Protocol 80 Productivity Blog

There are no shortage of ways you can constantly tweak your personal time management, and if you’re trying for that 2% more productivity per week, every little can count.

So these three things put forward by Work Place Life aren’t anything amazing on their own, but they can still have an impact when you add them all together, or perhaps give some inspiration as to how else you might shave off some lost time, even if just by a little.
Here’s three more you might try

1. Stockpile Stationary
   Keeping a collection of various bits of stationary you need in a draw can save you a fair amount of time. If you suddenly find yourself in need of something you don’t want to have to get up mid-flow and trek of to find a stapler or something.  For items in limited supply like staplers, keep two - one in common use that you don’t mind lending out. One you keep hold of no matter what, that you only ever use if the common one is AWOL.
2. Send Your Personal Mail Via The Company “Out Box”
   Firstly I’m not saying the company should pay for your personal mail, but my company is fine with accepting people’s personal mail, stamped as normal and dropping it in the Out Box for collection by the Post Office directly. Which saves me 10 or so minutes each time I want to post something because I don’t need to go out of my way to the postbox.
3. Buy Your Lunch
   Sure, it costs more to buy lunch if you look at the just the costs of material. But for me, it’s easier to buy a sandwich from the guy who delivers to the office, then it is to make my own. To make a basic sandwich is fairly quick, but the end result isn’t very interesting, and as soon as you start to make it interesting, the cost raises pretty close to what I’m paying anyway, only I have to spend the time putting it together. In other words, as with any money saving exercise don’t forget how much your time is worth.

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I’m not going to repeat the ancient incantation of “Don’t use email alerts“. Not a week goes by when someone mentions it within the blogsphere, but I’ve always found that while you can turn off email alerts, it’s more difficult to ignore the follow up phone calls just to check “Have you got my email yet?“.

One way to try and reduce this pressure is to set up your email program to automatically reply with a standard email which informs the sender that you have received the email, and will process it within an allocated period of time. It’s useful to make it clear in the message that it is an automated response, so people don’t assume that you are aware of the mail contents.

It’s not fool proof by any means, but at times where you just want to get down
to some work, but keep getting interrupted it can make it easier on people contacting you who are stuck in reactive models of working who might feel that no reply within 10 minutes is shocking.