Whatever the industry is that we work in, many workers struggle with the fact that there never seems to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. In today’s work at home culture, the answer to the problem may be to work later until you get everything done.

However, consistently working late will cause a chain reaction in which we’ll always be playing catch up. As a result, you’ll be working hard, but are possibly no more productive in doing so.

So how do we break this cycle?
Here are some tips that will get you to value your time and to work smarter, not harder.

Work Bound By Results-Not Time

If you work a desk job, the most common culture is to start work by 9 am and finish at 5 pm. However, if you happen to finish your jobs by 3.15 pm, you still have just over an hour and a half to kill before you’re ‘allowed’ to finish for the day. So what do you do? You end up filling your time with tasks for the sake of tasks. You’re still just as tired had you worked a full day.

Generate ‘Done’ lists rather than ‘To Do’ lists and at the end of the day, you will have seen how much you achieved in a chunk of time. You’ll then be able to prove exactly what you’d managed to achieve in the day.   

Automate More Tasks

When you and your teams have a lot of work to do, using technology can take some of the pressure away from you. This can be from creating systems for time expensive admin tasks to using a dispatch and e-ticketing software company to bring control and visibility if you work within the construction industry, for example. Outsourcing like this makes your job a much more straightforward task meaning you get to focus your time and attention on other things.

It may be worth seeing which of your existing digital tools are being used to their full potential or which more advanced technology can be utilized in order to streamline your workload. 

Quit Trying to Multi-task

Most of us like to think that we’re good at multitasking and successfully getting stuff done. The truth is that most of us are pretty bad at it. In reality, what we’re really doing is shifting our attention from one task to another in quick succession. This slows us down more than makes us more productive.

So if you want to work smarter instead of harder then you should work on trying to focus directly on one task at a time and completing that properly before moving on to the next.

Make sure you get to outsource the tasks that are not within your skill set to those who do. Doing the things you enjoy will make work feel less like work and more like doing things that you’re passionate about- which means it will feel like you never have to work a day in your life.