Contents
Good friends and family will come to understand that you have to do what is right for you. If they don’t; then the problem might lie with their expectations rather than with your behaviour. When people set themselves objectives, they often talk themselves out of these new objectives by immediately trying to figure out how they are going to achieve them. When an objective is new, the method for its achievement is not important. Far more important is your reason for wanting to achieve it.
Patricia K. Flanigan has worked in higher education for over 28 years. She holds a doctoral degree in Organizational Leadership from the University of La Verne as well as a M.A. In Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before retiring and moving to Idaho in 2015, she served as the dean of online education and learning resources at Saddleback College, a large community college in Southern California. She currently consults in higher education, volunteers for AARP, writes for a local magazine, and serves as an Affiliate Faculty member at Boise State Universityand a contributing member to LEARN Idaho. Since February 2017, she has been the founding director for Smart Strategies for Successful Living, a community-based website designed to promote quality aging.
Designed for teams of all sizes, across all sectors.
Some companies knew this before the pandemic, of course, but many were still of the mindset that if someone works less hours, it automatically meant their work wasn’t getting done — or not getting done well. If team members work efficiently and manage their time well, they can accomplish their tasks in less time with the same quality standard. Rather than focusing on logging longer hours, focus on end results. You can also combine taking breaks with completing tasks in chunks. Combining these two tips is a great way to ensure you’re working smarter, not harder. We live in a society that places a high value on productivity — for better or worse — so working smarter can improve your productivity and performance in various aspects of your life.
Whilst all participants understood what the benefits were for standing and moving, very few understood the negative consequences of sedentary behaviour. They agreed that if they had more knowledge about the risks of sedentary behaviour they would be more inclined to want to reduce it. Through our own previous empirical work and the existing literature , we identified that high levels of workplace sitting was a key behaviour problem and that interventions were needed to reduce sitting time. You can work hard every day of your life and still not get close to achieving your objectives. If your work is not aligned with your objectives, all that hard work will be for nothing.
It’s a huge relief not to be scrambling to meet deadlines at the last minute anymore. Lots of to-do list apps offer a start date feature or something similar. Spending time in nature is an easy, free way to improve your ability to focus and lower your stress levels. Studies have found that spending time in a green area like a park or forest can reduce stress and blood pressure while also improving attention span.
You can also use apps like Rescuetime, StayFocusd, or Freedom to block distracting websites or the internet out altogether. While it may seem counterintuitive, it’s essential to know when to shut down your computer for the day. You know the signs—your mind wanders, and you keep rereading the same sentence over and over. Or maybe you feel stuck, and it’s taking you half an hour to write a simple email. As tempting as it might be to burn the midnight oil, by stopping and picking up projects the next day, you’ll accomplish more in the long run. GettyWhether in work or life, most of us strive to accomplish more in less time.
Some writers even squeeze “two mornings” into their day—getting up super early to write, then going back to bed until 8 or 9 a.m. Many productive writers, artists, and executives are known for getting up early. Even Hemingway supported this idea.He said of working early in the morning, “There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.” Try to get to a park or another calm, green area for a break during your workday. A walk down a city street will do you good, but it can’t compete with being surrounded by greenery. Zapier is a no-code automation tool that lets you connect your apps into automated workflows, so that every person and every business can move forward at growth speed.
Always prepare a list of your short-term and long-term plans and trace your progress accordingly. “Don’t continue to re-invent the wheel… starting from scratch each time is a big time waster,” says Novak. Instead, she recommends finding and modifying templates you’ve utilized in the past or finding someone who has already done what you need to do and take a cue from them on how to proceed. This allows you to leverage other people or other resources to reach your goal as efficiently and effectively as possible.
He was a game-changer and believed in working smartly and wasn’t a trend follower. In the contemporary world, with various opportunities and areas of work, competition is equally fierce and companies require efficient workers. To reach the top of the pyramid of excellence, one must possess qualities that make them stand out. Your aim should not be to achieve your goals anyhow but ensure fruitful and productive results. Do not execute your tasks blindly, rather know the impact of your work and how does can help you accomplish your targets.
This is especially useful for small tasks because you can knock out a bunch at once . When I really focus on what I’m doing and work hard, I’m usually surprised at how much I can get done. Something that should take half a day can be done in a couple of hours when I minimize distractions and concentrate. Plus, you don’t want to exhaust yourself trying to solve it alone if you know your manager could help you with it.
Set a start date for tasks
The emerging themes were then organised into meaningful clusters and an initial coding template was defined. The template was then applied to a further focus group dataset and refined. Focus groups or interviews are recommended, using the COM-B model as the basis for discussion, to aid a deeper understanding of behaviours that need to change for the target behaviour to occur. In this study, we conducted focus groups with office-based NHS staff to explore their Capability, Opportunity and Motivation (COM-B) and the Theoretical Domains Framework to reduce their sitting time . The second layer of the BCW comprises nine intervention functions .
