5 ways to increase personal and team productivity

Today, much has been written about increasing productivity. Time management gurus talk about how to “put more cases on your work day,” motivation experts share secret practices that will help get rid of procrastination and laziness; Companies make gadgets and productivity software.

I will not try to grasp the immense and tell you about my own methods of increasing productivity. They are “run-in” not only for me: a small team of like-minded people was formed within the IT-department, as well as curious marketers and HR joined us.

During the month, we tried various tips that we learned from books, online articles, conversations with colleagues and personal experience. And what came to:
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1. Do you want to work better - do not be distracted

Multitasking is a myth inspired by the fame of Julius Caesar and actively crafted by trainers and consultants. Researches of scientists have more than once confirmed that switching from task to task or simply distraction takes 15-25 minutes of time from a person. In addition, "our brain is not able to concentrate attention and maintain performance, solving several problems," says psychologist Guy Winch.

To focus on business, we got rid of distractions (we used a program that blocks access to the Internet for a certain time) and formulated “rules for productive work,” which we hung in a prominent place.

2. One should not ignore procrastination in single work, and in the command one - Ringelman effect.

Someone claims that procrastination originates from the desire for perfectionism, someone that this is an extremely neglected manifestation of laziness. In any case, the fight against it must be carried out systematically and methodically. Experimental marketer and Eychar (available in the company in the singular) tested on themselves the method of Cal Newport, the author of the blog on productivity and efficiency. The professor suggests not just to make lists of cases, but to devote a specific amount of time to each case. But the main thing that helped our humanities heroes is the attention from colleagues. The entire IT department watched them with interest and, according to the test subjects, it motivated them to work better.

As for the Ringelman effect, it manifests itself in teamwork. Its essence is to reduce the productivity of workers as the group in which they work grow. Ringelman explains this state of affairs by the loss of individual motivation. The employee, realizing that responsibility for the task lies with the whole group, makes less effort. Another reason for the decline in productivity is the need to coordinate activities between the group members.

Nobody planned to expand the IT department, but we still tried to increase the motivation and improve the coordination of the activities of the existing members of the group. We decided to clearly designate for each area of ​​responsibility, while reporting on the planning meetings on successes and problems. It turned out quite well: at least you can immediately see who is working on what and who is doing great work and who is not very good.

3. Adopt best practices from others

Reading about productivity increases is good. But to adopt a positive experience from friends / colleagues / friends is even better. We were convinced of this thesis, working together with the marketer and HR-manager. Having been with us at the planning meeting, they decided to use flexible methodologies in their work. At the same time, we were prompted by several ideas on motivation (we finally introduced gamification into the department’s work with HR, we plan to later extend it to the entire company).

Another example: our PR people borrowed from the sales department CRM experience and now successfully apply the system in working with journalists. The deal with them is the publication of the article, the stages of sales are the stages of contact with the journalist (primary contact, negotiations, writing the article, publication). Again, you can keep statistics, watch the funnel and consider a great conversion.

4. Optimize processes. Analyze what you spend your time and team time

Before doing optimization, it is necessary to analyze: what do we actually have and what can be improved? This was helped by another program (in fact, quite a lot of them, we tried this one again), which collected statistics from our computers for two weeks. We rather easily found weak spots in our own activities, also managed to identify the most productive of us and tried to find out what the secret of the heroes was (this brings us back to the previous point).

Briefly about success: saving time by automating processes (they wrote a script to a marketer who brings together monthly reports and builds beautiful graphs - he used to do this in Excel); We saw that two testers do not use scripts to collect screenshots and lose a lot of time because of this.

They made templates for standard documents, which reduced the time spent on working with them for at least 5 minutes a day (in terms of each employee per week - a good saving is obtained).

5. Focus on priorities.

Parkinson's law says: "the work takes as much time as it is allotted." That is why you need to prioritize tasks and deal only with important matters. Trivia, such as parsing email, unplanned meetings and office conversations, current affairs - take away the lion's share of the workday. The worst thing is that we like it, because for insignificant tasks a lot of effort is not spent.

We approached the issue systematically: first, we sorted out the work, divided it into directions, discussed it and set priorities. Then, we determined the working time that will be set aside for these tasks. We used the Pareto rule (80% for priority tasks, 20% for routine).

And how do you increase productivity?