The Unexpected Benefits of Shaking Up Your Work Routine
Can a routine ever get in your own way? Can you fall into the trap of doing things just for the sake of doing them—whether they benefit you or not? Well, to put it simply, yes. And when it happens, your routine isn’t doing you any favors. Here's why we lean on these predictable systems, plus the unexpected positive effects of shaking things up.
44 Productivity Hacks to Turn Procrastination Into Action
If your to-do list is like mine — longer than the Great Wall of China — you’re probably desperate for productivity tips and shortcuts to help you squeeze a few more hours out of every day. Since we’re all about boosting productivity here at Wrike, we’ve compiled a compendium of productivity hacks to help you zip through your to-do list in record time. Without further ado: Focus 1. Unplug. Put your phone on airplane mode or Do Not Disturb (or use an Android app like Shush). Black out background browser tabs and notifications with an extension like StayFocusd, and mute your email with Inbox Pause for Gmail. 2. Tidy up. Did you know that the average worker spends 76 hours every year looking for lost stuff? Cleaning up your work area lets your mind focus. 3. Write distractions down. Free up some brain space by taking note of every reminder and distraction that pops in your head. It'll silence that nagging "I'm forgetting something..." feeling and let you focus on the task at hand. 4. Read/watch later. Use Pocket or the Wrike Chrome extension to save interesting links and videos that would ordinarily trigger a marathon link surfing session. 5. Take a hike. Periodic breaks refresh your brain, so go for a walk to boost creativity, sharpen your focus, and brighten your mood. 6. Change your scenery. Work from a coffee shop, library, or your backyard to improve focus and creativity without any office distractions. 7. Be healthy. Losing just 1.5 hours of sleep reduces alertness by 32%, and avoiding junk food can raise your productivity 20%. Exercise helps you better handle stress, makes you more alert, and gives you more mental energy. 8. Get comfy. An office that's too chilly or too warm (outside the 70-77 degree range) lessens productivity by 5%. The pleasant smell of lemons improves focus and reduces errors 54%. And sitting by a window keeps you focused 15% longer. 9. Go green. Houseplants improve creativity by 45% and overall wellbeing by 47%, while sharpening focus and concentration. 10. Grab some headphones. Listening to ambient music or white noise improves focus 35%. 11. Practice meditation. It teaches your brain to tune out distractions and focus longer. Even 5 minutes a day can have an impact! 12. Say "Awww!" Looking at pictures of cute baby animals or photos of nature increases your attention span and memory. Want to improve collaboration on your team? Start a 2 week trial of Wrike today! Save Time 13. Quit meetings. If you can't cut them completely, keep them to short stand-ups, or make at least one whole day a week meeting-free. 14. Say no. You can't do everything! Just make sure you say no the right way: “I don’t” is more effective than “I can’t”. 15. Delegate whenever possible. You've got a slew of talented teammates around you, so use them! Just don't dump tedious busywork on them — make sure every task you and your team take on is truly worthwhile. 16. De-clutter your inbox. Unroll.me compiles all your newsletters and subscriptions into a single daily digest. 17. Track your time. RescueTime shows how many minutes you spend using various applications. By productivity tracking, you'll get an accurate picture of your daily work habits and discover where you can improve. 18. Quit Facebook (partially). Move everyone from your “friends" list to "acquaintances" — you'll still get the important updates, but you'll spend less time scrolling through quiz results and food photos in your newsfeed. 19. Automate! Create standard email responses to common inquiries, set your browser to automatically open your favorite tabs, set up an RSS feed to monitor essential news outlets and use Zapier or IFTTT to automate other routine tasks. 20. Batch similar tasks. You'll get in the zone and power through several items in less time. 21. Quit typing. Try speech dictation software to get your thoughts down faster, or record new ideas and communications on the go. 22. Keep a "Stop Doing" list. It'll help you watch out for and eliminate the fruitless time sucks from your day. 23. Stop multitasking. Not only is it less efficient, it drops your IQ 10 points. That means more mistakes, which you'll only have to go back and correct... wasting even more precious time. Prioritize 24. Try the “Must, Should, Want” method. You identify three tasks that will help you accomplish your immediate and long-term goals, plus keep you from burning out. 25. Don't check your email first thing each morning. Instead, spend the first hour or two of each day tackling high-priority items. Too often emails derail our plans for the day, and what we intended to do gets pushed off or lost in the shuffle. 26. Do that ONE thing. Ask yourself: "If I could only get ONE thing done today, what would it be?" Do that first. 