How many items are on your to-do list for the day? If you’re often overwhelmed by the amount of tasks you have, or have to rush to complete them, you may be doing more work than necessary.
Sometimes, the easiest path to productivity is to simply do less. In the article The Best Productivity Trick of All: Do Less, author Alex Cavoulacos explains that knowing what not to do can have a significant impact on your productivity. Next time you’re planning your week, keep these 5 questions in mind to become a productivity ninja:
Clean out your inbox and archive anything old and irrelevant. Unsubscribe to newsletters that you never check.
1. Are Those Meetings Required?
Meetings are often scheduled on an ad-hoc or recurring basis even when they’re not required. Take a look at your schedule and see how many meetings can be replaced with a simple email. For the meetings you end up keeping, see if they can be restructured to increase their overall effectiveness, such as shortening meeting length and sticking to a hard schedule.
For meetings you’re invited to, ask the organizer if your presence will be missed if you don’t attend. Colleagues will often invite you to meetings without asking your permission first – don’t be afraid to decline. You can easily say no if the meeting isn’t critical to your job.
2. Do You Say No?
Much like declining a meeting invite, people are often reluctant to say no to taking on projects, assignments, tasks, and even team lunches. If you’re feeling overworked and notice your productivity lagging, go through your schedule and see how many times you’ve said yes to a request. If it looks like you say yes to a majority of invites, it’s time to start saying no if it isn’t a critical request.
3. Is the Task Necessary?
If you have a task on your to-do list that keeps getting pushed back, it’s a sign that the task may not be necessary to begin with. Get rid of it, and any other task that isn’t an absolute priority. And just because you’ve gotten rid of the task doesn’t mean it needs to be replaced – the added space gives you extra time to complete everything else on your to-do list.
4. Are You Getting Swamped by Emails?
Not every email that lands in your inbox needs to be answered. Clean out your inbox and archive anything old and irrelevant. Unsubscribe to newsletters that you never check. Flag emails that require immediate action. You’ll be more productive once your inbox is clean and manageable, as opposed to cluttered and overwhelming.
5. Are You Doing It All Yourself?
“If you’re doing everything yourself, and think ‘it’s just faster for me to do it,’” says Alex, “you may be a delegatophobe.” Look at your job description and core responsibilities to see if there are opportunities to delegate some tasks to colleagues better suited to complete them.