Are you having a tough time getting everything done at work? Here are five steps to a more productive work day.
1. Social media has become an extremely important tool for businesses, however, that doesn’t mean you need to spend every waking our reading and writing tweets or updates. Limit your Twitter and Facebook usage to once every few hours or at lunch time only and use those spare five minutes to chip away at more pressing tasks.
2. Phone calls can eat up huge chunks of your day, particularly unnecessary ones, so you need to address it if you want to get on with work. One solution is to move all your inbound call handling needs to an outsourced call centre. You can brief them on how you want calls to be answered, how to deal with individual callers, which people to put through, and which to take messages off. It’s easy and it’s less expensive than hiring someone in the office.
3. If you’re forever hopping from one task to another, then you need more focus. Use your Monday mornings to get meetings out the way and plan out your week. If you’re having meetings out the office, make sure they’re not in the middle of the day. Could they be done on your way into the office or at the end of the day, for instance? By creating To Do lists and prioritising what needs doing, you should get a lot more done.
4. You may also want to start using your commute more effectively. Sitting in traffic can be lost time, unless you’re using it to make calls (using a hands-free kit, of course). Alternatively, if you have the option of commuting by train, why not do that and use mobile internet or a laptop to plan the day ahead and draft any emails that need to go out.
5. Another option to improve your productivity levels is to ask for help. If you’re the boss it can be a struggle to hand over projects you consider vitally important, but you hired this team for a reason and they are there to help. Be careful of overloading them with work, especially if they already have too much to do in the hours provided, but if there are meetings they can attend on your behalf or small tasks they can take care of, maybe now is the time to show faith in their ability.
Do you think you could benefit from using an inbound contact centre or telephone call handling service? If so, it may be time to take action.