Getting Started With The Definition of Productivity

It’s time to make the donuts. Do you recall this Dunkin’ Donuts advertising campaign? It served as a sort of rallying call for me and my brother! I believe they should still be running those advertisements, but those times are over because we are now meant to be “runnin’ on Dunkin’.” Nevertheless, I have worked for companies that seem appropriate given that it dates all the way back to the motivation I had as a youngster. 

I’ll admit that when It’s time to make the donuts commercials initially aired, I thought this is what productivity is in its true essence. I thought that this was the definition of productivity. But later in life, I learned that hard labour wasn’t hard work when I saw that mustachioed man, Fred the Baker, getting up at some absurdly early hour and making his way to the doughnut shop to start his day. (Ad)

Because you have no choice but to get out of bed and complete a task when it needs to be done is not being productive. Although it would seem obvious, productivity isn’t putting us with those absurd hours just to keep the flame high. 

So what is productivity then? As defined by many economists, the amount of work that your workers can generate over a specific time period is referred to as workplace productivity. In other terms, it compares the total input to the whole output (goods and services) (labor and costs). But in true essence, the definition of productivity at work is the assessment of the efficiency of the employees.

Productivity at work is not what Fred the Baker shows rather it is quite the opposite. It is being at the best performance while being in your working hours to produce the maximum best result.

Productivity Hacks: How To Be More Productive At Work?

Are you prepared to hear good news? 

Eighty-six billion of the world’s most effective transistors are nestled inside your skull, only centimeters from your eyes. No computer ever created comes close to matching the incredible powers of this neural network, which is you and is running the operating system we know as life. 

Your brain can hold about eight thousand iPhones’ worth of data since it was created over millions and millions of years of life on Earth. An immensely intricate, invisible symphony of neural processes underlies everything you are, do, feel, love, care about, long for, and aspire to.

Now for the bad news is that the modern world is like The Hunger Games, and your brain is a willing participant being constantly and mercilessly pursued from all directions. Our tremendous birthright is being undermined by the way we live today, along with our ability to think clearly and our vulnerability to the amount of work we take up for ourselves.

Even though you may think we have a myriad amount of time, we also have a myriad amount of work that is constantly in need of our attention. So our fabulous brain always keeps struggling to make all ends meet and in the process causes our productivity at work to sink. Because guess what, we need to make our ends meet before we actually produce a better quality of work. This is why we have come up with a few productivity hacks that you can use in your everyday life to make sure you achieve the best productivity at work that you need for yourself.

Make Time for Work That Really Matters

Wish there were more hours in the day. How often have you heard yourself saying this? Everyone wants it, but it’s not something you can get. But what if you could free up a sizable amount of time—possibly as much as 20% of your workday—to concentrate on the tasks that really matter?

By being aware of how they spend their time, choosing the duties that are most important to you and your organization, and eliminating or creatively outsourcing the rest, you can make them more productive. 

The traditional Start/Stop/Continue exercise can assist you in adjusting your daily work routine in modest but meaningful ways. Choose between dropping, delegating, and redesigning. 

Sort the low-value jobs into three categories: off-load opportunities (tasks that can be delegated with little effort), quick kills (things you can quit performing right now without having an impact), and long-term redesign (work that needs to be restructured or overhauled).

You May Hate Planning, but You Should Do It Anyway

When you plan, you’ll learn the hard truths about what it will take to finish a project or just get this week’s job done. Because you are no longer in the lovely, fantastical world where time is endless and you can accomplish everything at once while making everyone happy, you might feel a little uneasy. 

However, learning about these realities as soon as possible offers you the advantage of being able to immediately negotiate deliverable expectations or enlist more resources for a project. Start planning ahead of time. Know what you have to do and plan it out. You will see a great difference. You will become more confident and will be able to set boundaries and choose your daily activities since you are aware of all of your options and the top priorities. By doing this, you may regularly satisfy expectations while maximising your effectiveness.

Train Your Brain to Focus

Take a moment to scan the room the next time you’re in a meeting. It’s likely that you will observe your coworkers texting or sending emails when someone is speaking or presenting. Many of us take great pride in our ability to multitask and treat it as a badge of honour. But ask yourself, is it?

It might enable us to cross off more items from our to-do lists. However, it also decreases our capacity for working memory retention, which hinders problem solving and creativity. It also increases our propensity to make errors, overlook crucial cues, and make blunders.

You’ll learn some unflinching realities about what it takes to complete a project or simply get your work done when you start to focus.

Make sure you take on one task at a time, (as I said already, multitasking is making errors) and focus on it completely. This will maximising your effectiveness and help you achieve your task faster.

Use The Power of Time Management

How many times have you been asked to manage your time better? I’m sure as I speak from experience, the number must be huge. Your ability to manage your time effectively can have a big impact on how productive you are at work, and how efficiently you work. Time management can actually help you plan in such a manner that will create a time span for all your tasks.

The Pomodoro method is one tactic you could find useful. The Pomodoro approach uses a timer and is similar to scheduled breaks in that you commit to a job for 20 minutes (though you can extend this to 30 minutes), work on it until the timer goes off, and then take a five-minute break. This method can be efficient because it gives you more uninterrupted time for focused work and a way to take a short break from the task before finishing it.

Allow yourself to understand the concept of time management and make sure that you take out time for all the tasks and spare some for yourself too.

Motivate Yourself And Beat The Procrastination

Our minds are wired to procrastinate, which is a problem. We all generally find it difficult to complete jobs that offer potential rewards for our current efforts in the future. That’s because our brains handle concrete information more easily than abstract information, and the current inconvenience is extremely real in comparison to those unknown, uncertain future rewards. 

But how do you stop being so narrow-minded about your difficult tasks? Rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis is key: Make the expenses of taking action feel lower and the benefits of taking action feel greater. The benefit of completing tedious work must feel greater than the discomfort of beginning it. Motivate yourself to work through it and take yourself out of this procrastination trap.

Get The Work Done on the Road

I know this may seem weird but trust me we waste a lot of time while travelling. Before the pandemic and even now, after when things are coming back, offices have opened their gates and are welcoming their employees back to work in full action. This allowed us to have more of The On Road Time that I call. 

Usually, we either, watch the next episode on Netflix because shutting our brain seems easier, or we just hog onto taking a nap and even some of us use this time to catch up with our old buddies. Well, there’s something better you can do. You can actually get your work done on the road. Make appointments with yourself, check in what’s missing, and actually spend the time with the satisfaction of getting a block of work finished. Sit back in your seat relaxed, and take in the joy of having completed something difficult. Taking a moment like this creates new neural connections that associate productivity at work with pleasure rather than resentment.

Going on Vacation Doesn’t Have to Kill Your Productivity

Vacations are the things that dreams and cruise commercials are made of. But some of us fear vacation because we either feel that while we will be in the Bahamas, taking a skinny dipping we will be wasting a lot of our time. The other half of us think that vacation will distract us and we will come back with gloom to not work. But it’s ideal to return feeling renewed, energised, and prepared to work. 

However, there are occasions when we worry solely about taking a vacation. Don’t do it; in fact, refrain from obsessing over completing all tasks before a vacation. Convince yourself that the world can function without you at that period in order to be able to actually take a vacation. By planning ahead, changing your perspective, and minimising your involvement with what is happening at work, you may make the most of your time off and expect to be completely revived when you return.

Bursting The Productivity Bubble