Keep Your Productivity from Taking a...Slump

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash.

Return Leverage contributors pride themselves on helping busy people get more done. It’s exemplified in the work we choose to engage in and is expressed in our brand promise: “we turn 30 minutes of explanation and direction into 20 hours of results.” For this reason, we also seek to make you and your team members as productive and efficient as possible, sharing carefully cultivated tips, studies, and strategies across our social-media platforms. (If you don’t already follow us, subscribe to our LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter feeds to stay in the know.)

Because you want to be efficient (we get it!), sometimes you just want to be debriefed. For this reason we’ve created this handy roundup of our favorite (and our followers’ favorites) articles on productivity

Productivity Stats That Will Surprise You

Graphic from Ridiculously Efficient. 

Unhealthy meeting culture, sleep deprivation, and unrealistic workday length are realities of the corporate workplace. Workgroups shares quantitative metrics to these productivity black holes that we find shocking---seriously, 15 to 18 hours of Facebook time per month?

The shock factor is invaluable to help you solve the problems in your own day. If you know where your time goes, you can be more mindful to eliminate distractions and schedule “goof off” time (for Facebook, a walk, or Web browsing) that’ll actually re-invigorate you.

Productivity Tips to Move You Ahead of the Scary Stats

Top executives share their tips for success in this article from Fortune. Most range from the conventional advice to create to-do

lists, eliminate distractions, and ensure that your work matches your goals. And, other, less commonly heard suggestions, such as taking calls right where you’re at and investing in voice-recognition software to dictate to (because most of us type slower than we think!) are equally useful.

We all have our rules for success. The key takeaways from these tidbits are to understand yourself, when and where you’re most productive, and how to consistently practice those habits.

Multitasking Is a Myth and Inhibits Your Productivity

Graphic from EnMast.

We’re all very busy. It’s the age we live in. Entrepreneur shares interesting research on the subject of multitasking, which suggests that while we think it’s possible, and that we can all do it, it’s not. In fact, it hurts our brain, and you guessed it, our productivity, too. Multitasking, and especially between tasks that share a similar area of the brain, such as writing and listening to music with lyrics, both of which activate the language center. Because the brain is forced to essentially switch back and forth between these tasks, we’re unable to get much done and if we do, it’s at the risk of error and inefficiency.

Instead, schedule time to complete tasks just as you would any other appointment, including checking email or social media, reading the news, or getting good work done. Separate these tasks and get more done in less time.

A Solution to the Organizational Productivity Problem: a Director of Getting Sh*t Done

Photo credit: Free Icons PNG

CEO of Hootsuite Ryan Holmes shares the company’s solution to internal struggle, stagnation, and completion of the seemingly endless list of honey-dos that crop up in business. This director role is designated to work across departments to eliminate bad processes, streamline where necessary, and keep the business from becoming stale. It’s not always productive, or most efficient, for leaders in a functional area to spur changes or lead the project. Sometimes an outside perspective is really what’s need. In this way, this internal role breaks through divides and gets work done, without the concern of being thought of us an “outsider” who tries to “change our ways.” Improvements to process, communication, and culture all seem to have a way of making us all more productive (and for the most part, happy), even if the change feels different or scary at the time. This director gets to have “do sh*t” on their business card and make people more productive and happy as they carry it.

We love this. Particularly because this is how we see ourselves as Return Leverage collaborators. We love to get sh*t done on your team’s behalf. We know that time and effort is needed to keep the business running. Sometimes the important tasks and fixer-upper, upgrade process and procedure type projects get pushed aside in order to keep the train on the tracks. We get it! We do it ourselves.

If culturally creating this role is a no-go, but you think your company could use a “Director of Getting Sh*t Done,” reach out through our Collaborate With Us page to engage us to increase your organization’s productivity.