Leave a Comment / Management, Leadership, Productivity / By Tim Lauenroth
How many people say that they don’t have time right now because they are too busy. They are stressed because they feel like they are chasing tasks and not getting to the end. After all, the tasks are piling up more and more.
However, many people misinterpret the word “being busy.” Being busy doesn’t mean being productive. It is often the case that these two words are used as synonyms in everyday life. But they are as different as night and day. The good thing is: that you don’t have to be busy to be productive. We’ll go further and say that without being busy, you’re more effective.
In this blog post, we want to show you examples of how you can distinguish between busy and productive in your work and what you can do to put yourself more in a productive state. Be curious!
1. Busy people multitask. Productive people focus on a single task.
As mentioned at the beginning, effective working people differed from busy people primarily in that busy people multitask and cannot focus on one task. Whereas productivity occurs when you focus on a single and devote yourself fully to that task.
A little comparison for you to see what happens when you have multiple things going on at once:
What happens when you have too many tabs open on your laptop or smartphone?
Your smartphone or laptop will slow down significantly and will no longer be able to perform the many tasks you request. It’s similar to your professional life. You can’t do 15 tasks at the same time, you can only do one task.
2. Busy people are trapped at their desks. Productive people take purposeful breaks and can switch off
What busy people often underestimate is the efficiency of purposeful break scheduling. Design your breaks to take a walk, maybe listen to a good song, and get your mind off things. You can be sure that you will work more efficiently afterward if you give your brain a break now and then.
To work productively, you need an efficient brain. It’s no use working all day long when your mental capacity is not established.
3. Busy people are constantly distracted. Productive people create a system.
Busy people get lost in the many tasks they have to do every day. The mails still have to be checked quickly, while one is currently working on another important task that also has to be completed quickly. Therefore, it is all the more important not to get distracted by other tasks and to create a system for yourself to get the tasks done.
Project management software like Microsoft Planner, as well as our project time tracking, can give you a good overview of your projects and tasks. Here you can prioritize and thus put together an order and system that will make you much more productive in getting your tasks done.
Here’s another little overview you can use to classify your tasks: The Priority Matrix:
4. Busy people get bogged down in the details. Productive people keep track of the macro and the micro.
One state you can use to check whether you are busy or productive is to check whether you are currently busy with details that have such a small impact on the outcome of the project that it is not worth thinking about. Busy people deal with unimportant details that have virtually no impact on the project’s success.
When faced with a decision to take A or B, first ask yourself: what impact will my decision have on the success of the project? Most of the time, you get bogged down in micromanagement and worry too much about whether A or B is the better approach. Instead, you should decide on one option and get started.
Big Win: timeghost as project time tracking for a productivity boost
Record the tasks you work on every day and assign them to a project. This gives you the perfect overview of how you allocate your time during the day, the week, and the month. You can conclude how productive you have been. Reflect on whether you took too long on a task and ask yourself what the problem was and how you can do better next time.
Each team member enters their working hours transparently in the software, which in turn provides the project manager or the administrator with new evaluation options. The recorded working times also allow him to make adjustments and optimizations to make the team even better.
We will be happy to show you a live demo of how we work with the app and what you can use timeghost for. In the demo, we’ll also introduce you to our integration with the Microsoft365 environment, which is also a great way to automate processes and link programs together.
Test our time tracking tool and track your billable/non-billable working hours
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Here you will learn how to best get started with timeghost so that the software immediately offers you added value.
If you have any questions about the software, feel free to contact support@timeghost.io.
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