Are you ready to hack your workday to get more done in less time and truly work smarter, not harder? If my love and study of productivity and organization is meant for anything, it’s meant to help us (me, you, everyone we know!) learn the essential strategies that make our workdays easier. So today I have compiled a list of twelve of my favorite time-saving, stress-releasing, and productivity inducing workday hacks to help you become the master of your own workflow in the office!
1. Get properly dressed: Yep, first things first! If you aren’t wear the proper clothing for work you are going to be uncomfortable, uneasy and you’ll ultimately end up working slow and miserable counting down the hours until you can return home to step into your pajamas. Although you may work in a formal business environment that requires a certain dress code, unless you are wearing a uniform, you have some say over the cut and materials of the clothing you buy, and so many brands have popped up in recent years to give women more comfortable formal office wear options.
2. Diffuse essential oils: One of the first things I do when I step into my office for a workday is create a blend of essential oils for the workday. I wrote about my essential oil secret weapon a few weeks ago, so make sure to check out that post if you want some tips from me on oils to diffuse.
3. Listen to white noise or classical music: For most of us, working silently isn’t the most productive way to work. I personally love listening to classical music while I work or turn on a sound machine app that can create some subtle white noise so that I can focus better, especially when I am working on difficult or stressful tasks.
4. Theme your workdays: Ever since I began theming my work days I have been much more efficient. Essentially, I took all my major work tasks and grouped like items together to come up with themes for each day of the week and on those days I use the theme to guide my work. Although I may need to stray from time to time for urgent issues, theming my days has kept me more accountable and helps me streamline my work.
5. Batch like items together: This goes along with theming my workdays, but whether or not you theme your days, you should always batch process your work. Jumping from task to task has been scientifically proven to be a waste of time, so when you can spend a chunk of time doing the same task over and over, you save yourself time by working more efficiently.
6. Set a timer to complete annoying tasks: Whenever I am avoiding tasks, I find the best thing to do is to set a timer to get them done! Having the deadline of a timer helps me get past my mental blocks and just do the hard work. Give it a try next time you recognize that you are avoiding certain tasks.
7. Shut your door: Shutting your door is a simple way to tell yourself and others that you are busy working. Having an open door policy in the office is nice, but when people see an open door and want to waste some time at work, they head straight for it! Likewise, when your door is open, it encourages you more often to leave your office or allow passers by to distract you from your tasks. So keep the door shut and if you are working on a particularly difficult project or task, you might want to leave a Do Not Disturb note on your door to discourage visits.
8. Make a NOT To Do List: No matter if you work in an office for a big corporation or if you work in your bedroom on your own small business, tasks come across our desks and emails that we should not waste our time on and one of the hardest parts of managing your personal workload is understanding which tasks you should not be doing. I’m a people pleaser and when I get a task, any task, I take ownership of it and strive to complete it, but through the years I’ve learned that sometimes tasks come up and they are not worth your time, even if they are assigned to you. So, as you learn about these useless tasks, keep a list of them so you know not to do them in the future. If you work for yourself it will be easy for you to delegate them to an assistant or ignore them completely, but if you don’t you may need to have a slightly difficult conversation with your boss and let them know you aren’t completing the task and give them a reasonable and well thought out explanation why the tasks is a waste. A lot of time, especially in corporate culture, tasks get attention that are worthless and our superiors keep assigning the task because that’s the way it’s always been done. Be willing to stand up for change to save yourself and your company the time and energy.
9. Use an email autoresponder and only check email twice a day: For some, this hack is NOT an option, but for those whose work is not tied to checking emails for customer service or something similar, you should give this a try. Set up an auto response email that says something like “Thank you for your email. I generally reply to all emails within 24 hours but if this is an emergency please call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX”. What this simple auto responder does is sets an expectation to anyone emailing you that they will get a response but not immediately, while also creating a process for urgent issues so that you can turn off from your email and check it when you are ready without fear of missing something important.
10. Keep your cell phone off your desk: I am always distracted by my iPhone. Not just by messages but also by the fact that I can at any time pick it up and check Instagram if I want, and I unfortunately spend too much time during my day doing this without even thinking about it. So, when I keep my phone off my desk, either on a charger on another table or in my bag, I remove the distraction. Since I use a Mac, if I get a phone call while my phone is off my desk, I can actually screen and answer the call from my laptop without having to get up, but if you are worried that you may miss important calls, devices like the Ringly or Apple Watch notify you without having to keep your phone out.
11. Keep hydrated by drinking water at set intervals: Keeping hydrated through the day is very important for mental productivity, but if you keep a bottle out and sip on it all day, you’ll end up disrupting your workflow for bathroom breaks. So, to combat this, I try to drink my fluids in bulk at regular intervals so that I’m not running back and forth from the bathroom as I work.
12. Reward yourself with activity after each 2 hour block of work: As I work, not matter how productive I am being, I always get the urge to check social media, read a blog post or watch a YouTube video, however, I have started to discipline myself to only engage in these activities after I have completed a block of work. This helps me to create a reward system that entices me to work faster and complete more tasks throughout the day. And it’s much healthier for you than taking a snack or smoke break!
I hope you enjoyed these twelve workday hacks and if you give any of them a try I want to hear about it! Tag me on Instagram @MissTrenchcoat and use #CharmedGTD in your description so me and the rest of our community can follow along with your productivity journey!
xoxo,
