Our salary level, KPI, excellent mood, and our boss’s good spirits depend on the quality of our work. However, sometimes it happens that we’re just sitting around and the project is still at the “I discover first client’s email” stage.
It is important not just to work but work effectively. Let’s look at how we can manage the efficiency of our performance with 3 simple steps.
First step: save your brainpower
Every person has “thoughtful fuel”, the right use of which affects the job results. So, if we do not leak it in vain, and stimulate if necessary — our work is made by magic: three times faster and five times more pleasant.
What does it mean to waste brainpower?
Let’s do a little test. For each “Yeah! That’s about me” assign yourself 1 point. For each “Oh no, that’s awful”- assign yourself 0 points.
- The notifications on my PC are always on. I don’t want to miss an important message from my boss, or PM, or somebody else.
- Between important task and urgent, I choose urgent one. That’s why I’m a super coworker — I’ve never said no yet.
- I don’t take short pauses in the workflow process. I wait for the big break so that I can get relax at 10000%.
- I always have my smartphone next to me. I need to control everything as much as possible — messages, calls, alerts. What if the neighbors flooded me?
- I don’t like to plan, and I think to-do lists are for people with memory problems. I always remember everything.
- I don’t believe in your efficiency theories blah blah. That’s because there’s too much work to do.
If you score more than 5 points, your brain is really boiling. You’re spending a lot more energy on your tasks and you’re to be like a squashed tomato at the end of the workweek.
A score of 3–4 indicates a fight between good and evil. You feel the truth, but you don’t always follow it. There is something to work on.
Up to a score of 3 — arm yourself with our article and you’ll be a super-efficient person in 10 minutes.
Now let us explain the results.
The notifications should be turned off. Always. Without exceptions
Even if you catch a glimpse of it, you lose concentration and make your brain work harder. Decide with your family that they can call you for super emergencies or wait until you have a break. When we are distracted — we spend more energy resuming the thought process.
Urgent does not mean necessary
If you’re working on a serious project, you shouldn’t be distracted by other tasks. In this case, the probability of catching bugs is much higher than if you wisely ignore burning demands. Set aside an hour at the end of the day for such tasks. It costs an incredible amount of effort to readjust to quality code after some frivolous task.
Pauses make you are comfortable
Break your workflow into 25-minute portions with 5–10 minute pauses and one big 20-minute break (Pomodoro Technique). You won’t get tired and will develop the habit of concentrating as much as possible for 25 minutes. And then being rewarded with a cup of tea and an apple or a walk. It is incredibly difficult for our brain to think for hours — we run out of fuel and after 2 hours we are only able to chat with colleagues.
Don’t touch your smartphone
Our smartphones are wonderful. Especially when they are lying in a desk drawer, or even in the next room. In 99% of cases, you’ll find alerts there about like, comment, or that you’ve been given a discount on a new collection of doggie clothes. Nothing worth torturing your poor brain for switching it from “hard work” mode to “wow, what a raccoon”.
Write your plan so that even a monkey can understand it
What monkey? Our internal monkey, who only knows how to get pleasure here and now. Common, all of us have such hidden primates which lost in difficult and complex tasks.
Make a simple, detailed plan that even a little lemur can execute for a banana. For example:
9.00 am — develop a reasonable strategy for localizing a new game for the Asian market.
Complicated, obscure, boring. A monkey cries and asks to get on Instagram.
9.00 — open Google Play,
9.10 — find 3–5 main competitors,
9.40 — download 3–5 games,
10.10–11.10 — test one or two games,
11.30 — write a list of pros and cons,
11.50 — take the report to the developers, and ask them to add Japanese cuisine to the game,
13.00 — write a letter to the translation company and find out the price.
Much easier, isn’t it?
Second step: get rid of ridiculous stereotypes
Our brains are full of cognitive distortions that keep us from working:
- If I ask for help, everyone will think I’m a noob.
- If I follow productivity techniques, they’ll think I’m silly.
- If I delegate some tasks, they’ll think I don’t know how to do them.
In fact, these thoughts are just spikes in the wheels. Let us prove.
There is no confusion in asking for help. Even for Seniors
Everyone on the dev team has one goal — a completed project and a satisfied client. So you’re all in the same boat. Then, there’s nothing to worry about some hitches. Colleagues are needed not only for going to the bar for Programmer’s day, but also for mutual assistance. Ask for help — it saves time and helps you make friends.
There are no silly techniques — there are those that work and those that don’t
If the color green calms you down, get a green notebook, put a cactus in your workplace, and write the plan with a green felt-tip pen. If it works for you, why not?
Discover productivity techniques and pick one that you wonder about. Test it and change, or keep using.
- The Technique of Alternating Activities: coding, then calling, then handwriting, then reading, etc.
- Mental Map Technique: create a creative map at A3 with your plans, goals, ideas, and objectives, then add remarks, note insights, etc.
- Super Saving Technique: do your work routine on the way to the office, use hotkeys, blind typing, arranging all files in special folders by type, etc.
- One-Person-One-Task Technique. Performing one task with maximum concentration in that minute without distractions to other tasks.
Do not confuse micromanagement and delegation
In the first case, you give up some of your work and nervously monitor every step of its implementation. Whereas delegation is the direction of routine functions, simple tasks, or scrupulous ones for which you do not have the proper concentration right now, to other employees.
The key is to assign the right task to the right person — who has the appropriate skills and whom you can trust — and then leave them to do it.
Do not be afraid to discuss with your superiors that some tasks are out of your competence, and it is better to reassign them. It is more useful if the task is completed on time, albeit by another person, than if you nervously study the issue instead of what you do quickly and well.
Third step: Encourage a love of life
We spend an incredible amount of our energy fighting discouragement and despair. While even in the most difficult situation you can find the pluses for yourself.
As Niels Bohr (1885–1962), the Danish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate of 1922 said: An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a very narrow field.
Therefore,
- not mistakes, but growth areas,
- not super-fast results, but calmly, and regularly efforts,
- not a huge and unclear problem, but a big task to be divided into understandable ones.
Optimism helps you find assistance from colleagues, allows you to smooth over sharp angles, saves time and nerves on suffering, and enables you to see new ways out and solutions. So, identify your top soft skills and focus on what you can actually do for your future and yourself.
Tips from SweetSoft: to maximize your productivity use these tools
- Any.do: connect reminders, calendars, notes, and cloud sync. Stay organized and get lots more done.
- Notion: uses AI and a unique algorithm to analyze and prioritize emails for you.
- Clockify: helps you to keep track of all your time and provides you with insights into your performance in terms of productivity.
- Teamviewer: allows colleagues to help each other remotely, make online presentations and join for tasks.
- Evernote: shares information and takes quick notes while you work. These notes can be audio and video files, images, web clips, or web pages; you can share these notes, and access them from any device.
- ClickUp: ranks team tasks by importance, performance, and helps track time spent on this or that task.
- Google Calendar + Todoist: create tasks, set deadlines, and remind you and help you not to forget anything.
To conclude
No matter how hard we try, our productivity occasionally falls. During such periods, it is worthwhile to be more self-aware and accept everything with calm optimism. So, choose your work credo, run with your motivation, and select the right productivity technique. Be sure that your work can be enjoyable if you manage it right. For other cases, there is SweetSoft, which is ready to work on your web solutions for you.
