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Work countless hours? Make too little progress? We’ve all been there and done that. When it happens too often, learning to stay organized can help pull you out of that rut and maximize your productivity.
Regardless of whether you work from home or in an office, there are several steps you can take. This article discusses the importance of organization and shares 10 tips on how to stay organized and efficient at work.
The importance of organization
Picture this: You wake up early to complete some work before the day’s 6 p.m. deadline. But you spend part of the day chasing your dog through the neighborhood. You have several impromptu conversations with members of the HOA about the height of your grass, and several more with teachers about your kid’s progress at school.
At 5 p.m., you manage to get behind your desk.
You spend 45 minutes working feverishly, ten minutes swallowing your pride to ask for an extension, and five minutes crafting an apologetic email.
Your evening is spent behind the computer trying to ignore the sounds of your family having a pleasant evening without you, or your friends texting you to meet them at your favorite restaurant.
You go to bed feeling exhausted and upset since you barely got the job done, didn’t work on any personal goals, and missed valuable time with friends and family.
We’ve all had those days.
However, the rising competition in the workplace demands that we be better, faster, and more efficient.
Achieving your goals and a healthy work-life balance becomes possible when you methodically work toward them. To help you, we’ve put together this list of 10 tips you can follow to maximize your productivity during the workday.
10 tips for staying organized at work
Your current unproductive habits are hardwired into your brain and reinforced through repetition. And changing them can be challenging.
According to the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology, the most direct way to stop bad habits is through monitoring your behavior when these unwanted habits occur, and understanding the situation that’s causing them. You can then take active steps to limit the bad habit.
The tips here can help minimize distractions and declutter your mind so that you can get your priorities straight.
It might be unrealistic to apply every one of these tips simultaneously. So instead, we recommend you pick out a few that resonate with your style of work and adopt the ones that work for you. It all comes down to some trial and error.
Keep in mind that learning organizational skills doesn’t magically mean that you get your job done. You still have to push yourself to do the work.
1. Make to-do lists
To-do lists are a no-brainer. You can pick the traditional route and use sticky notes, or download one of the many online productivity apps. Writing down your tasks allows you to visualize and prioritize them so that you can get the most important tasks done first.
Try scheduling the various tasks you need to complete before the end of the day. This gives you a definite time frame and can help prevent procrastination.
2. Triage priorities
Triage is a term typically used in a medical context when too many patients need attending. Doctors assign degrees of urgency to each patient so that they can attend to the gravest illnesses first. If doctors didn’t prioritize patients, someone with a severe stroke might be kept waiting while someone else with a common cold received treatment.
We, of course, aren’t talking about hospital settings. We’re recommending you triage your to-do list. List all your tasks, and then categorize them so that the most important tasks are done first. Otherwise, you might spend five hours on a low-priority project, and give yourself not enough time for something more urgent. Triaging helps you stay on top of the essential tasks.
You can also use tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to help you prioritize your tasks effectively.
3. Make daily, weekly, and monthly plans
Knowing your goals is an essential part of achieving them. Take some amount of time to think about your long-term goals. Where do you want to be in a year? In five years? What about 10?
Let’s say you want to have your first book published within the next year. Breaking down this goal into daily, weekly, and monthly objectives can help you strategize how to reach your goal. If you want to complete the writing in the first six months, how many words or pages would you need to complete per month, and how many hours would you spend on it per week?
You should also fit these objectives into your schedule like you would a doctor’s appointment to make sure you stick to them.
Breaking down your long-term goals into smaller, short-term plans can help you continuously work to accomplish them. It can also make the overall process less overwhelming to think about. Not to mention, long-term goals get accomplished more quickly.
After all, writing for two hours this Tuesday is less daunting than constantly reminding yourself that you have to finish writing a book before the year ends.
4. Use online or paper planners
We can’t emphasize it enough: Writing stuff down helps! If you prefer writing things by hand, you can use a paper planner, or if you prefer keeping things digital, you can use a simple tool like Google Calendar or Evernote.
