7 ways to be more efficient

Many leaders love to talk about how necessary it is to improve how efficient everyone must become and yet, they never provide (or role model) any solutions as to how to do this.

Here are seven simple ideas you can implement as a start point:

1. Stop ‘being busy’

Busyness is a status signal that long ago stopped meaning anything useful. According to one survey workers spend 58% of their time on ‘work about work’ rather than the actual work they were hired to do. If your diary is overwhelming you could…

2. Kill half your meetings

A recurring meeting with no agenda, no decisions to be made, or one where people don’t actually need to be there is not a meeting - it's a waste of time. The average worker now attends three times more meetings than they did in 2020. Almost nobody thinks all of them are necessary.

3. Decide once

Revisiting decisions is one of the great hidden inefficiencies (and frustrations) of working life. Every decision that’s reopened consumes time, erodes trust and signals that nothing is ever really settled. Make the decision, then move on.

4. Manage your energy, not just your time

Time management assumes all hours are equal. However, research from Heidelberg University confirmed that not everyone thinks clearly at 9am. The trick is to know when you're sharp, and protect that time accordingly. 

5. Use technology intentionally

Technology can - in theory - save significant time, but only if you know what you want before you use it. The people who use technology most efficiently are the ones who learn how to use it and then have a clear goal before they actually open it. Used lazily, technology becomes just another distraction.

6. Default to asynchronous communication

Not everything needs an answer now. Cultures that have normalised instant responses have quietly trained its people to be always on and thus, never fully present. Asynchronous communication respects the recipient's attention and almost always produces a better reply than a message fired off between two other things.

7. Finish things

The Zeigarnik Effect demonstrates that unfinished tasks occupy disproportionate mental bandwidth. The longer your list of half-done things, the less capacity you have for anything. Create a shorter daily task list to focus your attention. Completing something, even imperfectly, clears space to do something else.

Efficiency isn't a personality trait. It's a set of decisions that we repeat in order to get our work done. Most of us already know what we should stop doing. The question is whether we're willing to stop doing it.

What’s one idea that you can share?