Are you effective at work?
If you had to pause a few seconds before answering that question, or you’re still trying to figure out how to respond, you’re not alone. It’s a vague and challenging question, and everyone might answer it differently. Plus, what does it really mean?
If you don’t feel effective, it doesn’t mean you’re not good at your job, or don’t try hard. Even if you’re super dedicated and constantly busy, you still might feel unproductive, or worse, be approaching burnout. On the flip side, you may have impactful ideas, but you don’t know how to get buy-in from stakeholders and put yourself out there to get noticed, earn more, and move up your company hierarchy.
Regardless of what being effective at work means to you, we can all benefit from relieving stress and upping our work game, whether that means finding more work-life balance, managing our time better, or feeling confident enough to earn more and get noticed for our strengths.
What does it mean to be effective at work?
Being effective at work is somewhat subjective. For some, it could mean contributing to creative endeavors. For others, it could mean achieving a healthier work-life balance or developing strong professional relationships. For most people, it’s probably a combination of more than one factor.
People who feel like they are effective at work often say they are:
Highly productive
Doing their best work
Working smarter, not harder
Engaging in meaningful, high-impact work that moves the company forward
Getting buy-in for their ideas
Achieving a healthy work-life balance and well being
Earning more money and moving up in the company hierarchy
If you want to work towards achieving the above or simply boosting a few skills, read on! We’ve got seven tips on how to be more effective at work.
Tips for being more effective at work
Be productive instead of busy
We sometimes misinterpret busy work for effective work.
Being busy, however, doesn’t mean your work is impactful. And it doesn’t even mean you’re productive. It just means you’re busy!
I get caught up in the “busy trap” myself. For example, we’re in the middle of selling our house, and there’s a lot of prep work to do. Instead of preparing for the sale and cleaning out my overstuffed closets, I will busy myself with other tasks like laundry or tidying up my desk to make myself feel like I’m getting work done. But I know deep down I’m not getting the right projects done. So even though I’m “busy”, I’m not really productive or doing effective work because it’s not moving me closer to my intended goals.
How do you define high-impact or important work that is effective? We break this down a little more in the next section.
Prioritize goal-focused work
In a recent article, we talked about being effective vs. efficient and how efficiency is doing things the right way (with speed, optimized), and effectiveness is doing the right thing (what’s right for your business and aligned with your goals).
We can be super busy with work and even do it efficiently. But being efficient is useless (and wasteful) if you’re focusing on the wrong tasks.
The key to effective work is being productive with projects that make a huge impact.
Goal-focused work positively impacts your business because it 100% aligns with your company goals and priorities.
It’s easy to get distracted with work that seems effective (new trendy marketing tactics, cool software upgrades, tidying up your desk that might not need tidying). But when you dig into your daily task goals, you might find that some aren’t 100% aligned with your company’s goals, even if you’re working super hard.
For example, let’s say you’re launching a new software feature that enhances the user’s login experience. The goal of this enhancement is to reduce customer complaints and churn. But let’s say while you’re perusing other software for inspiration, you stumble upon another feature that will improve your product. It’s so good that you get to work implementing it right away. But is this new feature aligned with your company’s goals? Is it wise to start prioritizing this new venture and putting off your current project? If not, even though it might be a good idea, busy work will distract you from your current goals.
Create a “not” to-do list
If you find yourself in a perpetual cycle of busyness, but you’re not doing effective work that aligns with your goals, take notice of what you’re working on daily. To get more productive and avoid useless work, create a “not” to-do list.
What tasks do you fall back on when you’re procrastinating effective work? For me, it’s laundry, dishes, and organizing my desk (even if it doesn’t need to be organized). So I would put those items on my daily “not” to-do list and avoid them throughout the day to stay focused.
Stay on top of shifting goals and priorities
Proactively check in with leadership and your team to ensure you’re aligned on priorities. Sometimes priorities change, and they can get lost in translation if your company works at a fast pace.
Are you busy or productive?
How do you know if you’re being busy vs. productive? Find yourself on this chart based on the emotions you feel during your workday.
If you feel like you’re not productive enough, read on to learn how to quickly ramp up productivity and get back some time in your day for meaningful work!
Multitask (on autopilot)
I get super conflicted when I think about multitasking. On the one hand, I think I’m pretty good at it, but then experts tell me that it isn’t even possible.
You’ve likely come across dozens of articles telling you not to multitask, and after doing a little research, I can no longer disagree. Neuroscience professor Earl K. Miller says that “multitasking is not humanly possible”. You’re essentially time-sharing, not multitasking when you do two things at once.
I do have another take on this, however. Sure, multitasking and focusing 100% of your attention on more than one thing at a time isn’t possible, but doing multiple things simultaneously (passively) means you can get more done in less time (sweet!). Multitasking is beneficial when the tasks occur on autopilot without requiring your mental focus.
When you throw clothes in the washer, do you sit there idly waiting for the load to finish? I suppose you can, but while it’s running, you could also be doing a host of other tasks like managing your email, catching up on phone calls, or checking items off your to-do list. When tasks run on autopilot, you can get multiple tasks done simultaneously.
Set up your work environment to function like this! Here are some work tasks you can set up to run on autopilot (without your full attention and focus):
Automate email categorization: Fly through your inbox twice as fast and automate your email management with Superhuman’s Split Inbox).
Automate workflows: You can software such as ClickUp or Integrify.
Automate employee screening: Ask questions that exclude recipients from going further if they don’t answer correctly.
Delegate: Notice what you can delegate to team members to free up your time for more meaningful work.
Prioritize your challenging tasks: If you can’t complete two tasks at once without losing focus, prioritize them in order of importance, and either delegate some work to a team member or schedule them into your calendar.
If you can’t stop procrastinating, use it to your benefit instead
Do you know how telling a child to stop doing something makes them want to do it more?
Every time I try to stop procrastinating, I resist avoiding it because I’m focusing so much on what’s wrong (I constantly procrastinate) instead of what I really want (to be more productive and achieve my goals).
