Are you one of the nearly 50 percent of U.S. workers that routinely work over 50 hours a week? Are you sacrificing weekend and vacation time for your job? A study conducted by John Pencavel of Stanford University shows that the relationship between hours worked and productivity falls sharply when employees work 55 hours a week or more. Longer hours have also been connected to an increase in absenteeism and employee burnout as well. As a business leader, how can you protect yourself as well as your employees from becoming a “work martyr”? Here are several easy-to-implement ideas:

To-Do or Not To-Do

To-do lists are, by their very nature, optimistic. While optimism can be one of your greatest assets, over-optimism works against you. The pitfall lies in our tendency to add too many things to the list. However, counter-intuitive it may sound, overpopulating your list does not help. In fact, it creates apathy.

You might feel guilty the first time you fail to cross off a task but what if the same thing happens constantly and with numerous items? The failure to adhere to a commitment you made has a cascading effect that diminishes the list’s power to motivate.

Takeaway Tip: Counter the feeling of being overwhelmed. Break down complex goals and separate them into daily, weekly, and monthly waypoints instead. Keep them bite-sized, realistic, and doable.

Set Priorities

Once you have a list of achievable tasks, the next step is to arrange them by priority.

Avoid the temptation to put the easiest tasks higher on the list and try to adhere strictly to their order of importance. One of the most effective ways to this is to apply the Pareto Principle, popularly known as the 80/20 rule. It states that 20 percent of your efforts generate 80 percent of the results.

Takeaway Tip: A to-do list organized by priority greatly simplifies how you plan your days, weeks, and beyond.

Maintain Focus

Once you have created your to-do list and set your priorities, the real challenge begins. How do you maintain focus?

  1. Eliminate distractions. Email and social media are the two most corrosive enemies of productivity. In order to counter distractions, experts suggest setting times throughout the workday to check and respond to email and turning off notifications. Newly developed apps, such as Offtime and BreakFree, allow users to place limits on the use of social media. Fortunately, there are social media blocker apps that allow you to place limits on your use.
  2. Pace yourself. Burnout can be fatal to your productivity. Drop the mentality that non-stop work is the best way to accomplish the most. Instead, pace yourself with regular breaks. Some experts advocate 25-minute work sessions separated by 5-minute breaks, others believe that breaks of between 10 and 20 minutes after 90-minute work sessions are more productive. Tweak your workday to whichever interval allows you to accomplish the most without distractions or burning out.

Takeaway Tip: By limiting distractions, the smart worker achieves more in less time with less effort. The result is more success, better work-life balance, and a positive reinforcement of the right attitude.

Looking for more suggestions to improve your productivity and achieve a heathier balance? Visit the Productivity page in my blog section or contact me today.