27. Pick 3 "Most Important" tasks. Write them on a Post-It, and keep it within sight all day long. 28. Prune your to-do list. If it can’t be done only by you and it's not important enough to delegate, rethink whether it's really worth doing at all. Don't waste time on unproductive tasks! 29. Do creative work first. Take advantage of a fresh brain and leave paperwork, meetings, and follow-up tasks for later. 30. Be picky about the work you accept. Write down your mission (or company's mission) in one concrete sentence, whether that’s “Build useful software” or “Bake beautiful wedding cakes.” Will that task help you achieve your mission? Only take it on if the answer is a firm “yes!” 31. Write tomorrow's to-do list tonight. List 3 items to jumpstart your day with a sense of purpose. And make at least one of those items something fun to get your day started on the right foot. 32. Use Stephen Covey's prioritization matrix to sort tasks. Important & Urgent at the top, then Important but Not Urgent, followed by Urgent but Not Important and finally Not Urgent and Not Important. 33. Ask yourself 5 questions: Does this get me closer to my goal? Is it important to my boss? Does it make me money? Does it make my life easier? Does it have to be done today? Sort your list based on the # of yeses. Get Motivated 34. Break big tasks into bite-sized pieces. This should kill your procrastination. Or, commit to working on a big project for just 30 minutes, and then stop. 30 minutes a day can add up to significant progress pretty quick! 35. Try David Allen's two-minute rule. If it takes less than two minutes, do it now. Yes, right now. Checking small items off your to-do list boosts motivation. 36. "Eat the frog." You know those big tasks you always dread? Crossing one off first thing in the day gives you a sense of accomplishment and makes you motivated to get even more done. 37. Find your “biological prime time.” This is the magic hour where your energy, focus and motivation align at a high point. Schedule your most important tasks for that window. 38. Make progress visible. Check off tasks or keep an anti-to do list (see #38). It’s easy to lose motivation when you feel like a hamster running on its wheel, going nowhere. Celebrate your successes! 39. Create an “Anti-todo list.” Keep from getting down on yourself for not completing your planned to-dos by keeping a running list of all the stuff you did get done. 40. “Don't break the chain.” Mark each day you accomplish an important task with an X on your calendar, and watch the chain grow. Then don’t break the chain! 41. Start a StickK contract. Name your task or goal, give yourself a set amount of time, and then put up some cash as stakes (optional). If you achieve your goal, you keep your money. If not, it goes to charity. 42. Strike a power pose. Think Wonder Woman or Superman — wide feet, hands on hips, chest out, chin up. The right body language can boost confidence, lower stress, and help you get "in the zone." 43. Eat some chocolate. You'll get a rush of dopamine, a hormone that boosts motivation. Chocolate also releases chemicals that promote calm and stimulate your brain, perfect for buckling down and getting things done. 44. Be happy! A good mood makes you 12% more productive, so joke with a colleague, watch a funny cat video, or chat with a friend. With these productivity tips bookmarked or pinned to your wall, your list of accomplishments will be more impressive than ever. Get Work Done - 17 Workplace Productivity Hacks from Wrike Related Reads:• 10 Encouraging Productivity Proverbs for Your Office Wall• How to Create Productive Work Habits (Slideshare)• 8 Lessons in Increased Productivity from Wrike Customers• 10 Free Productivity Apps for Getting Things Done
Email Management: 10 Clever Tricks to Hit Inbox Zero
For those of us staring down hundreds of unread emails each morning, the concept of inbox zero can start sounding like a mythical achievement — like finding the Holy Grail or stumbling across buried treasure. We look at our colleagues who regularly achieve it with a mix of envy and suspicion: there must be some kind of sorcery involved, right? Give these 10 tips and techniques a try to not only accomplish inbox zero, but actually stay there. No magic required. Trick 1: Use Tony Hsieh’s Yesterbox technique. The basic idea is this: today, you only read and respond to yesterday’s emails. The vast majority of emails don't require an immediate, same-day response, so you can let today's new messages come in without being distracted or distressed by every one. And tomorrow when you get up, you’ll already know exactly how many messages you have to get through and can more accurately plan your day. Zappos CEO Hsieh says he’s actually more responsive with this approach: everyone gets a reply the day after, instead of a week, month, or... never. Obviously, legitimately urgent emails can be addressed today — but true email emergencies are a pretty rare occurrence. Hsieh’s Pro Tip: If you’re using Outlook, just collapse your “Today” section to stay focused on yesterday’s messages. Read more details here: http://yesterbox.com/ Want a tool to help improve your productivity? Start your free Wrike trial today! Trick 2: Apply