Tips on making the most of your workday

Tips on making the most of your workday

Do you often find your workday spiralling out of control? You start each day with a plan to get so much done, but soon find yourself becoming distracted, focusing on low-priority tasks and procrastinating. How can you regain control of your time? 

One-size-fits-all lists on how to be more productive don’t work, so we’ll outline productivity techniques that can be adapted to your personality and working style.

Use the three basic principles of productivity to help guide you through your workday.

All workers and workdays are unique. With fewer companies and employees adhering to a traditional 9-to-5 day, the differences in our workdays are becoming more pronounced. But putting those differences aside, three overarching ideas apply to all our productivity tips:

1. Trust the small increments
You can’t expect to change years of working habits overnight. Small changes in how you work can gradually add up to big changes in productivity. Try one tip to start and keep adding more as you find the strategies that work best for you.

2. Be accountable
Whether it is weekly check-ins with a co-worker or setting your own deadlines and announcing them to others, having to answer to someone else can often force you to get the job done.

3. Forgive yourself
You are human. Accept that you are sometimes going to slip up, become distracted and have a bad day. It is more important to move on than to dwell on your mistakes.

For the multitasker

If you’re trying to do three things at once, you’re often accomplishing very little.

• A biological impossibility
Think you can get more done by juggling multiple tasks at the same time? Try calling your co-worker while typing an e-mail and checking your Facebook page. You may feel as if you’re being productive, but you’re probably not getting any of those tasks done efficiently.

We all have a limited amount of cognitive bandwidth, the number of thoughts and memories we can hold in our minds at any given time. Your brain may delude itself into thinking that it has more capacity than it really does, but it is really working extra hard to handle multiple thoughts at once when you are switching back and forth between tasks. Your ability to get things done depends on how well you can focus on one task at a time, whether it is for five minutes or an hour.
“Multitasking is not humanly possible,” said Earl K Miller, a neuroscience professor.

• More errors and less creativity
When you multitask, you tend to make more mistakes. When you toggle back and forth between tasks, the neural networks of your brain must backtrack to figure out where they left off and then reconfigure, he said. That extra activity causes you to slow down and errors become more likely.
“People are much more efficient if they monotask,” he said.

Trying to multitask also impedes creativity, he said. Truly innovative thinking arises when we allow our brain to follow a logical path of associated thoughts and ideas. This is possible when we can focus on a single mental pathway for an extended period.

The brain is like a muscle. It becomes stronger with use, Miller said. As with physical exercise, the more we strengthen our mental connections by focusing on one task to the exclusion of all others, the better we can perform.

How to monotask
Try to set up a work environment that encourages performing of one task at a time. It is probably not realistic to think that we can block off hours at a time for a single task, but even committing to monotask for five minutes can yield productivity benefits.

Here are a few small changes you can make:

• Remove temptation
Actively resist the urge to check unrelated social media while you are working on a task. Some workers may need to go as far as installing anti-distraction programmes that block access to the most addictive parts of the internet for specified periods.
Work on just one screen. Put away your cellphone and turn off your second monitor.

• Move
If you find yourself losing focus such as reading the same sentence over and over or if your mind continually wanders off topic, get up and briefly walk around, Miller said. A brief walk around your office can lift your mood, reduce hunger and help you refocus.

• Work in intervals
Set a timer for five or 10 minutes and commit to focusing on your assignment for that amount of time. Then allow yourself a minute of distraction, as long as you get back on your task for another five or 10 minutes.

When distractions take over

The tendency to become distracted is primal, so forgive yourself if you do. It arose in our earliest days as humans, when we needed to respond instantly to lions, tigers and other predators that threatened us, said Miller. Every sensory input was deeply interesting and our response to it was sometimes a matter of life or death. Our brain has not let go of this ancient survival mechanism. We still crave that informational tap on the shoulder, he added.
Fortunately, the more we work on focusing on one task at a time and ignoring distractions, the more we exercise the prefrontal cortex – the more evolved part of our brains. Then it becomes easier to focus.

For the procrastinator
Accountability, whether it is to yourself or to another person, can be crucial to your productivity.

• Be accountable
To fight procrastination, find an accountability partner. This can be a colleague or a manager, whose role is to receive regular progress reports on your project. The person you choose will have to take his or her role seriously, expressing disappointment if you have not achieved your goal and appreciation if you have. 
Some inveterate procrastinators even agree on a set of rewards or punishments to go with their deadlines, depending on what motivates them the most. A reward could be a free lunch, while punishment could be an email to the department announcing that a deadline was not met.

