effective strategies is to proactively eliminate or at least diminish distractions. First, you need to ensure that your team is aware that you will be unavailable for a period of time each morning. In order for this to be effective, you need to maintain clear and direct communication with your fellow team members. Another option you have is to actually use the tools that you frequently overlook. Take the “Do Not Disturb” setting on your smartphone, or instance. This tool is a great way to shave back the amount of distractions that you need to deal with.

3. Turn off Music

With the modern penchant for open office spaces, the workday can get loud and manic. This makes listening to music seem like a good idea. Alas, this isn’t so much the case, as it simply substitutes one distraction for another. You may be under the impression that you are accomplishing things faster, but the research indicates that this isn’t the case.

One neuroscientist of prominence suggests an alternative: instead of distracting your brain with music as you try to be productive, listen to some music before you begin to put yourself in the right frame of mind. By listening to music - and then stopping - before you begin your task, you can also file away your mental distractions so that they won’t cause a problem.

4. End the Day by Planning Tomorrow

Those last few minutes of the workday can seem really long, with everyone shifting into evening mode. As tempting as it is to switch off “work mode,” we suggest you resist for a few additional moments to organize the following day.

Taking a few minutes to review your schedule for the next day is like taking something out to defrost for dinner. Instead of winging it tomorrow, you know what you have planned and what you need to do in order to be successful. Which situation sounds better to you: coming home to something that just needs to be popped in the oven for a savory slow roast, or coming home and realizing that you have to microwave a piece of meat in order for it to (hopefully) cook properly? In our business, we’ve found that taking those few minutes to plan the rest of our day in the morning sets us back for the rest of the day.

Try these tips out to see if they have any benefit on your productivity. What else have you tried to boost your workday’s productivity?