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Cut That Out! Stop Doing These Things that Sabotage Workplace Productivity

It’s no big secret:

High productivity starts with great habits.

But just because something is common knowledge doesn’t mean it’s common practice. As a manager or supervisor, part of your role is helping yourself and your direct reports to develop better productivity habits – while eliminating activities that waste valuable time and energy.

Are you maximizing productivity and happiness – or unwittingly sabotaging success?

Today, our Lebanon staffing service shares three things you should STOP doing, if you want to get more done:

Stop multitasking.

When you attempt to do two, three or more things at the same time, none of those tasks receives your mind’s full attention. Instead, your brain winds up overburdened, which undermines your efficiency and increases mistakes.

Productivity tip: Encourage employees to devote their attention to one task or project at a time. Discourage practices like answering emails during meetings or checking phones during safety briefings.

Productivity tip: Learn how to use time-blocking techniques to resist impulsive multitasking. Train your team to schedule their day with blocks of time devoted to high-focus tasks, interspersed with brief breaks and lower-priority work. Blocking time and scheduling breaks increases energy, busts stress and maximizes productivity.

Productivity tip: Practice the mindfulness techniques we share in this earlier productivity post to boost focus.

Stop getting mired in social media.

Social media can be fun and entertaining, but it also sends people down a time-wasting rabbit hole. Constant push notifications disrupt employees’ attention and rob your organization of time that should be spent on productive activities.

Productivity tip: If you want your team to stay focused throughout the day, encourage them to remove alerts from their smartphones. Ask them to check their phones during scheduled breaks. And if it’s a pervasive problem, consider blocking social media sites from your company’s network.

Stop incessant email checking.

Your email dings. You instantly stop what you’re doing to see who messaged you. It turns out to be nothing important, but when you go back to what you were working on, you’ve lost your train of thought. It happens to the best of us! And if you let it, email will turn you into a hyper-vigilant – and extremely unproductive – prairie dog.

Productivity tip: Stop reacting to each message as it comes in. Only check your email at predetermined times during the day, using your email’s auto-responder feature to to notify people of when you’ll be checking your email again. And if you have important vendors, clients or customers to whom you must respond immediately, set alerts so you know when they contact you.

Productivity tip: Encourage all employees to periodically unsubscribe from email lists that do not directly pertain to their job. Train everyone on how to use your email platform’s message prioritization and organization features (things like flags, folders and rules) to better manage the torrent of email that floods the typical inbox.

Looking for other ways to boost your and your team’s productivity?

Give our Lebanon employment agency, or your local Wood Personnel office, a call! Whether you need to offload time-consuming tasks, staff up for a high-priority project, cover staff absences or hire productive new employees, we offer a range of staffing and placement services to help you get more done.

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