It can be difficult to be productive in today’s digital world. There are so many distractions when you work on a computer. While many of these distractions don’t feel like distractions, they can have a cumulative cognitive drag. Don’t believe it? You can read this entire post without checking your email or being distracted.
All productivity vampires share one thing in common: switching expenses. Switching costs is exactly what they sound like. It’s the loss of cognitive momentum when switching between tasks. Multi-tasking is also known as it and has been shown to be detrimental to productivity.
Even if you think you are multitasking, you may be unaware of micro tasks. These four hacks can be used by leaders and managers to reduce task switching and improve productivity.
#1 Wage war against meetings
Meetings can be a major productivity killer. Even though you know this, you just… can’t… stop. Every meeting with more than two people should be seriously questioned.
Meetings are good for us. It’s nice to have everyone in the same place sometimes. Sometimes it’s necessary.
TeamGantt is a remote team that works remotely. We have one team meeting per month. It’s serious.
These tips can help you reduce the impact that a meeting may have on your team’s productivity.
Meetings should be held early in the morning. Keep them brief. This will ensure that meetings don’t interrupt work.
They can also be held at the end, but people may be mentally commuting home. Morning meetings are bad because people dread them. It’s when they are most productive. However, the type of meetings you should have is one that requires sharp problem solving and brings people together. Email can be used to do the dull, status and update meetings that work well in afternoons.
Ask yourself if it would be possible to have this meeting asynchronously. Use TeamGantt, a great team communication tool. Daily standups and status meetings, company announcements and updates, are all things that don’t require everyone in the room at once, interrupting their workflow. Slack and other real-time chat tools can be distracting. This brings us to the next tip…
#2 Reduce real-time communication
It’s not only big distractions like meetings that can reduce productivity. Add all the micro interruptions and you have a high switching cost.
This is why remote teams are more productive. Remote teams are falling prey to this trap, thanks to Slack and the natural human desire to answer queries in real-time.
Many of the most productive people believe that communicating asynchronously is the only way to function and get things done. This is why Elon Musk believes email is his preferred communication method.
If you want your team more productive, don’t expect a quick response to your Slack message.
Here are some ways to reduce real-time communication and increase productivity.
Reduce the Slack. Slack, or any similar tool, should be made clear to your team that replies do not have to be immediate and that people don’t need to be available 24/7. It’s better to think of it as email than instant messaging. This is what TeamGantt does and it works well for us. When I’m working uninterrupted, I close Slack completely.
Establish a common time for socializing or uninterrupted silence. It can be difficult if everyone chooses different times to be silent. If you find that chaos is distracting, then set aside a few hours each day to allow everyone to focus on a single task and remain uninterrupted. If you prefer that the main mode of operation is uninterrupted, you can designate a few hours each day as “social time”, where everyone can chat and c
