Many employees are supposed to have 40 work hours each week and that’s about 160 work hours a month. Although many employees work more than that, there’s no guarantee that these hours are full productive. In fact, it is possible that only 1/3 of them are truly effective in producing something for the company. It is important to know about the definition of being productive. However, the measure of productivity is different in each business or industry. But, we can define that being productive is equal to producing something meaningful for the business based on specific productivity standards. It is important to know about the usual time wasters that suck up our time. Factors that result in wasted time may include social interations with people, online activities, mobile device usages and many random little things.
Many employees are avid Internet users. They check email, instant messages, social media, forums and other online platforms constantly all day long. Each time a new update comes in, it is hard for them to resist checking what’s the update. Many employees have become true slaves of the Internet and chances are, we are wasting much of our time to stuff unrelated to our office tasks. Email, social media comments and other online updates accummulate each hour; it becomes a real habit to check them. So, it is very easy to get completely hooked with online updates. For many employees, it’s more than about compulsion, but closer to addiction. Things can get worse because employees are concerned that they may miss out important email messages that are crucial for business operations.
Social interaction could also cause us to waste time. Meeting is important for work-related tasks, but it shouldn’t be longer than necessary. We should use the conventional wisdom by making meeting as short as possible, while being able to discuss and cover all the most important tasks. An effective meeting session should allow us to receive all inputs and reach important consensus. Actually, in some cases; individuals could achieve more than a team and we should consider whether a meeting is necessary. After a consensus is achieved, we may only need a short discussion to monitor the progress of the task. There are many times that we have been seduced about the importance of team work, when in reality; tasks can be separated into modules or components, which can be completed individually.
In some cases, meetings create more tasks than necessary. Meeting may not always get work done, because new ideas could cause new tasks to be created. Often, we go out of the meeting room with a new list of things to do. Many people think that a meeting session is worthless if there’s new task that needs to be completed. Meetings should focus first on present tasks and makes sure that they can be completed in the shortest possible time and it means that no new tasks are added when they are not needed. New tasks can pop up anytime even without meeting sessions, so it is important not to overload ourselves. In a nutshell, we should determine what kind of productivity level that should be achieved in a specific amount of time.