- “That way, when you get a notification, you know exactly what kind of alert it is without even looking at your device.”
- Do your coworkers come to you with questions while you’re in the middle of something?
- That way, you’ll complete tasks faster and not waste time trying to find solutions.
- Once you’re on track by working smarter, use that extra time that you’ve won for yourself to do things outside of work that bring you joy.
You pay more attention to clear and concise communication, which also helps your decision-making abilities. Create a list of things you want to get done the next day each night, and organize it by morning, afternoon, and evening. Maybe you’ve thought about how many projects you’re taking on or how long your commute is to work. Maybe you’re getting things done, but it’s taking all your energy.
Featured Articles
After a certain point, your body becomes tired and your mind wears down, leading to more frequent lapses in concentration and careless mistakes. Do your work when you have no distractions surrounding you. You want your efficiency to be maximized as much as possible.
This does NOT mean taking the easiest method for the sake of it or being lazy. For example, if you respond to numerous e-mails per day and answer the same questions again and again, save your responses. When those questions come up, you can cut and paste your canned response. You might have to make minor edits, but the bulk of it will already be written. If you are self-employed, declining a job like this is much smarter even though it’s hard to let money go.
Shortly after each measurement point, participants were given a summary of their own average sitting ; and standing and stepping time during work hours and for the whole day. To support behaviour change, information about how to set goals for reducing sitting at work and on action planning, was explained in the seminar at the group level. At the individual level, each participant was given a paper-based diary where they could note their goals, set an action plan of how to achieve these goals and review them regularly.
The logic behind this is that it takes time for you to get into a rhythm. If you constantly start and stop that process, you’re wasting time catching up where you left off. Many people, when faced with six dozen tasks at a time, decide to work longer hours and push themselves to the point of exhaustion to get things done. Instead, it’s time to look at how to work smarter, not harder and learn more effective ways to work. This type of scheduling requires good time management skills, too. Setting time limits on how long you’ll work on a specific task and pre-schedule breaks can feel stressful, but these boundaries will benefit your productivity.
You make too many mistakes when you’re ill or tired to call that “working smart.” You should ideally be getting eight hours of sleep every night. You can certainly pull continuous 12 hour days at work, but it’s not sustainable.
Readiness-to-change
This will save you time, and you will be able to cut meetings to a minimum by honing in on the important work. However, I often find that we are doing non-essential tasks or ones that can easily be postponed. Even just viewing photos of nature scenes has been proven to increase positive emotions and improve reaction times and accuracy on cognitively demanding tasks. Reviewing your progress often will help you identify what’s working and what’s not. Set a reminder for each week or month to go over what you completed. I do this monthly, and I’ve found it’s an excellent way to have an honest health check on my productivity and my priorities.
Use productivity and automation tools
As an educator, her focus is to inspire others to live and age well. Participants were encouraged to discuss and suggests ways in which their capability, opportunity and motivation to reduce sitting at work could be supported. Within each component, the 14 TDF domains were raised as discussion points by the researcher as appropriate.
Software designed for productivity and automation can be a helpful shortcut to simplify tasks, streamline your workflow, and make collaborating with others a breeze. Productivity tools can benefit individuals and large teams working on projects with lots of moving parts. In fact, when we try to multitask, we actually accomplish less because we slowly lose our ability to focus enough to learn, according to neuropsychologist Dr. Cynthia Kubu. So, rather than trying to work on multiple different tasks at once, try focusing on one at a time — you’ll see better work quality and higher productivity overall. When our teams are working smarter, and not harder, they will see the impact they’re making on the organization.
Steps 2 and 3: Select and specify the target behaviour
However, to bring more clarity, let us understand hard work vs smart work through some examples. But by learning how to manage your energy, in addition to your time, your productivity will skyrocket. One study found that having your phone present, even if you are not using it, can make you perform 20% worse than if it was out of sight.
We suggest keeping a to-do list short, concise, and realistic. Achieving small goals not only moves you forward, but can also help improve your sense of accomplishment. I’ve chased perfection too many times in my career, searching for the perfect image for a presentation and spending hours drafting, revising, and rewriting short email updates to senior management. I would spend hours updating my project list for one-on-one check-ins with my boss, which at the end of the day, he never looked at. A job that takes hours to complete for someone who works hard, a smarter individual can finish in less time. One of the classic examples of working smartly is Aesop’s Fables’ story of “The Crow and the Pitcher”.
Research has shown that even very brief moments of diversion can greatly improve your productivity. The to-don’t list is full of the things you need to avoid in order to find a good work-life balance in the long term. For example, you can add “mindlessly scroll through social media” or “people-pleasing” to your to-don’t https://coinbreakingnews.info/ list to help you focus on what really matters. These tools can help keep you focused, organize your tasks, and eliminate distractions from your workspace. I still have alerts set up for my due dates, so I don’t miss them, but starting a task days before it’s due lets me relax and get it done well ahead of time.