As a business owner, executive, or employee, you should always strive for maximum efficiency. It’ll help your well-being, your stress levels, productivity, and even your company’s bottom line.
Here are some quick tips to ensure you’re staying on top of the ball.
1. Improve meetings
We’ve all been there. You get called into a meeting room, sit down, and everyone immediately pulls out their phone or starts chatting. The clock hits 10AM, but a few people are still strolling in. 10:15AM and finally everyone’s arrived. The meeting begins without any structure. Topic tangents start to develop. Before you know it, it’s 11:30AM and everyone wasted an hour and a half for a topic that could have been explained in 5 minutes or via an email.
This has to change.
For one, if you have the ability to, adopt a strict attendance policy to avoid people strolling in 15-30 minutes late.
Second, conduct all meetings standing up. Standing still in one position is usually not very comfortable. This will provide more incentive to keep the meeting short.
Third, always have an outline – and stick to it! Going into the meeting, you should know exactly what needs to be said or the conversations that need to happen.
2. Utilize tools whenever possible.
There’s a tool or a piece of software for just about anything now. Need a place to manage projects, then try Monday.com. Need a place to communicate with your team that isn’t email, then try Slack. Need a place to backup files, then try Dropbox.
Seriously, there’s a tool for just about anything.
If you notice some workflow process that seems to not be running as smooth as it could, do some research to see if you can optimize it with a piece of software or a tool.
3. Work on yourself
The smarter we are, the quicker we can complete a task. And the healthier we are, the longer we can sustain our workload without getting burnt out.
Read books, listen to podcasts, read articles, subscribe to business newsletters like The Newsette.
And get healthy. Eat your vegetables, exercise daily, and avoid alcohol and smoking.
Additionally, do your best to get comfortable at work. Grab yourself a comfortable chair, a pair of glasses to reduce fluorescent light fatigue, a large water bottle so you don’t have to get up 100 times to refill your tiny plastic cup at the water cooler, and your favorite snack so that you don’t get hangry.
Efficiency is a process, so don’t expect results to happen immediately. Work on it daily, follow these tips, and you’ll slowly start to see results.