How to get more done in less time at work
When I worked at the White House, the scarcest resource wasn’t staff or money. It was time. From the moment we walked in the door, the clock was ticking down to the end of the presidential administration. To maximize our impact, we had to work as efficiently as possible.
One afternoon, I gathered with a dozen coworkers for an informal lunch meeting in which we shared productivity hacks. From Outlook macros to scheduling wizardry, we exchanged our favorite best practices for how to get more done in less time at work. I recently shared some of these practices with a coworker, and it reminded me of how beneficial this type of knowledge exchange can be. With that in mind, I’ve shared below several of my preferred practices, with the hope that some of them may help you, too.
Identify your most productive work windows. When is your brain at its sharpest? Is that the morning for you? The afternoon? Late evening? Avoid scheduling meetings for those hours if you can. Instead, dedicate those hours to accomplishing your most mentally demanding work. I am able to write a complex document far more quickly and with higher quality in the morning than when I’m in a post-lunch food coma. Knowing that about myself, I preserve morning work hours for harder tasks and push meetings and less demanding work to the afternoon.
Triage your work. Instead of handling every email the moment it hits your inbox, sort when you will handle different types of work. Plan to read and respond to less mentally demanding needs during the times when your brain is more tired. I postpone doing training, updating my timecard, and reading less important emails, newsletters, and administrative matters until the afternoon. If you avoid tending to these less demanding tasks during your most productive hours, you’ll be able to get more done each day.
Triage your task list. I have used the integrated task list in both Outlook and Gmail—not because they’re perfect, but because most of my work tasks derive from emails. In Gmail, my main task list is what I need to get done that day or week. I use separate task lists within the same Tasks app to track non-urgent items like training and research. It’s easy to spend a lot of time, several times a day, visually reviewing and sorting your task list. By minimizing what’s on your daily task list to only what you need to do that day or week, you’ll save time you’d otherwise spend scanning and mentally prioritizing a long list.
Block out chunks of time for uninterrupted work. Transition time is costly for your brain because you have to reorient yourself each time you return to a task after attending to a disruption. I’m able to do a better job if I focus on one task at a time, rather than switching back and forth between that task and my email and phone and chat messages every two minutes. That doesn’t mean you have to leave your email unchecked for hours at a time. If that would be untenable for your job, try having at least 10 or 20 minutes of focus time, followed by time to check emails and messages. That approach will promote a state of flow instead of sacrificing your focus to frequent interruptions.
Minimize meetings and meeting times. When I was a manager at a state agency, the main complaint I heard from staff was that they spent too much time in meetings and couldn’t get real work done. Scrutinize your meeting requests. Could you accomplish the task more quickly over email or through asynchronous collaboration in a Google Doc? How much time do you really need? Can you shorten that meeting? Don’t default to 30 or 60 minutes if you can do the job in 10. Do YOU specifically need to attend, or did someone invite you and another colleague who does the same job? In such situations, perhaps only one of you needs to attend.
Scrutinize recurring meetings. People set up recurring meetings and claim that they’ll cancel them if there is nothing to talk about that week. In practice, people rarely cancel those meetings. Someone will come up with an item or issue to fill the time. Even if you all show up and agree to abandon the meeting after one minute, you have interrupted the work you were doing. You break your focus, and gain nothing. Consider reducing the frequency of recurring meetings. Or, make the meetings opt-in, where you all hold the time on your calendars, but make the default that you won’t meet unless someone notifies the group in advance that they have an issue requiring discussion.
Schedule meetings back-to-back. Some meetings are unavoidable. If you have to attend meetings, try to stack them to occur one after another. This may sound grueling, but scheduling your meetings this way will minimize the time lost to transitions and leave bigger blocks of uninterrupted work time. I find that I can get a lot more done if I consolidate my meetings together than if I have to stop my other work every 30 or 60 minutes to attend a meeting, even if the overall time spent in meetings is the same.
Meet with purpose. When you do meet, have an agenda or at least a clear purpose for what needs to happen in that meeting. Is it an informational briefing, or a decision meeting? Make sure all attendees know the purpose of the meeting. Identify a meeting captain or facilitator who will keep attendees on track. These practices can help avoid meandering meetings that take a lot of time and accomplish little.
Disable desktop pop-up alerts and notifications. You want to create the conditions for you to enter a state of flow at work. The fewer distractions you have, the more you can focus on knocking out a task right the first time, with your full attention.
Eliminate desktop distractions. I’m referring both to your computer desktop and your physical desktop. I have nothing on my desk, both at home and at work. No knick-knacks, no photos, no tasks lists, nothing. I do not leave my phone on my desk. Even the presence of your phone face down in your visual field distracts the brain. I put my phone in a drawer or behind me, out of sight, if I’m focusing on a task. If I need to be aware of urgent notifications, then I enable the sound alerts.
Type in Dvorak! This approach is not one you can implement overnight, but if you’re willing to devote the time to rewiring your brain’s touch typing, it’s pretty awesome. The QWERTY keyboard layout was specifically engineered to slow down typing speed so that keys would not stick. That’s not a concern with modern keyboards. I type on a custom ergonomic keyboard with individual mechanical switches for each key, which enables faster typing. I set the layout to Dvorak. Dvorak puts all the vowels and the most common consonants in the English language on home row. This layout enables you to type faster and with less repetitive stress because your fingers are not reaching for faraway letters and keys as frequently.
Incorporate exercise into your work day. This may not sound like a traditional productivity hack, but when I move my body, it sharpens my mental focus. Depending on how much exercise I do, it can save the time I would otherwise spend in a dedicated work-out session. Any chance I get, I do work meetings by phone while walking back and forth on my office’s campus. If I can’t leave the office, I hold planks during calls. I find that I pay more attention to calls when I stand up or hold a pilates pose than if I’m seated at my desk. If I sit at my computer for a video or phone call, it’s easy to succumb to the distraction of checking my email or the news, and I lose track of what the speaker is saying.
Some of these practices require a high degree of autonomy in your job. I enjoy hearing what works well for others and welcome comments on what you do to preserve time for the work that matters most. If you’re wondering about that Outlook macro I mentioned in the introduction, that’s coming in a separate post on email best practices.