Waking up and going to work is the inevitable
reality for billions of people, and sometimes people have a hard time
acclimating to a new job. If that job is an office, there are some particular
issues you will have to confront in order to get the most out of your time at
work. Today, we look at five simple things you can do to make your life easier
inside your office.
1. Show Up, and Be on Time (or
Early)
One way to ingratiate yourself with your new
bosses, and make life easier at work is one of the simplest work strategies you
can undertake. Just be there on time and be ready to work. Workers that show up
early to work are typically viewed by management as more conscientious and
nearly always receive higher performance ratings that their contemporaries.
Fair or not, people who perform better late in the day aren’t viewed as
favorably by their managers as people that come in ready to take the bull by
the horns early and often.
It goes without saying that people that miss a
fair amount of work tend not to work anyplace for very long. This isn’t just
because they don’t meet the demands of their schedule. Many organizations view
those that perform satisfactorily at work but miss a fair amount of time with
illness (diagnosed or otherwise), in a much less favorable light than people
that are there on time every day and don’t necessarily perform at the same
level.
Like Woody Allen once said, “90 percent of life is just showing up.”
2. Schedule Yourself One Hour to
Tackle Your Most Pressing Issues
Working efficiently at the office can
sometimes be a task in itself. There are so many times where your positive
momentum is broken by emails, phone calls, visits for conversation, or IMs that
you actually don’t produce as well as you are capable of. That’s why it is
important to prioritize tasks, of course, but also to schedule yourself for an
hour of uninterruptible work. Since most offices utilize some type of scheduling
program to manage time, scheduling yourself for an hour early in the day has
been proven to make people more productive.
The best strategy is to start taking some
proactive steps to avoid distractions. The first is to ensure that people know
you will be unavailable for an hour every morning. Direct communication with
your contemporaries is essential for this strategy to work. Another strategy to
take is to understand that the technology that we all typically ignore, like
the “do not disturb” button on your phone, works, and can be used for your
benefit. By actually using the tools you already have that are designed to help
people avoid distractions, it will be much easier to actually avoid them.
3. Stop Listening to Music to
Focus
The office can sometimes be a hectic place.
This is especially true if you work in an open office. It might feel like you
need to listen to music to get anything done. This is actually a non sequitur,
since you are just choosing the method of your distraction. It may seem that it
helps you to get stuff done faster, but research shows this simply isn’t true.
One prominent neuroscientist suggests that
instead of listening to music while you try to be productive, listen to some
beforehand so that you are relaxed and in a good mood. Music allows you to
mentally put away some of the things that may distract you from any given task
before you undertake it.
4. Wrap Up Your Day by Scheduling
Tomorrow
Sometimes, the end of the workday can’t come
soon enough. The anticipation to get out of the office can be quite distracting
in itself, but if you take a few minutes at the end of the day to decide how
you are planning on tackling the following day, you don’t have to do it when
you come back in the morning.
Scheduling tomorrow’s schedule is a lot like
making your bed. In doing so you already have everything neat and tidy so when
it’s time, you can slide right in without having to do much. If your business
is anything like ours, you need to be productive from the start and those
15-to-30 minutes you are going to take to plan the rest of your day just makes
for higher stress levels.
These four suggestions will immediately help
you be more productive. Do you have any other suggestions on how to get the
most out of your workday? Leave them in the comments section below.