How to be more productive during office hours

1. Make sure you have enough sleep

This should be your first priority. If you’re tired, you can’t focus at full potential. So it’s important to have a healthy sleep schedule.

2. Listen to music

Listen to your favorite music while working might help you be more productive and get through your to-do list much easier. Don’t think that you may look antisocial, it can just be a sign that you don’t want to be disturbed.

3. “A cluttered desk is a symptom of a cluttered mind.”

If you work in a messy space, it can cause you stress. The time that you lose everyday looking for misplaced papers it’s wasted time when you could have done more work.

4. Stop multi-tasking

It’s a wrong idea to think that if we multitask we are more efficient. In fact, the opposite might be true. If you want to do many tasks at once, it can make you lose time, be less productive or it can make you do one task wrong. Try to take care of a single task before starting a new one.

5. Track the time you spend on a task

You think you can handle the exact time you spend on a task, but you can be wrong. You can be so focused on a task, that you forget how much time you invested in it. In order to get help and know exactly how much time you spend on daily tasks or on social media channels, you can use Rescue Time.

6. Take regular breaks

It may sound like a stupid rule, but it’s important to take it seriously. When you take scheduled breaks, you improve your concentration at work. While working at a task, if you take short breaks it helps you have a constant level of performance.

7. Set deadlines

If you’re not working in a company where they set the important deadlines for you, you can set them yourself. Stress is not always a bad thing. Sometimes stress can help you to be more focused and productive in reaching your goals.

8. Turn off notifications

It’s very easy to be distracted by a text notification or email. Try to turn off your notification during work and make a schedule for checking emails and messages.

9. Schedule email time

It’s better if you choose to check your emails in the afternoon, in order to save the morning energy for harder tasks.

10. Learn to say no 

It’s not something bad to say no from time to time. Actually, when you say “yes” to a request, you say “no” to something else from your life. When you can’t say directly “no”, try another approach like “Thank you so much but I don’t think I have the time right now”.