Are you a productive or a non-productive person? If you’re not sure, let’s see together. A practical person who uses their time productively wakes up in the early morning, showers, grabs a cup of coffee, and sits down to start their day. While that happens, they plan what they’re doing for the day and what they will accomplish these tasks. However, does that mean they are productive and will complete every task on that checklist?
Remember that while creating your checklist, many distractions can happen. Like getting a notification on your phone, or your roommate wanting you to help them with something, the list of distractions is endless! Rather than spending your time accomplishing something you planned on doing, your mind loses focus, and you either surf the internet for 30 mins or get stuck doing other chores in your house with your roommate. This will eventually mean that your checklist has to be cut in half because you’ve already lost half of your day doing other things that weren’t on your list.
See what we mean? Are we describing your daily routine or not yet?
Listen, we have all been there. Distractions and interruptions are the sole reasons we cannot be productive when we want to be. They can break your flow in the blink of an eye and may affect your work performance. We don’t want that, so let us find out how to break free, avoid these interruptions, kick back start, and improve your work performance. Here are 25 ways to improve your work performance. But, first.
Why Improving Your Work Performance is Important
Work performance plays a huge role in your job. You must remember that your employer or boss is analyzing three main things; speed, quality of your work, and how effective your outcomes are. Of course, it differs from one job to another, but those are typically the three main objectives you must work on and achieve if you want a raise in your salary or even get promoted.
Indeed, keeping up with these three main objectives is not a cakewalk. Depending on what your job is and how it works. For example, a content writer’s job aims to look out for speed, quality, and efficiency. You must set goals for these three objectives. Sometimes you might have deadlines; also, you must consider that after you write your article, you still have to go through the editing phase (this depends on what your manager sets for you).
Another example could be being a marketing manager; your goals are quality and efficiency. Your goals will differ because you’re dealing with clients wanting to grow their brand, but speed doesn’t matter as long as you finish everything the best way you can (depending if they’re in a hurry or not, then speed would be added to your goals).
Please ensure you know your job’s requirements and goals to improve and benefit from. If you follow the goals and give the best outcome, you’re a shoo-in for a raise or promotion.
25 Ways to Improve Work Performance
If you feel lost and need help with how to practice improving your work performance, no worries; in this article, you will find 25 ways to improve your work performance. Good luck!
- Set milestones
- Set clear and achievable goals
- Limit distractions around you
- Maintain a healthy life
- Tidy your workspace
- Avoid multitasking
- Prioritizing your important tasks
- Improve your time management
- Delegate tasks as much as you can
- Communicate clearly
- Prioritize self-improvement
- Take a break
- Maintain work-life balance
- Love what you do
- Don’t leave with tasks not completed
- Teach yourself new things
- Ask for constructive feedback from your manager
- Become a mentor
- Become punctual and productive
- Rethink ineffective ways to work
- Build work relationships with your teammates
- Avoid social media, gossip, and drama
- Schedule effective meetings
- The 20/80 rule
- Overcome resistance towards the difficult tasks
1. Set milestones
Create a list of tasks you need to accomplish daily. Setting milestones to your checklist can make you a more productive worker. Once you start with the first task, the rest will come flying. Just make sure you perform your tasks best so you can encourage yourself for the rest.
2. Set clear and achievable goals
When setting work goals, remember your workload and what you must accomplish first. Put priority goals first and then follow the rest in order. This will help you achieve more realistic goals for yourself. Once you complete them one by one, you will feel a sense of accomplishment which will cohesively make you want to keep the flow going. However, unrealistic goals might burn you out and discourage you.
3. Limit distractions around you
Limiting distractions has got to be the most challenging task to do, we know. Nevertheless, you can try to control some of them. Go to a quiet place in your house and buckle down for a couple of hours, put your headphones on to listen to brain-inspiring music, shut off your phone, and turn off email alerts on your laptop. There are many ways to limit the distractions around you; you have to be strong enough to do so.
4. Maintain a healthy life
To maintain a healthy lifestyle, it’s recommended to kick start your day with a good stretch, shower, and nutritious breakfast to provide you with energy, motivation and help you focus throughout the day. Don’t forget about snacking on healthy choices to keep your brain happy.
5. Tidy your workspace
Declutter the area you are working in. Keep everything at hand, and be sure to have everything you need in front of you before you start working, so you don’t have to keep getting up and distracting yourself. Also, don’t forget to close any unwanted tabs on your laptop. A fresh canvas makes it easier to work. To maintain a healthy lifestyle, it’s recommended to kick start your day with a good stretch, shower, and nutritious breakfast to provide you with energy and motivation and help you focus throughout the day.
