Work Efficiency: 3 Mistakes to Avoid
It’s important to understand what might be slowing down your work. Knowing these three key aspects, discussed in this article, can help you eliminate wasted time and energy to become more efficient and productive!
With more and more organizations relying on productivity as a primary indicator of economic value creation, being able to maximize your time and effort at work is key.
Every day, you could be wasting hours of your time doing stuff that isn’t directly helping your organization achieve its goals. This can be caused by the way you organize and prioritize your work, the way you communicate with people, or how you manage your tasks.
So, What is Work Efficiency Anyway?
Here’s a hard rule to follow: You are only as productive as your least efficient activity. Now that might lead you to wonder what exactly is an efficiency-producing activity?
Efficiency and productivity are two of the most important concepts in business, which is why a lot of businesses make efficiency-enhancing programs and processes.
Efficiency and productivity are related in that they’re both about having work done and getting results. However, they’re not the same thing! Productivity is about the amount of output that can be created from a given amount of input. Efficiency is about producing desired goals with the available resources. Or in other words, while productivity is more about “quantity,” efficiency is about the “quality” of the job done.
Again, productivity is about how much you get done in a given time frame with given resources. Efficiency is about how well you get it done. If you’re working hard but not getting much done, then you’re wasting energy. If you’re working hard and getting a lot done, but in an inefficient way, then you’re still wasting energy.
When it comes to efficiency, there could be many areas where you may need to make improvements. You’ve probably been doing some things wrong. Don’t worry, we all have! But instead of trying to cover everything, we’ll go through the most relevant things, while providing you with real solutions.
To help you avoid common time sinks and wasted efforts, this article will look at 3 things that can be particularly detrimental to your work efficiency, productivity, and overall performance.
Now, let’s dive in!
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If you’ve been struggling with work efficiency and know you need to improve, but you don’t know where to start. It’s probably a wise idea to look at the way you track your performance.
A lot of people work hard, but not a lot of people know how to work efficiently. It’s like a race: You can run as fast as you want, but if you don’t know where to go, you’re bound to lose.
Being more efficient with your time and energy doesn’t mean working harder; it means working smarter. A smart way to work efficiently is to always keep tabs on your performance. Maybe it goes without saying, but when you measure your own personal productivity, you also need to measure the productivity of your team. This is important because you’re only as efficient as your team is.
A lot of people don’t know how much work they’re doing compared to other people on their team or at other companies. They don’t know how much time they spend on certain tasks or whether an hour spent working on one project is better than an hour spent working on another one. Poor measurement of your personal performance can lead to inefficient use of resources. You must measure your performance if you want to improve it, and you have to do it right. You can’t just guess at the best way to work or what needs improvement. Instead, you need to know exactly how productive your current methods are and where your weaknesses lie.
Monitoring performance is important for learning and improvement. It helps you see if you’re moving in the right direction or if you need to adjust your strategy.
For example, you should measure the amount of time you spend on certain tasks and then compare it with other people in similar roles within the company. You may be surprised by what you find out about yourself and what others are doing; it can be going either way (you’re outperforming or under-performing) but his information will help identify opportunities for improvement and allow you to focus on areas where you need extra focus.
The first step toward improving efficiency at work can be as simple as setting up a tracking system that helps you measure your personal performance daily. This can be done with tools available on the market that automate the process, based on certain efficiency metrics. For example, they tell you how much time you spend on each of your listed tasks.
Maybe you spend more than enough time in the morning reading/sending emails.
We all have done multitasking. Whether you’re talking about eating while watching TV, texting while driving or checking email while talking to your boss, multitasking is a part of lives. However, and this might surprise you, the human brain is not wired to multitasking!