Planners can help you stay on track with your ongoing projects and commitments. Having a visual representation of your schedule and tasks to accomplish can help you get through them with a calm and focused mind since you don’t have to worry about forgetting or missing any deadlines.
It might also help to color-code your tasks according to the type, importance, urgency, preference, and so on.
5. Delegate work
Not everyone can do what you do, so prioritize tasks you need to tend to personally. To maximize efficiency and avoid taking on too much, consider delegating jobs that don’t require your level of expertise to the people around you.
Provide detailed guidelines and feedback for the tasks you assign, so the people doing them know how to do them in the best possible manner.
This process can be slightly more challenging when working from home rather than in an office setting. Fortunately, there are several productivity tools like Slack or Trello to help remote teams simplify and streamline work.
6. Avoid multitasking
When work piles up, we often try to cross two or more things off at once. For instance, you might attend a phone meeting while reviewing and adding notes to your writer’s article. While you may think you’re being efficient by multitasking, you’re doing the opposite.
Individuals grossly overestimate their capacity to multitask. A recent study suggests that the human brain multitasks by creating and using shared mental representations of those tasks. The study posited that even if we increase brain resources dedicated to the tasks, the efficiency of a multitasking system doesn’t increase, as it’s primarily dependent on the resource sharing scheme implemented by the brain—and that scheme is inefficient.
Think of it like this: When your computer has too many tabs open, it slows down, right? Similarly, when we do more than one thing at a time, our attention is divided, reducing the efficiency and quality of our work.
In another recent study, it was found that the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds today. The more people multitask, the more they are driven to multitask—with negative results on our ability to learn, focus, and even empathize with others.
7. Schedule breaks
Like multitasking, running between meetings without a break might provide the illusion that you’re ticking a lot off your to-do list quickly, but it’s counterproductive. Studies show that being well-rested and taking breaks helps people stay on-task and engaged.
If you work on a computer, use these breaks to also give your eyes a few minutes away from the screen. If you’ve been slumping at your desk for two hours, use this time to stretch or walk around for 15 minutes.
Although this might feel like a waste of time, it’s exactly what your brain needs to rejuvenate and stay alert.
8. Establish a routine
Having a daily routine helps you convert your daily tasks into daily habits. Just like you brush your teeth every morning without a second thought, having a fixed work routine can help you stay more organized and make your workdays easier.
For example, you can accustom yourself to checking emails every day at 9 a.m. Once this becomes a habit, it’ll be harder to procrastinate.
9. Clean up your workspace regularly
Being focused and motivated in a chaotic environment is challenging. Research suggests that too much clutter tends to hurt productivity, but a little can be OK, especially for creative people. Whether you need a completely clean desk depends on your personality and job.
If you find that clutter distracts you and you need to make a change to get better results, try keeping a tidier workspace. If you’re a creative person and having things on the desk to fidget with help, then that’s OK—but keep it under control, because too much will have negative effects.
10. Schedule your workday in blocks of time
Studies suggest the best way to make sure you’re efficient is through scheduling blocks of time. Reserve some of these blocks for doing specific tasks without distraction. So, for example, if you schedule a block of time to complete some work, you should put away your phone, close the other many tabs that you have open, and avoid answering emails. This is called deep work.
Another school of thought—the Pomodoro Technique—recommends blocking time in 25-minute chunks, followed by five-minute breaks. This method is good for people who tend to get distracted while working, or who find themselves failing to multitask well. Many writers, designers, coders, and students have had success with this technique.
Stay organized and create an effective workflow
Implementing some of these tips can help you start the next day with a free and fresh mindset. Create a practical planning system and daily work routine to make achieving even the biggest goals a lot less intimidating.
If, after implementing these tips, you find yourself with a few more hours each day, why not take on some additional freelance work? Upwork allows you to work any time and from anywhere. Browse available freelance jobs today.
