12 Science Approved Hacks To Boss Your Productivity

Step One: Take a nap (no, seriously).

don't just stand there crop
Pixabay

Even if you love your job, it can still sometimes be difficult to motivate yourself. 

Somehow, the days just seem to slip away and you feel as though you've got nothing to show for it.

Well, what you need are a couple of tricks to help you stay on track and fly through your work, freeing up time and headspace for the important things in life like spending time with your family and filling yourself up with red wine.

Unless you've got one of those cool jobs like a lumberjack or zookeeper, the chances are that you'll spend most of your waking hours in an office or a shop where you will be required to complete a number of analytical and creative tasks throughout the day through the use of brainpower and coffee alone.

Rather than spending your week in a sort of lumbering plod, ending in a mad rush towards the end, these productivity-boosting techniques will make it easier for you to get everything done in time to be in the pub by 5:45pm on Friday without any unfinished tasks hanging over your head.

That's the good news. The even better news is that many of these techniques involve giving yourself breaks and reducing your stress levels.

Healthier, happier and more productive? Turns out you can have you cake and eat it after all.

12. Work In Smaller Groups

don't just stand there crop
Wikipedia

Too many cooks spoil the broth - never before has this rung more true.

The founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, has a “two pizza” rule that states that if you can't feed your team with two pizzas then it's too big.

The problem stems from an effect known as “social loafing”. This occurs when people begin to put in less effort when working in a group, due to the reduced culpability of the individual and the bigger the group, the greater the effect. The upshot of this is that a large group can actually be less productive than an individual.

There are a number of factors that feed into the effect, including the difficulties involved in coordinating large groups of people and the "dispensability of effort" effect in which an individual will feel as though their input is less important the larger the group is and will therefore less likely to put the effort in at all.

If you really need to involve everyone, but need to get things done, you're much better off splitting into smaller teams or even working individually and then coming back together to collate your results.

 
First Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Writer. Raconteur. Gardeners' World Enthusiast.