How to Boost Productivity in the Pandemic Era
Most businesses started to migrate to working remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The migration came with numerous challenges that individuals had to deal with. One significant and vital aspect is productivity.
In the following points we are going to exhibit the most effective ways to boost productivity while working remotely:
1. Define Your Times of Peak Performance
It is quite helpful to contemplate the times that you are most active and productive. You can start off by thinking on the following: are you a morning, afternoon, or an evening person? Do certain times of the day stimulate your energy? Do thoughts flow in a specific time of the day more than the other times? Does sunrise motivate you to get up and start finishing your projects, or at night when it is calm and serene?
Most people have their very different periods of high and low activity throughout the day. This depends on their general life style, sleeping patterns and norms, and sometimes family commitments play a big part too. It is helpful to find out when you are most productive and arrange your schedule accordingly.
2. Take Breaks Regularly
Scheduling breaks throughout your working day can help stimulate energy and motivation. However, how often you take breaks and how you spend them is what is most important. The Pomodoro technique can be helpful in regulating breaks during the work day, or a specific task. The technique depends on setting the timer to 25 minutes of performing on a certain task, then take a 5-minute break when the timer rings. The technique can be repeated to finish a single task, or to divide the tasks according to their priorities. Once you complete 4 Pomodoro intervals (which sums to two hours) you take a longer break that can range from 15 to 30 minutes.
How you spend the break is as important as taking the break itself. Some people find themselves spending their long breaks scrolling down social media, or venting to their colleagues about work; things that can actually backfire and increase the stress and the negative energy which can be very mind consuming as it does not help you detach from the task at hand or from the load of work. So, it can be rather refreshing to spend the break going for a walk, exercising, meditating, or even playing a fun distracting game. This will help you take your mind off stress and will lead your mind to rest and get back to work more energetic and refreshed.
3. Introduce Flexibility to Your Schedule
When working remotely, flexibility is key. Priorities change all the time, as well, deadlines never cease to exist, not to mention unexpected events. Handling pop-ups, deadlines, and changing priorities is very important to maintain productivity.
4. Limit Distractions
It is very difficult to avoid distraction with all the new technology and all the push-notifications. However, there are effective strategies to follow, lessen and control the sources of distraction. First things first, you need to identify the nature of the source of distraction:
a. External sources of distraction: background noise, phone notification, or family members talking or even people interaction in a co-working space. In such cases, you can place your phone on silent, or if you wish not to get notifications at all you can place it on “airplane” mode. You can also use noise-canceling headphones and listen to music while working. You can sit in a separate room either at home or at the co-working space and close the door to get more focus.
b. Internal sources of distraction: if you feel distracted but in the same time you can’t relate it to an external source, then you may ask yourself if you are bored, then you may need a refreshment or a little recess; or maybe you are thirsty, hungry, tired, have been working long without a break. Depending on the reason that you identify, you can follow the right strategy. You can take a break to have a snack, meditate, take a walk, or even take a short nap to rest.
5. Keep Motivation Stirring
Motivation is known as the desire of making an action in order to achieve a certain goal. It depends on a variety of internal and external factors. Although motivation sometimes can be very hard to attain when it comes to certain tasks at work, there are some smart strategies to overcome the moments where we lack motivation:1
- Bundling: you can always outsmart the undesirability of some tasks by mixing them with desirable ones. That is, if you find it hard to fill out some necessary but boring reports, you can indulge your ears with some instrumental music to keep the energy flowing.
- Buddy System: maybe you can do the task at hand with the help of a colleague or a friend, or just the mere presence of a friend or someone you like to spend time with can be and inducement to finish the task and make it less tedious.
- Your Future Self: put in front of your eyes how your “future self” will look like, and try to see how it feels if the goal you are working towards is achieved. The factor here is positive reinforcement which can be decided based on your preferences and inclinations.
6. Work-Life Balance
Sometimes one can take time to run some errands or engage in non-work-related tasks, especially when working remotely with flexible hours. While this could give your family members or friends the sense that you are always available, you can do simple steps to guarantee that your personal life does not affect your work-hours and vice versa:
・Establish ground rules: if you are working from home and you have family members around or even roommates, you can simply inform them about when can interact with them and when you cannot during the work day. The same goes if you are working with friends in a coworking space. You can also imply your full engagement at work by putting on sound-isolating headphones, or closing the room’s door with a “busy” sign hung on it.
・Limit Push Notifications: in order to maintain your personal life and guarantee that work does not overcome your work-life balance, you can decide exactly at what time you are planning to fininsh work, then set your notifications to be ON after that. This way, you can make sure that you spend enough time with your family/friends, and that you take the needed time to rest and detach from work.
7. Create a Dedicated Workspace2
When working remotely, it is essential that you separate where you rest from where you get work done. You can make use of cafes with encouraging atmosphere or coworking space where you can leave off to your home once you finish work. The commute to and from work usually gives you the mental separation between work and non-work hours, in this sense, if you cannot perform your working hours in a café or a coworking space, you can specify a spot at your home to dedicate for work where you can leave after finishing your duties. It goes without saying that your own bed, couch, or even your dining table are not the best choices to begin with.
8. Ensure Productivity of Meetings
Meetings are essential in aligning team members and in sharing different insights when it comes to managing projects. However, when working remotely, some people would favor having a weekly meeting just to gather and make sure that everyone is connected. Being in touch as a team is key to boost performance. However, meetings are not always necessary.
Sometimes we meet to share insights that can be shared in a message or in an email. This can be better used to finishing tasks at hand. For meetings to be productive, make sure that they entail; discussions to solve a problem that is getting in the way of work progress; or brainstorming for new ideas or action plans. This is where collective group ideas pay off.
9. Use the Right Tools
There are too many apps for task/project management that can facilitate a smooth coordination for ongoing projects where all team members can share their inputs and see the inputs of others. Some of these apps that guarantee a great experience are: Trello, Monday and Asana. Also, for teams that work remotely, there are great applications for team collaboration such as: Slack. Google Drive is quite a handy tool for document sharing and collaboration.
10. Know the Different Work Styles
People are vastly different, especially when it comes to work styles, behavior types, generations, and skillsets. Understanding your style and the styles of others play a key role in increasing productivity and effectiveness. According to The Human Element (THE), based on the FIRO theory, people vary in their preferences and tendencies when it comes to levels of inclusion, control, and openness.
Sometimes our stress come from the fact that remain rigid on our thinking that our behavior is the right one (consciously or unconsciously). That can be the source of great stress if you do not learn to become flexible and acknowledge that people have preferences and those preferences can be different from ours sometimes.
When working on a project together, how much face to face interaction one wants to have might be different from another member. Though preferences are different, developing the flexibility to be able have more interaction when necessary (if that is not our inclination), or less interaction (if not our inclination) becomes the key for the productivity of the project members. The same goes with control; some people to be told how to do thing, or be given a structure for work, whereas some like to take the lead. For Openness it is about how much one wants to share about his/her experience (emotions, thoughts, beliefs..) and how much to keep for oneself.
All in all, working remotely may be comfortable in some aspects, but quite challenging in other aspects. Creating an environment that fosters ways to boost productivity can play a key role in improving the bottom-line of businesses and the overall satisfaction of the working individuals.
1Psychology Today 2021, accessed on 24 April 2021, (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/productivity/productivity-hacks-systems-and-techniques)
2Aaron Brooks 2020, accessed on 24 April 2021, (https://www.ventureharbour.com/productivity-hacks/)
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