5 Most Important Tips on How to Improve Team (& Personal) Productivity

There are a lot of innovative time tracking and productivity tools popping up on the internet in an attempt to boost employees productivity. Surprisingly, statistics actually show contradictory results regarding productivity. According to a report from the US Bureau of Labor, employee productivity is actually declining.

Clearly, we cannot entirely depend on time tracking systems to improve productivity. Time tracking tools are merely helpers. According to most authorized media, these 5 are the most effective tips on how to improve productivity, whether as an individual or at a team level:

1. Give yourself deadlines

Most people admit they perform best under pressure, usually when they have a looming deadline. Adding a sense of urgency to your work, even if it's your own set deadline can greatly improve focus and efficiency.

To make the practice more fun, you can promise yourself rewards at the end of completing each task. As a general rule, this should always be a realistic deadline, that which you can achieve.

2. Always prioritize your tasks

Starting with the most difficult or largest task can help boost your confidence and its also a plus in terms of your time management. It happens to every developer, that you estimate the time you will take to complete a project, only to realize that one of the tasks actually requires more time than you imagined.

If it’s a smaller or less complicated task, you can always compromise, however, if it's a large complicated task you would have to surpass the deadline.

3. The phone can wait!

Setting up a specific time for checking up on your phone or answering emails is a common habit among most successful professionals. You probably know from experience, that there was a time while you are working when you reached out to your phone to check the time but ended up staying on the phone for 20 minutes or more.

According to a survey by staffing firm OfficeTeam, most office employees spend an average of 56 minutes each day using their smartphones for non-work related activities. This is about a little below 5 hours of people goofing on their smartphones per week. Thus if you can stay proactive during work and avoid reacting to every notification which pops up on your phone, you can add about 5 more hours to your weekly productivity.

4. Don’t kill two birds with one stone

In today’s fast-paced society, whereby we are constantly bombarded with a lot of tasks, multitasking seems to be the only way out, but it isn’t. Psychological findings have actually shown that doing several tasks at once actually slows you down and can result in reduced productivity and lost time.

5. Delegate tasks

It is not entirely limited to teamwork. Even as an individual developer, you can delegate some tasks to applications or software designed to help developers with simple tasks.

One of the useful applications used by many developers all over the world is Duefocus. Duefocus is a really good tool for efficiently managing a team and automating tasks that could have taken you hours to do by yourself. The app takes time tracking to a new level and it enables synchronization with all popular task managers.

The Takeaway

There are infinite ways to increase productivity. However, if you can at least leverage these 5 strategies, you will be pleasantly surprised at how much efficiency they’ll bring to your work.

It's not very hard to achieve productivity once in a while, what`s challenging is maintaining productivity. Keep in mind that productivity is a work in progress and you have to stay disciplined and keep learning.

Prepared by Duefocus Team