10 Tips For Being More Productive At Work

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Feeling unproductive at the office? Wish you get more work done? We all have those days where getting things done seems like the hardest thing in the world. Here are some tips for being more productive at work courtesy of Forbes:

If you’re reading this article instead of calling a client or crunching a spreadsheet, chances are you could be more focused at work. You’re not alone. According to a recent survey by Salary.com, the average employee admits to wasting about two hours of each eight-hour workday, not including lunch or scheduled breaks.

The Internet doesn’t help. Like the college roommate who keeps asking us to hang out when we know we have to study, the Web (and e-mail) provide so much distraction on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour basis that we can find it nearly impossible to give our full attention to higher-level tasks. And with few defined edges to many projects, we end up living in an endless jumble of work and life. We can book a trip to Turkey while participating in a conference call; we can send work e-mails from a towel on the beach in Cancun.A

s the economy ebbs along with our focus, we have more to do and less time to do it. Enter the productivity experts. Their guru is David Allen, author of the 2001 book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (GTD to its devotees). There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to boosting productivity, but Allen and his ilk have some effective tactics you can use right now.

Here are 10 of them. If the economy continues to slump, they may just help you keep your job.

Beware Multitasking

Sounds counterintuitive, right? Truth is, we’d all be more productive if we checked e-mail only a few times a day rather than incessantly, says Allen.

Tame Your In-box

Technology is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. Allen says that if replying to or disposing of an e-mail takes less than two minutes, do so right away. Get rid of that annoying alert flashing on your computer every time a new e-mail comes in. Send less to receive less: Keep your e-mails short, and write fewer of them.

Read more at Forbes