Scientific evidence shows that multitasking isn’t always as efficient as it seems. In fact, it can often lead to increased stress and cause your productivity to take a nosedive. A study published in the “Journal of Experimental Psychology” indicates that multitasking may be undermining your efficiency
What we usually think of as multitasking, is just successive mono-tasking. Our brain switches from one task to the other in a rapid way rather than focusing on two or more things at once. While this is true for most of us, a tiny fraction of people can indeed multitask efficiently: 2.5%, according to Health Essentials
When you try to focus on two or more things at a time, your brain can’t devote its full attention to either one of them. And if you’re not giving it your full attention, there’s no way you can be as efficient as possible. Therefore, unless you’re one of these “2.5 percenters” of the population, you’d better avoid multitasking altogether!
So what’s the solution? We bring you a list of tips to boost your productivity:
Our lives are becoming increasingly automated, and this trend is set to continue in the future. And the way we work is no exception. Some people are aware of the technological disruption and embracing it. Others, resistant to this change, are still stuck in the old ways of doing things, failing to take advantage of the benefits that automation can bring.
We all know that automation can make our lives easier, but we often overlook it as an option because we don’t want to spend money on software or hardware.
And no, we’re not talking about your old manual spreadsheets! Yes, spreadsheets are an easy way to automate some simple tasks such as calculations and data entry. But for more complex tasks, you need a tool where spreadsheets could be just one of its basic features.
The level of efficiency at which you work has a direct impact on the bottom line. If your staff is spending too much time looking for information or trying to find the right document, it can have a negative effect on both productivity and morale. You might be the world’s most efficient worker, but if you’re working on inefficient workflows, it could all be for nothing. For example, many
businesses still rely on paper-based processes because they’re familiar and comfortable. Think about all the time wasted updating spreadsheets and filing documents instead of focusing on actual work output!
If for example you think that it is too early for you to go for automation as your business is still small, you would be wrong! By removing inefficiencies, automation can help your business grow and make it more profitable.
Automation isn’t just a buzzword. Time-saving and energy-efficient, it is something that can change the way you work. Process automation is an efficient way to streamline your tasks and make sure that you are working on the right things at the right time.
Automation solutions take charge of repetitive tasks or routine processes that otherwise would take long hours of work but give little value or profits. By using automation tools to generate and visualize data, or to connect different apps together, you can create a workflow where tasks are completed faster than ever before.
Automation tools offer many benefits. To name a few, they enables you to:
One of the greatest productivity frontiers still untapped is to figure out how we can best combine our own personal strengths as well as harness the power of automation. In many ways we are only beginning to scratch the surface of automation.
The big takeaways here include the need to start keeping track of your daily activities and think critically about how they affect your work efficiency. To reach new levels of performance and become the best version of yourself, it is important first to be able to accurately measure your own performance.
Further, it is advisable that you have a plan in place on how you will deal with tasks that do not contain deadlines. When possible, avoid multitasking, as this can easily lead to an inefficient work environment. Finally, eliminate any tasks from your workflow that could be automated through the use of software. There is a plethora of tools available out there today that can aid in enhancing work efficiency through improved time-management and overall planning for individual projects.
Speaking of automation and work efficiency, we cannot fail to mention AllActivity—which is not your average SaaS Business Intelligence solution! In addition to the standard features you’d find in a SaaS BI software, AllActivity, is also an automatic workflow and analytics tool that generates its own data. And it doesn’t stop here! It also creates actionable, made-to-measure, insights for teams to act on. As a cherry on the top, you have your feedback loops, data visualization, trend analysis, and security. As far as work efficiency goes, with AllActivity, you will have a technological leg up on your competition.
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Whenever you’re ready…here are 4 ways we can help you increase your productivity, lifestyle & health by embracing automation:
- Claim your AllActivity Software Demo. Ask for a complete 2-month free trial and start achieving better results from the beginning!
- If you’d like to learn how automation and task mining can take your team or organization to the next level, go to our blog or visit our Task Mining section, where you can find our lifestyle calculator and find out how to be more efficient!
- We are hiring! If you are passionate about coding, enjoy new challenges and working in an international team, we are looking for you!
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