It’s January and the start of a new year usually has people reflecting, looking to make changes in their life, to be a more rounded version of themselves over the year. When embracing the “New Year, New you” mantra, most people take on resolutions like being healthier, sleeping more or giving up bad habits. However your personal life isn’t the only aspect of yourself that may benefit from some resolutions.
January is the perfect time to tackle how you conduct yourself in your job and to pick up some new skills to improve and maximise your productivity in the office. Improving your productivity will help you and your employees to get the most out of your job and daily work, and in turn will help to make you and everyone around you happier and more content within the office. Here are our top tips in order to improve productivity within your office this new year.
Work in 90 minute intervals
Research has found that people who work in intervals of 90 minutes are far more productive than those who work longer without breaks in between. There are many variations of this work / break ratio, the 25 minute Pomodoro Technique being the most popular among them, but for long-form work 90 minutes seems to be the sweet spot. The amount of time you dedicate to your break and how you choose to spend it is entirely up to you but the best way to benefit from them is to entirely separate yourself from your work and de-stress. Taking a quick walk outside, eating a healthy snack or having a quick chat with a coworker are all great ways to momentarily separate yourself from your desk to clear your mind and revitalise yourself for your next round of work. And the short rest should grant you a nice burst of productivity as well.
Cut down on noise
A study published by the British Journal of Psychology found that whatever task you are trying to complete background noise is a productivity killer. In fact workers can be up to 66% less productive when exposed to just one nearby conversation. With over 70% of offices being open planned in the modern working world that is a lot of productivity lost. A way to fix this is to listen to music while you work through noise cancelling headphones. This will help to cancel out most conversation around you. And on top of that research has also proven that listening to music helps to boost productivity while completing monotonous tasks.
Another solution is to invest in soundproofing solutions for your office. Acoustic wall panels or freestanding acoustic screens can help reduce noise bouncing around the office and help to soundproof your office, reducing noise in your office overall and helping to improve productivity within your office.
Invest in Sit-Stand desks
Studies show that standing both improves your health and levels of productivity. When compared with employees who are sitting, those who are standing showed greater levels of productivity as their focus increases and thus they can get more work done. Getting people to stand for part of their day will help to improve output levels significantly within your office. You can upgrade your office desks to a set of sit-stand desks or buy sit-stand desk mounts for your existing desks to transform them into sit-stand desks as a cheaper alternative. Helping to kill two New Year’s resolutions with one stone as you will be improving both the health and productivity of your employees by switching up one thing within your office.
Time chunk and complete difficult tasks first
Time chunking is a productivity trick of alternating your focus between tasks that are more repetitive, and ones that are more engaging. The idea behind it is to ensure that you are continuously engaged in the work that you are doing by dedicating a specific amount of time to each task and switching between them. By switching between tedious and thought provoking work it ensures that you have a higher chance of being productive within your day. To add further levels of productivity prioritise your tasks each day by completing your more difficult tasks first as its proven that an employees engagement slowly lowers as the day progresses. So by completing your more challenging tasks first you can ensure your day will be more productive as you wont be dragging out harder tasks later in the day and wasting time.
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