Stay on track
To-do lists work to keep you accountable because they help you stay on the path to getting your most important work done – if you use them effectively, that is.
Before you leave work for the day, make a list of five to eight goals that you would like to accomplish the following day, said Julie Morgenstern, a time management expert. On a separate list, add any personal errands that need to be done that day. That list should contain no more than two or three items. 
Be realistic about what you can accomplish in a day of work. Resist the urge to make a to-do list for the whole week, which can leave you feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

Make the items on your to-do list specific, realistic and simple. Don’t secretly pack eight or 10 tasks inside one huge item, like “Finish project”. Instead, break your project into small, separate components.

• To-do list disadvantages
Because our primal mind craves distraction, the classic to-do list can prevent interruptions from taking over your day. But human beings are also vulnerable to so-called “structured procrastination”, where in order to avoid working on a hard task, they spend time on a much easier one. Answering an email or liking a post on Facebook can be a form of structured procrastination. 
Writing your to-do list can also be a form of structured procrastination. So, give yourself five minutes or less to write a to-do list each morning. Keep it focused and short, so you’re not spending more time checking off items than actually completing them.

• List keepers
Some people like to keep their lists on paper, making emphatic and satisfying checkmarks whenever they complete a task. Others prefer the computer route
To avoid confusion, pick either paper or digital for your lists because it can be hard to manage both. 

This article first appeared in The New York Times.
The shifting definition of worker loyalty

The shifting definition of worker loyalty

IS LOYALTY in the workplace dead? Just last month, Lynda Gratton, a workplace expert, proclaimed that it was.

In The Financial Times, she said that it had been “killed off through shortening contracts, outsourcing, automation and multiple careers”. She seemed to be echoing the comments of other career specialists who say that loyalty has been sacrificed for the realities of a fast-paced economy.

But the situation may be more complicated. Depending on how you define it, loyalty may not be dead, but is just playing out differently in the workplace. Fifty years ago, an employee could stay at the same company for decades and the company reciprocated with long-term protection and care, said Tammy Erickson, an author and work-force consultant. Many were guaranteed long-time employment along with health care and a pension.

Now many companies cannot or will not hold up their end of the bargain, so why should the employees hold up theirs? Given the opportunity, they’ll take their skills elsewhere. These days, Gratton said, trust is more important than loyalty: “Loyalty is about the future – trust is about the present.” Serial career monogamy is now the order of the day, she said.

Erickson said that the quid pro quo of modern employment is more likely to be as long as I work for you, I promise to have the relevant skills and engage fully in my work. In return you’ll pay me fairly, but I don’t expect you to care for me when I’m 110. For some baby boomers, this shift has been hard to accept.

Many started their careers assuming that they would be rewarded based on long tenure. Now they are seeing that structure crumbling around them – witness recent lay-offs. Don’t their experience, wisdom and institutional memory count for anything? A long-time employee who is also productive and motivated is of enormous value, said Cathy Benko, the chief talent officer at Deloitte. On the other hand, she said, “You can be with a company a long time and not be highly engaged.”

Benko, who is a boomer herself, has seen her company shift its focus to employees’ level of engagement or “the level at which people are motivated to deliver their best work”, rather than length of tenure. Younger workers are likely to hold many more jobs in their lifetime than baby boomers did, she added.

More than previous generations, she said, they are asking themselves, is my work meaningful and challenging and does it fit in with my life? If the answer is no, they may move on. But the attitude is “I’m leaving, I had a great experience, and I’m taking that with me,” she said.

In certain people, though, loyalty shows up strongly as a personality trait, said Eva Rykr, an organisational psychologist and learning director of EQmentor, a professional development company. Some people just have a need to attach themselves to someone or something, she said. But that can be risky when the object of attachment is an abstract company, she warned.

“Perhaps you can consider loyalty to your co-workers and clients as the new loyalty,” she said. This would be “a practical loyalty that is based on our relationships”. “Looking at the bigger picture,” she added, “you can consider loyalty to your team, your department or a cause”.

But employees may be invoking loyalty when something very different is involved. They may say they are staying in a job for the sake of their company when in fact inertia and fear of change are keeping them there. Then there are the effects of the recent recession. Many people, if they haven’t been laid off, have stayed in jobs not out of loyalty but because they feel they have no choice.

Employers may need to prepare for profound disruptions as their workers head for the door when the job market improves. If the pendulum shifts, how will businesses persuade their best employees to stay? Money may do the trick, but not always. Especially with younger people, “you’re not going to buy extra loyalty with extra money”, Erickson said. Rather, employers need to make jobs more challenging and give workers more creative leeway, she added. More experienced workers can benefit from opportunities, retraining, recognition and flexibility.

Loyalty may not be what it once was, but most companies will still be better off with at least a core of people who stay with them across decades. If loyalty is seen as a commitment to keep workers of all ages fulfilled, productive and involved, it can continue to be cultivated in the workplace to the benefit of both employer and employee.

This article was first published in The New York Times.

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