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What does "being productive" mean? Anyone who has ever been in a hurry and had to pay for an overpriced cab ride knows all too well: time is money. We pay for the time we take from others, and we get paid for the time we work for others. Our ability to earn money depends on our ability to produce with that time. And the better we produce, the more that time is valued. That's productivity.
On average, an American worker loses 6.5 hours of productive time per week to distractions, costing businesses $600 billion per year in the United States.
According to a study by Reclaim.ai, only 53% of planned tasks are actually completed each week, with managers wasting up to 14 hours per week organizing and prioritizing their employees' tasks. On average, an employee is disturbed nearly 32 times a day.
In addition to these problems of time estimation, organization and concentration, there is the problem of multi-tasking. A study published in the Harvard Business Review indicates that we lose more than 25% of our productivity by multitasking.
Task management
Use a task manager! According to a study conducted by RescueTime, people who use a task manager report feeling 23% more productive overall.
The benefits are numerous. First of all, writing down a task allows you to keep track of it. You can read our article on how being better organized helps you remember better.
Secondly, it is an effective prioritization tool. You can break down projects into smaller, more manageable chunks, which makes managing your workload much less overwhelming.
And with features like reminders, notifications, progress tracking, and task templates, it's easy to stay on top of everything without having to manually check every hour.
There are plenty of task management apps like Todoist or Asana. But when it comes to ramping up productivity, there's something even more effective.
Time management
Productivity is all about time. So it's important to know how you use your time and to organize it. According to a study conducted by DeskTime, people who use a time management application save an average of 2 hours per day. That's 10 more hours per week, or 40 hours per month!
To find out your habits, a few days working with Harvest or DeskTime can help you understand what takes up the most of your time and what consumes it. Compare your results for the week to your ambitions and make a plan to optimize waste.
But the most important thing is the calendar. Use it to manage your time. Enter your appointments, your trips, your breaks and your tasks. You will be able to visually see your actual workload (according to your estimates) and the realism of your plan.
Putting your tasks in your agenda is an effective way to commit to doing them. It correlates the notion of action with that of time. Google, Microsoft or Apple, what counts is to have a well kept calendar!
Automatic calendars
In 2023, there is a new generation of tools that replaces all the previous ones: the smart and automatic calendars. They manage tasks, appointments and arrange your time for you according to your constraints. They are powerful tools that allow you to concentrate and save time. No need to think about organization anymore, it is done dynamically by itself.
Reclaim.ai estimates that the automatic calendars’ total gain is around 40% of additional productivity. Imagine gaining 140 days in a year. What would you do with all that time? How much money is it worth to you ?