4 Ways to Speed Up Your Productivity and Work

At the end of the workday – do you feel proud of putting in 8 hours of work or do you feel guilty about being distracted most of the time? Kudos to your focus and determination if you are the “proud” type. Welcome to the club! If you are the “guilty” type. Cheer up! You are not alone.

Different Ways to Increase Productivity and Speed at Work

99% of the employees face distractions at work. Social media, webchats, reading news websites, and engaging in non-work-related discussions with colleagues were among the top 4 distractions at the workplace. The key to speeding up your work and increasing productivity is to strike a balance between work and so-called distractions.

Distractions at the Workplace

Udemy 2018 Workplace Distraction Report based on a survey of 1000 full-time U.S. officegoers revealed that more than half of the respondents admitted to being distracted by social media during work hours. Other distractions include a noisy workplace, talkative co-workers, personal issues, and office gossip. The Udemy survey stated that 52% of the respondents were more productive when working in a quiet work environment. Even business meetings can distract employees from their work. However, since meetings are scheduled in advance employees can plan their work schedule in such a way that their work is not interrupted.

Here is a list of common workplace distractions:

• Chatty colleagues
• Social media, online news, emails
• Office noise
• Meetings
• Mobile phones/texting
• Gossip, coffee/tea/smoking breaks
• Personal issues

How Distractions and Delays Affect Speed and Productivity

What is the impact of these distractions?

Of course, it makes employees lose focus on their work and also slows down their work speed and productivity. The Udemy survey also revealed that once an employee is distracted, it takes 23 minutes to refocus on a task. So powerful are these distractions that they sometimes side-track the regular project work.

The reality about distractions caused by social media or surfing the Internet is that they become ongoing tasks, one news item prompts the employee to browse through other related articles. It is like a bottomless pit – the employee gets sucked into it and loses track of time. In the beginning, employees can snap away from these distractions and refocus on their work, but once they get addicted to these distractions, their work speed and productivity go for a toss.

In addition to distractions, delays in business processes also affect the speed and productivity at work. The most common delays are approval delays. Delay in the approval of invoices or requisitions causes bottlenecks in the business process.

Ways to Speed up your work

We have discussed at length about distractions at the workplace and how they affect our focus and speed of work. How many of these distractions are self-inflicted and how many are due to the work environment? Once we have this classification done, it will be easier to work towards eliminating the self-inflicted ones. Eliminating self-inflicted distractions clears the air so that employees can work on ways to improve work performance and speed.

Here are a few tips to bring back the focus and speed up your work:

1. Sharpen your focus:

Narrowing down your focus on work-related stuff helps in increasing productivity. Steering clear of distractions and focusing on your work helps get work done faster. This doesn’t mean you cannot take breaks; all you need to do is time your breaks so that you don’t lose focus on your work.

2. Set deadlines:

Self-imposed deadlines motivate employees to speed up their work. You can set everyday deadlines or weekly targets to complete your work. Still, better, you can reward yourself once the targets are achieved. You can treat yourself to a movie or a meal at your favorite restaurant, or as simple as a candy bar when you achieve targets.

3. Set work schedules:

being organized in your work is a great way of increasing your productivity. Sketch a work schedule that times your work, breaks, and meetings. If you set a schedule for a week, then you can review and make changes whenever required.

4. Leverage technology:

Adopting the latest technology like automation can speed up business processes. Redundancies are eliminated and business processes are streamlined by automating the repetitive, mundane steps in a process. Approval delays can be avoided by automated approvals.

Workflow Automation for Work Speed and Efficiency

Apart from distractions, performing mundane tasks can also cause employees to lose focus or interest in their work. Repetitive steps in a business process can be automated through workflow automation. Workflow automation increases the speed and efficiency of business processes by eliminating redundancies and streamlining work processes. Processes that involve approvals can be speeded up by automating the approvals. Workflow automation brings speed, efficiency, and transparency into the approval processes.

Cflow is a powerful workflow automation software that can automate any business workflow within a few minutes. The easy-to-use visual form builder can be used by even a non-technical person to automate a process workflow. Speed up your work and increase business productivity with Cflow.

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