6 office productivity hacks to make life at work better

Even as the rest of the world touts the benefits of work-life balance, many Singaporeans are still clocking 14-15 hour workdays, wearing it around like a badge of honour and thinking it’ll lead them to greater work success.

Conversely, there’s strong evidence to show that overworked people are far less productive and are on the brink of burnout.

You’d rather put your time outside work to good - spend time with family and maybe even throw in a sweaty workout.

Monster has launched the Work-Life Balance campaign to raise awareness on this issue and to encourage job seekers to go for the jobs that help them manage their work and personal lives in a more efficient manner.

For more videos of the Work-Life Balance, series click here.

If that’s got you thinking about reducing the hours you spend at work, we urge you to take the following tips into consideration:

1. Map your tasks
Everyone has their own ways of planning their tasks. Whether you use a physical planner, a notebook or other task management tools to keep track of them, make sure you list them down in the most logical manner.

Task-mapping requires some trial and error and there’s no one-size-fits-all method to go about with this. The bottom line here is to find what works best for you, refine it and stick to it.

By doing so, you get an overview of the tasks for the day or the week, enabling you to prioritise your time better and not take on more than what you can handle.

2. Start with the most important tasks
Your mind is at its best at the start of the day and gets wearier as the day goes. A good rule of thumb is to begin the day with the most demanding tasks, leaving the less demanding ones for the later part of the day.

3. Go for your lunch break
Taking a break, even if it’s only half an hour, has been proven to successfully sustain, if not improve one’s concentration. Yet against these expert findings and research, lunch is often still the first thing workers put off when the day gets seemingly too busy!

Do yourself a favour and consider this the next time you decide to skip your lunch. How you spend your lunch break dictates how the rest of your afternoon will pan out. Want a better afternoon? Go grab a bite.

4. Take short breaks between tasks
Don’t always strive to complete your tasks in one attempt. By doing so, you’re more likely to exhaust your mind, limiting yourself from performing to the best of your capabilities. Taking multiple breaks between work that requires careful thought and execution can increase your ability to be more creative and productive.

5. Reduce the time spent on social media
This one’s a no-brainer. People today spend a fair amount of their time at work scrolling through social media. Without personal discipline, this can easily impact our productivity.

We’re not saying you should stay off social media, but it pays to be conscious of the time you spend on it so it does not eat into your time at work.

6. Be positive
Unreasonably demanding clients or colleagues aren’t uncommon, and there’s nothing wrong with getting upset over what they’ve asked of you. But alas, there’s also nothing worse than having a ton of backlog at work resulting from that.

Occasional work demands are understandable and it’s important to remember that it will pass. Continue to complete what you need to, and remove yourself from the situation once work ends.

There’s no need to bring that negativity out of the office!