Whether you are working traditionally or as a self-employed individual, becoming more effective at your workplace will always be a beneficial thing to do. There are many benefits to being more efficient and many tools and skills that can help to get you there. So if you’re looking to become more effective at work, this article is definitely the one for you.
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Why You Want to Be More Efficient
There are plenty of reasons why you would want to be more efficient, ranging from the incredibly important to the incredibly irrelevant. However, the most important thing to keep in mind for yourself is one question:
Do you want to improve your efficiency?
If the answer is “yes,” then great, that’s all that matters. If the answer is “no,” then that’s fine too. You don’t have to. Finally, if the answer is, “I don’t know,” then you might want to have a look at some of the points below to see if they help you make up your mind.
Impress Your Boss. A common reason that people look to improve their efficiency is to impress their boss. There are plenty of reasons why they might want to do this. They could be looking for a raise. They might want to improve their bottom line. They might just like praise. Whatever your reasoning, if you’re looking to impress your boss, then becoming more efficient is a great way to go.
Get Your Work Done Fast. Another common reason that people look to improve their efficiency is that they want to work less. It could be that they are self-employed and simply want to get through their work so that they can move on to whatever else they have planned. Or it could be that they have a lot of work to get through at the office and don’t want to spend all of their time there. Whatever your motivations for wanting your work done, quickly boosting your efficiency are a great thing to do. It literally means that your work takes less time.
Make More Money. One last reason that people might be looking to improve their efficiency is that they are looking to make more money. In the case of traditional employees, this is probably tied to the aim of impressing bosses. However, if you work as a freelancer, the more efficient you are, the more you can potentially make if you are charging by the project.
In fact, as a freelancer, if you have the clients, then boosting your efficiency is probably the single most lucrative thing that you could do.
What Contributes to Your Efficiency
People like to think of efficiency as this single quality that someone has. That could not be further from the truth. In reality, efficiency is the result of a complex medley of “things”. From mood to skill set, there are many things that will impact your efficiency, and you aren’t always going to understand why. Even the weather can have a significant impact on how efficient you are, and you might not even notice.
It isn’t necessarily useful to understand every single element that contributes to your efficiency because you can’t control a lot of them. However, it does pay to know the ones that you can control. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant ones, shall we?
Skills. First and foremost, one of the most well-known contributors to your efficiency is the skillset that you possess. The skills that you have and your proficiency with them can have a large impact on your ability to do particular tasks.
This is probably something you well know, but it can be helpful to consider the tasks that you are doing on a daily basis and what skills you think you apply to those tasks. Every now and again, it might be a good idea to pick one or two of those and start working to improve them. You never know. It might make you more efficient in the long run.
Knowledge. Putting skills aside, one of the most important factors that is going to have a lasting impact on your efficiency is your knowledge. Now people often conflate knowledge and skill, but they are actually very different.
At its most fundamental, the difference between skills and knowledge can best be summed up by cooking.
You can be a pretty decent cook without ever understanding which flavors work together or why they do. Similarly, you can be a terrible cook but understand exactly how to put flavors together.
However, you are never going to be a truly great cook without both possessing skill and knowledge in the art of cooking. This is the same with any task. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources that you can use to start building your knowledge in any number of areas.
Health. Last and certainly not least, health is a massive contributor to your effectiveness as a worker. Just think about it right now when you aren’t feeling well. You’re never going to work as well as you do when you are feeling well. However, what you count as feeling “well” might not be the best that you can feel.
Poor health habits are pretty much ubiquitous in society, and most of them aren’t the worst thing in the world. It is unrealistic to expect people to behave perfectly all the time and never engage with anything “unhealthy”. However, it is destructive to assume that you cannot improve upon your health habits now simply because they aren’t the worst. There is almost always going to be someone with worse health habits than you, But something isn’t good simply because something else exists that is worse.
Fortunately, there are plenty of easy-to-integrate steps that you can take to boost your health habits and ensure that you are making good headway towards leading a healthier life. This will make you more efficient, sure, but ultimately what matters is that it will make you happier, healthier, and able to lead a better life.
