Emile Salame is the founder of Cornerstone Asset Advisers, an organisation dedicated to helping clients manage their real estate investments. This article will look at productivity, providing practical steps to help professionals hone their organisational skills and work smarter, rather than harder.
A key element of enhancing productivity is creating and sticking to schedules and to-do lists. Whether relying on sticky notes or one of the many productivity apps available for download today, writing down tasks helps workers to visualise and prioritise their responsibilities, ensuring that they tackle the most important tasks first.
Scheduling tasks that must be completed by the end of the day gives people a definite timeframe to stick to, preventing procrastination and improving time management to help them get everything done.
‘Triage’ is a term typically associated with medical settings, referring to situations where too many patients need attending and must by prioritised according to the gravity of their condition. Similarly, professionals need to give precedence to the most important tasks, completing these before lower priority duties. Otherwise, workers run the risk of allowing too much of their time to be eaten away by mundane tasks at the expense of more urgent work.
Creating daily, weekly and monthly plans helps professionals to achieve short and long-term goals. By breaking long-term goals into incremental steps completed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, professionals make the process more manageable and less overwhelming to tackle.
Digital and paper planners can be an effective means of staying on track with ongoing commitments and projects, providing a visual representation of key responsibilities. Schedules help people to work through tasks in a calm and organised manner, focusing on the matter in hand rather than constantly worrying about missing or forgetting any deadlines. Colour-coding tasks according to their urgency, importance and type etc. can help professionals to decide what needs to be done and when at a glance.
Professionals who have the option of delegating work that does not match their skill level or could better be completed by another employee should exercise that right where appropriate. Effective delegators provide guidelines and feedback for tasks they assign, ensuring that colleagues know what is expected of them and how to complete it in the smoothest, most efficient manner.
In the same way that workers organise their responsibilities according to importance, so they should also sort incoming mail into categories according to urgency, using voice mail to screen phone calls when they are in the middle of an important task. It is also sensible to keep workspaces clutter free, ensuring that only critical information and items required daily are left of the desk, with less frequently used materials stored away. Duplicate materials and information that will soon become outdated should be thrown out, with free space left on bookshelves for growth.
The benefits of working in an organised way are numerous, helping workers to avoid wasting time searching for important documents and reducing stress by enabling them to accomplish more with less effort. In the workplace, good organisational skills help professionals to complete more high-impact work without feeling overwhelmed or burned out. With all of their work in one place, organised in the right way, it is easier for workers to prioritise their duties and ensure the most important tasks are addressed first.
Getting organised enables professionals to complete the most important work first, helping them to feel healthier and happier at work with less stress, increased productivity, a more flexible schedule and more space for creativity. According to Asana, 60% of an average employee’s day is dominated by ‘work about work’, for example switching between apps and following up on tasks, with just 40% left over for skilled work and strategy. When professionals are organised efficiently, they spend less time searching for information and more time executing, enabling them to make a far bigger impact.