the 2-minute rule. Take a cue from David Allen’s GTD method: if it'll take you less than two minutes to reply, do it now. Don't wait! Trick 3: Schedule a meeting with your inbox. Set aside time each day to go through your email, whether it’s one hour-long chunk mid-morning, or three 20-minute check-ins at the beginning, middle, and end of the day. Then don’t look at your email any other time. Don’t keep it open in a browser tab, lurking in the background as you work. Turn off notifications. You may even be away from your desk at the time you choose, but as long as you are aware of how to access your messages, like, for example, how to access Outlook work email from home, you'll be fine. By dedicating scheduled time to your inbox, it won’t be on the back of your mind all day long, but you'll still stay on top of your messages. Wish you knew the best time to check your email? This article says that the best time to clean out your inbox is two hours after you’ve started working. Trick 4: Try Unroll.me. This app consolidates all your email subscriptions and newsletters into a single daily digest. Instead of dozens of daily emails to sort through, you have one. It’s easy to unsubscribe from lists en masse, and since you can quickly scan all the offers and updates in one message, you get through your "junk" mail that much faster. If you follow a lot of blogs via email, consider using an RSS reader like Feedly or Inoreader to monitor them instead of clogging up your inbox. Trick 5: Reschedule your emails. Install Boomerang for Gmail to schedule emails to reappear at a set time. It’s great for messages that require some research before a response, and for batching similar to-dos together. Say you’ve got a job posting up and emails from potential candidates are streaming in. You routinely sort through new resumes on Friday mornings. So reschedule every email from job seekers to show up in your inbox Friday am. They won’t be sitting in your inbox, distracting you or weighing on your mind, but you’ll still get them done and clear them out. Trick 6: Don’t be afraid to delete. If it’s that important, someone will follow up with you. So if there’s even a question about whether you need to keep the email, just delete it. Your trash bin will typically save deleted emails for 30 days, so if you deleted something by accident, you can always retrieve it. But trust us: 99% of the time you won't need to. Trick 7: Modify your Out-of-Office message. Vacations are great, but returning to a terrifying number of new emails can be really depressing, and can take forever to dig your way out of. Even worse is neglecting your work-life balance by figuring out how to access my work email from home. Replace the boilerplate out-of-office message with this: "I’m out of the office from 11/10-11/18 and won’t see your message. Please resend your email after 11/18.” Then filter all incoming messages straight to the trash while you’re gone. If it’s important and the deadline hasn’t passed, they’ll get back to you — and you’ll come home to a clean inbox. Trick 8: Put all your action items in Wrike. Move your to-dos out of your inbox and into your workspace with the rest of your tasks. Wrike’s Outlook/Apple Mail add-ins and Gmail gadget quickly turn emails into tasks, so you can clean out your inbox and actually get to work on to-dos instead of letting them languish in inbox purgatory. You’ll benefit from better organization, and manageable email. Trick 9: Move conversations out of your inbox. Keep your inbox uncluttered by limiting the amount of email you generate. Prevent a chain of email responses by stepping away from the laptop and holding conversations face-to-face, picking up the phone, or sending an instant message. Trick 10: Play the Email Game. The above tips will help you stay at inbox zero, but how do you clear the current mountain of unread emails to get there in the first place? Cleaning out your inbox doesn’t have to be a chore — make it fun! The Email Game gives you a set amount of time to act on each email: reply, forward, label, archive, delete, or skip to look at later. Collect points for beating the timer, which is set according to the length of each email. After you’ve powered through a batch of messages, you’ll get a status report showing how much time you saved and your rank on the leaderboard. Just try not to get addicted to beating your high score! "Inbox Zero" means zero time wasted in your inbox. Did you know that the real definition of Inbox Zero, as originally coined by Merlin Mann, doesn’t actually have anything to do with your number of unread emails? It’s the amount of your attention that’s preoccupied by email, the extent to which your inbox weighs on your mind. Yes, having zero emails in your inbox is one way to do that, but it’s not the only way. So don’t get down on yourself if you don't hit this productivity benchmark every day — or at all. The real achievement is in figuring out a system that works for you, so email doesn’t rule your life. Give these tricks a try, and be sure to let us know how it goes! Wrike can help you organize and manage all your to-dos and reminders. Start a free trial today and make your inbox a more productive place.