6. Avoid multitasking
Sure, multitasking is a great tool when you have a bunch of tasks to do, but don’t think that it keeps everything efficient. It doesn’t. While shuffling between two tasks, sometimes you perform better than the other. Practice efficiency and concentrate on one task simultaneously to have a perfect outcome.
7. Prioritizing your important tasks first
Before you begin your workday, prioritize your schedule. See what is your most important or time-sensitive task and do it first. Distractions will come your way, so getting your first task out of the way is excellent.
8. Improve your time management
Time management plays a big deal in our work performance. A great way to organize your day is to manage your time. Sit down at the beginning of your day and create a checklist. This checklist can include everything you need to work on throughout the day, even put snack breaks on the list.
Sometimes it’s easier to procrastinate, sure it can cause stress, anxiety, and fatigue, making one want to procrastinate. Excuses on excuses, don’t let yourself fall apart. It’s better to get your most essential tasks done efficiently than to stress on the last day and send your worst work.
9. Delegate tasks as much as you can
If your position is of a manager or above, you must delegate tasks to your team. A good manager knows when they are overloaded. Have a team meeting, decide which project would work well with which team member, and give them the proper instructions to perform at their utmost capabilities. Even if you feel like you would need to oversee what they are doing, that is all right. But, at least take the load off you, so you don’t stress and fail.
10. Communicate clearly
Communicating clearly and effectively with your co-workers is the most crucial key to increasing better outcomes. Your job as the manager is to know every one of your team members personally and professionally. Also, creating a safe work environment will have your team members wanting to come and speak with you if they have a problem. It’ll also bring the entire company closer. The good idea is to schedule weekly meetings, one-to-one meetings, monthly evaluation meetings, team outings, and so much more to help keep your team members loyal and increase their work performance, and of course, it builds trust within.
11. Prioritize self-improvement
Always work on yourself. No human has learned everything, so try listening to podcasts while working out or making a meal and reading books; if you don’t have time for that, that’s where kindles come in, expand your mind. If you learn something new, share it with your team and help them educate themselves too. Set up monthly sessions to teach them new terms or something. The world changes every day, and you, my friend, have to keep up with it so it can keep up with you.
12. Take a break
If you work from home or even in the office, scheduling breaks is a great idea to stretch your mind. Our bodies are not designed for 8-9 hours of efficiency. Short walks, grabbing coffee at your nearest coffee shop, or even making a sandwich in your kitchen can take some of that stress away. This will help you become more productive when you release some of the anxiety and stress of finishing all your daily tasks.
13. Maintain work-life balance
Some people don’t know how to differentiate work from their personal life. They finish work, go home and work some more; they are workaholics. However, it’s not healthy. You must set up working hours that fit you and your company’s plan. After you finish work, go home and be with yourself or your family. Downtime is essential to a successful life. Think of yourself.
14. Love what you do
People who choose jobs that they love are ultimately happier. Change your position if you wake up and are not excited about the day. The average person works 13 years and two months at work. So, if we’re spending all these years working, shouldn’t we choose a profession that we’d love?
15. Don’t leave with tasks not completed
Do not ever leave a task uncompleted, you’ll never get back to it. If you leave a task unfinished this will create a bunch of problems that can lead to delays and will harm your performance. Ultimately, don’t leave your task if you’re not done with it to avoid any performance-related problems that may harm your productivity levels at your job.
16. Teach yourself new things
Every day the world evolves with new trends, terms, and everything. That is why you have to stay on your game. What might have worked yesterday and made you an expert isn’t going to work today or tomorrow. Teaching yourself new things to help with work or your personal life is key to becoming a better person. Knowledge is power.
Work on yourself every day. Listen to a new podcast or watch the news. There are many ways to teach yourself new things every day.
17. Ask for constructive feedback from your manager
Don’t be shy about asking for feedback from your manager or teammate. Constructive feedback about your work from your manager can benefit you in many ways. If you are unsure of something and also need help, ASK. There’s no harm in asking questions, but be sure they are good questions you cannot answer yourself. Also, if your boss criticizes your work, take it lightly and try to improve. Please don’t take it negatively; that’ll drive you crazy. Try to see the positivity in each situation. You all should be one team.