Tools to Help You
There are so many tools that can help you to become a more effective worker, and often people don’t even think to engage with them. These tools are often right in front of us, and it’s not always in our nature to think of using them. However, if you do, there is a lot that you can gain.
Learning Platforms. Now that you understand that your skillset and your knowledge base are so important to your efficiency, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand why a learning platform can be so beneficial in helping you to boost yours. These platforms have a huge range of potential courses taught at a highly professional level and can help you to improve your ability and knowledge base in almost any area.
On top of that, the ease of access to these courses and the way that the content is broken down means that you can engage with the learning in a very flexible manner. This means that you can keep on working and simply use your free time to catch up on any and all learning that you can get through these platforms.
Traditional Education. It is important to remember, however, that people learn in different ways, and sometimes what you need, rather than a flexible, easy to engage with the platform, is a rigid, structured course. While some people do respond better to freedom in their learning experience, others require the firm guidance of a teacher.
If this is the case for you, then you might want to look into the option of finding digital university courses. If you’re operating a business, for example, then engaging with an MBA degree online can be a brilliant way to help you better understand what you’re doing and how to do it well. Much like the learning platforms, this can help you to develop and enhance skills that you already possess so that you can work far more efficiently.
Task Management Software. Alternatively, if you are struggling to keep your tasks in line and that is preventing you from reaching your most efficient, then you might want to consider engaging with task management software. These can be highly beneficial tools, and there are a huge range of them available, so it pays to have a look around for one that suits your needs.
By utilizing task management software like this, you can help to quickly and efficiently organize your goals so that you can engage with them in a reliably efficient manner. Not only will this ensure that you get through the work you have quickly, but it will also help to ensure that you are getting the most important tasks done first.
This can be incredibly important in terms of efficiency because often, the most important tasks are the ones that hold your company back from being able to progress. So by ensuring that you’re working on what is a high priority, you can make sure to complete your work in the most effective way possible.
Pomodoro Breaks. Sometimes staying on task can be difficult, and if you particularly struggle with holding your attention on a single objective for a long period of time, then you might want to consider engaging with Pomodoro breaks. This is a productivity technique that is designed to help maintain concentration by allowing you short, frequent breaks that shouldn’t upset your workflow.
One of the best things about this is there are plenty of software tools out there that can help you to engage with Pomodoros seamlessly. For example, the Clockify app can be brilliant for that, as it allows you to track your time and will remind you when to take your breaks and when to stop and get back to work.
Plus, if you are so inclined, you can utilize these short breaks for any number of important tasks. Some people use these short breaks as a perfect opportunity to get up and be active while working, ensuring that they are staying healthy and working hard. Alternatively, some people use these short breaks as an opportunity to engage with learning platforms and to build their skills in other areas. Others still just use them as an opportunity to destress and do something pleasurable.
Regardless of how you utilize your Pomodoro breaks, the technique itself can add a lot of productivity to your workflow. After all, having regular breaks in which your mind can refresh and then refocus on the work that you need to do can be incredibly useful in allowing you to stay productive throughout an entire day.
The Buddy System. Speaking of staying productive, there are plenty of other productivity techniques that you might want to consider involving in your workflow. For example, one of the most effective techniques that people often apply to help keep themselves busy and effective is the buddy system. This is where you have a buddy who checks up on you every now and again to make sure that you are staying on of your work.
If this sounds like a system that could work for you, then there are plenty of options available to you, and it could be a great way for you and a coworker to make sure that you are staying on top of your work. Just be sure to keep guilt out of it. It’s just a system to help keep you both focused. No need to make it anything more than that.
Keep Working at It
Finally, one of the most important things to keep in mind when you’re working towards making yourself more efficient is that it is a long process. Nothing worth doing should ever be done quickly, and often the best things in life take a very long time.
However, the longer you work at it, the more you will see that every day you make another piece of small but important progress. It may not seem like it at the time, but these gains add up fast, and soon you will find that you are doing so much more than you ever thought you would. So keep working on your improvement because it will always benefit you in the end.
Oh, and be sure to have a look back sometimes and reflect on how far you’ve come. Give yourself a little credit because it isn’t easy to keep going when things are tough.