Understanding the Basics of Project Time Tracking
Project time tracking is essential for any company that works on multiple projects or clients. A time management tracker can help you monitor employee productivity and improve project costs. Learn about the basics of time tracking with Wrike.
Secrets to Getting Projects Done in Less Time
The secret of efficiency in project management is pretty simple: You don't need to do everything; you need to do everything that's important. But with tight deadlines, lots of people and multiple projects, planning your time can be very tricky. Matt has first-hand knowledge of what it means to manage multiple project groups with their own goals, priorities and working habits. He knows precisely how crucial it is to have a clear picture of all projects to allocate resources between them, especially when you plan hundreds of tasks for a really large team. "At some point, we decided to bring all that to a system, rather than continue trying to work through the Outlook Calendar," comments Matt Bullock. In less than three months of using Wrike, Matt systematized all his team's tasks and projects in one place. After that, he implemented four project management rules that dramatically changed project planning for Base Camp Franchising and allowed the team to do more in less time with better quality. If you feel overloaded with tasks and stressed out by deadlines, Matt's experience can really help you out. These four rules revolutionized project management in Base Camp Franchising. If you face the same challenges of running multiple projects simultaneously, they might be helpful for your business, too. Here's what Matt advises: 1. Coordinate your team's efforts This may seem obvious, but in reality, too often people are overloaded with unstructured information when new tasks spontaneously appear from everywhere - via e-mails, phone, Skype, etc. Employees rarely see the whole picture of the project, so they're not aware of where the team's priorities stand, or their own definition of capacity in business. Consequently, they get out of sync in collaboration. We all have faced situations when, say, it took three days to complete a task, while there were only three people working on it for an hour each. When a worker isn't in the loop with what his peer does, he might have a wrong vision of priorities. People work on things that seem to be the most important for them, but the priorities may be different on the level of an entire project. To avoid misalignment in his team's efforts, Matt implemented Wrike project management software, which made collaboration in Base Camp Franchising absolutely transparent: "There are two things I like about Wrike. First, it gives me a list of to-dos within each project any time I need it. Secondly, it automatically sends notifications, so that not only me, but all other project contributors are always aware of what they need to accomplish and when." 2. There can't be too many experts We got used to the idea that too many cooks spoil the broth. However, with the impact of technology, this proverb doesn't really match modern collaboration. If your team is able to share information and communicate efficiently, involving experts can help you discover mistakes on earlier stages and avoid losing time on unpromising projects. "We have an outsourcing coder, and I'm able to pull in other subject matter experts on each particular project. We all work in the same environment in Wrike and thus manage to keep everyone in the loop. We involve more people and produce a better product because of that." (Matt Bullock) 3. Use technologies that save time Try to minimize the time you spend on collecting status updates and spreading the information between all collaborators. Instead, focus on the activities that add real value to the results you deliver to your customers. Matt highlights: "Instead of having long meetings in order to know how is the project going, in Wrike, it's like in Facebook, where you post a status on a task when something is happening, and you always know when something has changed or needs to be changed. That helps a lot!" 4. Be precise; it really helps! Project management is not only about managing projects, but also about managing opportunities. You should be ready to estimate your resources immediately when a new idea comes up. This way, you don't risk jumping into something that you are unable to accomplish before the deadline. Matt believes that the Gantt chart is the most efficient tool for making this tip work: "We use the Gantt chart, where we can easily see how much time we have and decide whether we are able to add a new feature or not. I can set task dependencies and milestones, so it's easy to plan to see how changes might influence everything." ___ Applying these methods to its project management practices, Base Camp Franchising improved its time planning and made collaboration more efficient. As a consequence, no change can knock the team off the course – it's now able to react way faster than before. Matt admits that Wrike has greatly influenced these improvements and supports his business a lot on the way to achievements. We welcome you to join one of our FREE Webinar, where you'll learn how Wrike can make your business more successful, too!
Take Control of Your Project Plan Calendar
There are many different ways to set up a project planning calendar template, and it's important for every leader to find an approach that works for their team's needs. Here are a few key considerations to bear in mind as you establish the schedule for managing a project.
