How lessons learned from our social networks activity can bring us closer to the goal of staying productive at work? Well, usually on the contrary social activity distracts from work. But as it’s useless to fight our weak points, better use them as your strong points, right? Let’s see how to.
What I need during the day? I can give you a short list. I want to:
- stay productive
- catch my ‘creativity flow’ and do something while it’s here
- do everything on time and have the feeling like ‘yeah, did it!’
And I hate pulling myself into work or being distracted or late on my schedule. What is on my way every day? My email, online shops and social networks. Every morning my inbox is full, my friends post something new, my linkedin connections never stay calm.
For this, first of all, keep your inbox empty, advised by lifehacker. It is a simple rule, but it will really save your time and keep you concentrated. Leave only messages that push you to action and once the action is finished, delete the letter or save it to another folder, if you wish to. This is very important matter to keep you productive. Combine it with another little but very efficient trick: take an action first, only then take a look on your social networks and how your connections are doing. You will stay connected to your ‘creativity flow’ and when it goes down, you can keep track of what’s going on around. Like this, you will avoid the necessity to pull yourself into work by effort.
Do you already use those tricks? You know how to use online tools to save you time, not to waste it. At the same time email notifications that we get have a very useful function of helping us keep track of what is going on everywhere. Why not to use it for work? Online notifications when you need to do something for work. You might think that I am speaking of email from your boss, but I mean workflow automation. With the help of special issue tracking software you can streamline your working processes, collaborate with your team and get notifications of any important matter so that you’re always aware of what action to take.
I use Comindware as I am for simplicity. And the interface of the solution with the simple ‘play’ button to start a task really touched my heart. I have some working processes that I need to do according to a scheme. For example, a scheme for the website content:
I write it\order from copywriter -> it undergoes proofread by CEOs\VP\technical writer -> goes back to me\goes to the webmaster -> gets revised and improved
Sure that I can do all of this manually, writing emails and attaching files, sending them to the necessary people and keep all the scheme in my head and not to forget anything. But why doing so in the XXI century? This is a completely boring work that wastes my time and distracts me from creativity. I have set a workflow for this. After my content is ready, I attach it to the item ‘Content Improvement’ in the tracker and hit the button ‘Complete’. After this a task is automatically generated for the technical writer. He gets an email notification and takes action: in his case he revises my content. After he hits the appropriate button, the content automatically goes up the scheme and organizes all the team with the help of the email notifications. It is possible to write comments, attach files (as I have mentioned): all the information about this part of the project is kept in one place and already organized. I don’t spend time on arranging my emails or thinking over what to do next. I only get tasks and take action. Like this, I work quicker, save my time and my performance matches my expectations (and what’s not less important to me, my boss’ expectations).
Most of workflow automation solutions demand from you some special skills to create a workflow and I am really happy that Comindware Tracker doesn’t demand it form me. When I need to create a workflow scheme, I drag & drop its elements in my browser window and build the workflow. Actually, I use only a couple of workflows and one of them I have already discussed above.
To sum it up, if you are a quick computer and social media user, you can use those skills to help you deal with your work as quickly as you can deal with your emails from your favorite shops and social networks. I hope you found this article useful. In case you decide to try Comindware tracker, you can get yourself a trial here. Tell me what you think. Is the article useful? Did you try this solution? Do you use any other? What is your secret to stay productive?