Jan Lehman gives her best advice on how to get back an hour of your day with her best productivity tips. Communicate your focus time to others, and get buy-in from the rest of the team to implement this time-blocking technique company-wide. Turn off all notifications: on your phone, email, banner alerts, chats and Slack. Spend time thinking about bigger business priorities or planning a project start to finish.

Focus time is when you think about your most important work. The best way to combat constant interruption is to block space on your calendar for focus time. Those interruptions cost you nearly six hours a day-an astronomical cost to productivity. Returning to what they were originally working on can take an additional 23 minutes. On average, an office worker is interrupted or distracted from what they’re doing every three minutes. Create a list of your top three priorities for the following day one of these, ideally, is something that you work on during focus time.Ī study by the University of California, Irvine, found that one of the biggest killers of productivity is constant interruption. Leave meetings for the afternoon.”īefore you clock out at the end of the day, Lehman suggests checking your emails, your calendar and your to-do list to plan your next day. Therefore, the morning should be when you schedule focus-intensive tasks. “For instance, research shows that 85% of us are morning people. “Everyone should make time at the end of the day to hit pause, look at what they’re being asked to do a few weeks out, and plan their top three priorities for the next day,” explains Lehman. However, by mapping out a schedule that’s linked to our goals and priorities, we can structure our time more effectively. Approaching the day without a plan leaves room for distractions, detours and multi-tasking. Jan Lehman, productivity expert and owner and CEO of CTC Productivity, told CO– that one of the biggest ways we lose productivity is by not planning our day effectively. Here’s how to get an hour or more back during your day by making a few simple adjustments to your routine. The solution is to work smarter, not longer. Despite working notoriously long hours, merchants are struggling to accomplish everything on their to-do lists. Getty Images/JohnnyGreigĪ survey by SCORE found that small business owners reported having an average of just 1.5 hours of highly productive time every day. Distractions abound in office settings and can cost employees six hours of productivity each day.

Microsoft detours 1.5