18. Become a mentor
Becoming a mentor is a great way to help new team members get acquainted with the company. If you are a manager and have been in the field for some time, creating seminars for your teammates might be a good idea. This will help them and you in learning and revising terms and situations that will help them in their line of work. Consider monthly sessions where you can take each department separately and teach them a thing or two about their field. This will create trust and bonds with your teammates, and they will come to you for any inquiries they might have in the future.
19. Become punctual and productive
Becoming punctual and productive is different for each person. Figure out what time of day your attention levels spike and decline. Most people have a high peak before lunch, and their creativity heightens when they’re most tired. However, as we said, each individual is different. You should test your most productive hour and work on that. For example, start scheduling your day according to when you’re most productive; for instance, if you feel like you’re an early bird and get all your tasks done in the morning, then get up and work during that hour. If you are a night owl and work more efficiently during those hours, then assign your tasks to be due the day after so you can work on them at night.
Punctuality is a different factor. Many people are more prone to being late. It would be best if you worked on being on time. Because being on time means you’re organized and plan your day out correctly unless, of course, there’s an emergency. Schedule your day, and your life will be easier.
20. Rethink ineffective ways to work
If you’ve had the same job for years now, you will likely follow the same daily routine. In this case, it’s difficult to spot any behavioral patterns hurting your work performance. An excellent way to assess if you are practicing ineffective ways of working is to sit down and see what you can change to help your work performance excel.
21. Build work relationships with your teammates
Meeting new people is a critical thing in business. It would help if you built relationships and connections with your teammates and other people you can find on LinkedIn, which can affect your work performance; when you meet new people, whether it’s virtually or face-to-face developing relationships could help you in many ways. It’ll help you build these relationships, possibly get a better connection to a new job, and encourage you to be more outgoing, which could get you many work opportunities.
22. Avoid social media, gossip, and drama
People love to communicate with one another and discuss topics they like, for instance, gossip, drama, or social media. However, this will affect work performance almost every time. If you are someone who does this during your entire work day, stop. You’re wasting time socializing. Socializing now and then is no problem, but not during the whole work day. You won’t get anything done. Don’t engage with ongoing drama because it might harm you; words travel fast. You don’t want the HR calling you in for something you didn’t do but were talking about.
23. Schedule effective meetings
You need to schedule meetings with your employees or teams every so often. These meetings should be organized and effective. Create a list of the topics you would like to discuss, so you stay productive and on top. This will benefit you in numerous aspects, staying up to date with your teams, building a personal connection with them, creating loyalty, and having the opportunity to give constructive feedback.
24. The 20/80 rule
A Pareto principle, or in shorter terms 80/20 rule, says that 20 percent of human efforts produce 80 percent of results, which means that, on average, 80% of your hard work is spent on creating things or situations with no relevance to your work. Knowing that fact now, do you still want to waste time gossiping?
25. Overcome resistance towards the difficult tasks
This is the biggest one yet, overcoming your resistance to complex tasks. We know how hard it is to start with the “big one,” but the rest should flow if you first tackle your most challenging task.
Tips to increase your work performance
- If you don’t do well in loud places, choose a quiet place to work at or wear headphones that can block out the outside voices.
- If you are working remotely, set up a specific place you can go and work at. Like a home office, or even a desk in a corner. This will help with being productive.
- Start your day with a checklist of tasks you need to accomplish for the day. This helps with being organized and every time you finish a task you can check it off. It’ll make you excited to finish the list.
- If you’re a #1 procrastinator and need to buckle down, set designed alarms, this will help you with speed. Oh, and don’t forget to set alarms for breaks too.
- Take breaks! Sometimes you can get wrapped up in one task for hours, and your work might suffer if you push it. Take a break every couple of hours or whenever you need to re-energize. Go for a walk, or make a cup of coffee and breathe some fresh air.
- Instead of multitasking on a couple of tasks, choose one, finish it and move on to the others. Practice efficiency, not speed; your work outcome will become better if you do this.
- Avoid distractions! We cannot stress this enough.
- Set up weekly meetings with your team to see what they’re up to.
- Build strong relationships with your teammates; the closer you are, the more they’ll trust and stay loyal to you.
- Set clear goals with yourself and your team. Setting objectives and goals help us to achieve them. It gives us that push we need to do better and perform faster.
Level Up at Work
If you use any of our recommendations, trust that your work performance will improve. If you strive to succeed, you will push yourself and your team to work harder and smarter. Switching your daily routine and activities takes some time, but the good idea is to do it as a team. A team will motivate and push each other to complete their goals. Best of luck!
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