Struggling to Stay Productive At Work? Here’s What You Need to Try

Productivity in the workplace has always been a tricky subject, especially when it comes to balancing that productivity with consistent quality and the needs of your mental health.

Learning how to stay productive is a skill just like everything else and it can take time to develop. That’s why today we’ll be offering some tips for improving your productivity as well as what you can do to help your whole team run more effectively.

Limiting Distractions

It’s no secret that with the rise of social media has come a rise in distractions, both at work and at home. Venture online and you’ll find any number of attention grabbing headlines, notifications telling you what’s important, countless buttons designed to do everything they possibly can to make you click.

For some, avoiding these distractions can be as simple as switching off the phone during work hours but if your job takes you online during the day, then you may need to put some more rigorous measures in place.

A big part of learning how to limit distractions at work is about pinpointing the cause of those distractions in the first place. Do you find yourself drifting over to headlines or social media during the day? Find ways to block those sites on your office PC. Do you get anxious about whether your team has won the match? Give yourself a set check in point and try to make that a routine.

Of course, not all distractions come from technology. For some people – particularly those that aren’t stimulated by their jobs – the brain will hunt out distractions. You’ll find yourself chatting with coworkers, thinking about hobbies or personal projects, or even just fiddling with items at your desk. If that describes you, then what you need is the coffee break.

It doesn’t have to be coffee – for some people it’s a cup of tea, or even just a walk around the office. The key is that between tasks you need a short ritual/routine that lets you get up, step away from the desk, and clear your head.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a full break or even a reward. The perfect coffee break ritual takes less than two minutes while giving you a change of surroundings and letting you stretch your muscles. By doing so, you create the feeling of a split between tasks, helping to chunk up your work into smaller bite size portions.

Of course, that’s not to say rewards don’t have their place…

Carrots & Sticks

Sooner or later, most tips for productivity at work boil down to one of two categories: carrots and sticks. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. After all, positive and negative reinforcement are the only real methods for motivation we have and they can be pretty powerful.

When you’re at work, both carrot and stick are at play. If you work, you get paid. If you don’t work, you’ll lose your job. Unfortunately, while these motivations are important, on a moment to moment basis the potential reward/punishment is delayed. Put simply, it just doesn’t feel that pressing even if it should.

The trick is to create short-term motivators. How you do this is entirely up to you but what’s important is that you attach those motivators to results. Whether it’s a healthy snack for hitting your goals or an afterwork run for missing them, try to turn these motivators into habits until your brain automatically associates them with success and failure.

Avoiding The Blame Game

Before we wrap up, we’d like to take a moment to talk about what not to do when trying to raise workplace productivity.

All too often, when we talk about staying productive at work, the conversation can devolve into the worst kind of blame game.

Whether it’s those lazy new hires who don’t know what they’re doing, that unsympathetic boss who sits around all day handing out orders, or all those middle managers getting in the way and clogging things up, there’s always someone to point the finger.

The truth is that these are all just caricatures – easy stereotypes that our brains leap to when things are going wrong. While nobody’s perfect, nine times out of ten, people are trying their best and a problem with productivity is usually just a communication issue.

We’re certainly not saying you never have a right to be annoyed with your coworkers. What we are saying is that it’s almost always better to assume good intentions unless you have reason to believe otherwise.

It really can’t be overstated that good communication is one of the easiest ways to improve people’s performance at work. Those lazy new hires might just need a little more training. That unsympathetic boss is probably dealing with issues the rest of the company doesn’t even know about, and those middle managers are doing their best to delegate appropriately.

When all’s said and done a productivity problem is almost never one person’s fault and blaming them probably won’t lead to any change. Instead, ask what you can do to help tackle the problem for everyone.