Feeling overwhelmed and having your work-life seep into your personal life can be exhausting if you don’t find a good handle on it early on. It is difficult when you are not firing on all cylinders and your working world isn’t productive enough. Efficiency is essential for maintaining performance and a work-life balance.
Not having the ability to work through your load can affect future projects and your overall work ethic. Managing workflow is the key to having a balance in your career and your personal life.
Here are 10 top tips that will be efficient in helping with managing workflow in any industry.
1. Evaluate You Current And Future Workload
Take inventory of what you have to now. Do not overlook any assignment, project, or even housekeeping activities. It is even helpful to write them down in categories with the due dates next to them.
Once you have assessed all the work that is due, you want to push that aside and shift your focus to your future workload.
The future workload is defined as anything that isn’t meant to be finished within the next 2 weeks. You want to keep track of those projects and assignments so that you not only know when they are due but you can begin to prep for those.
2. Prioritize Your Workload
Now that you know when everything is due, it’s time to rank them by importance. You want to start on the most time consuming and important projects first because the easy one can be done towards the end with ease.
Giving your 110% is crucial to your important assignments and projects and prioritizing will make it clear for which one needs it the most. Using Kanban boards can help with optimizing management productivity.
3. Focus On Thing At A Time
Multi-tasking seems like a good idea because you think you’re knocking out a lot of your workload faster. This isn’t true and the quality of your work will suffer. You end up maxing out your brain faster because you’re constantly switching between tasks and you’re slowing down your productivity rate.
One thing at a time and you’ll be efficient and successful.
4. Adjust and Adapt
Things change and the load can get smaller or bigger. Do not let this discourage you because you already had a “plan”. Things change and you should train yourself to roll with the punches!
5. Communicate Effectively
If you know that you won’t be able to deliver on a deadline, communicate it the moment you know, not right before it’s due. This saves the other person time and you can now try to get it done with some help. Communicate any obstacles or success any time you can because this indirectly holds you accountable for your tasks.
It’s better to hear and see progress than to keep it to yourself.
6. Outsource Your Work
If you have a task that you know would save you time by delegating it to someone else, do it! Sometimes your daily workflow should outsource your work to someone who could do it better and faster.
If you have a jam-packed day of work and one of your tasks is to make a logo, outsource it! A great place to start to outsource all your logo and design needs would be Fiverr or UpWork in addition to a local graphic designer.
Give it a go and realize you saved yourself a lot of time and got a beautiful product as well.
7. Limit, Not Eliminate Distractions
A common thought is to eliminate any distractions. However this is impossible, and your brain will start to get uncomfortable with how quiet it is. You want to build in five-minute breaks to improve your work-flow, not hinder it.
Working straight for however many hours is impossible because it becomes exhausting and after about an hour or two, you’re no longer motivated to finish anything. With the five-minute break, you can catch up on your social media notifications, grab a snack, or even just take it as a chance to stretch your legs and breathe.
8. Keep Your Workspace Organized
A messy workspace is a great way to not be productive. For maximum workflow efficiency, keep things where they belong and labeled so you’re not wasting time looking for things.
A lot of people like to have silverware, food, and just overall unnecessary junk scattered throughout their desks which becomes frustrating when you need that tiny rubberband trapped between your half-eaten apple and stapler.
Try to keep it clean and minimal. Throw papers out that you don’t need, keep your pens and pencils in one spot, and label your drawers. This will make a huge difference in improving the workflow process.
9. Regroup
As you get closer and closer towards the end of the day, you want to make sure you ross off and update your list of things to do. Make sure to also incorporate all new tasks and assignments as you go throughout the day into the list.
This may seem intuitive but it’s easy to forget or tell yourself that you’ll remember…you won’t.
10. Work and Home Don’t Mix Well
If you keep yourself focused and follow the tips above, you should see less and less of your workload coming home. A home is where you are supposed to de-stress from your job but if you bring it home, you’ll never enjoy the little moments away from work. This will lead you to decrease your workflow efficiency and will also make you unhappy.
Make sure you keep your work at work!
Why Managing Workflow Is Important
With these ten top tips and tricks on how you can now be effective and efficient in managing workflow, you should see tremendous positive progress in all aspects of your work ethic. You will find that you no longer dread work and your workflow efficiency has gone up.
Contact us for any questions and check out our page for more tips to improve your workflow. Visit the Business section of the Everything Entrepreneur Blog right now for more work management tips.
