Plan the day - block out time to concentrate on your tasks
Setting out times to do certain tasks will help you and your team focus on getting the job done. It also helps to have time blocked out to prevent yourself from working on something else when someone asks for a "quick favour". If your team have a shared planner, people can see what other team members are working on and are less likely to distract someone from an important deadline.
And if someone is pulled away from doing a task they were scheduled to work on, update the plan to track why the original task was missed or not completed.
Prioritise the important not the urgent
When you have a lot of work on, you may find yourself multi-tasking or getting distracted with small urgent tasks, meaning it takes longer to finish the most important work that you have.
Prioritising your team's workload will help to get important tasks finished. Using different priority statuses or displaying tasks with due dates in order, can help to show the context of whether those urgent things are really urgent and help team members use initiative to pick up the next priority.
Time recording can help productivity - but not why you think
Make time recording about jobs or projects, not people. If your team are recording time on each job or project, then straight away you get a great understanding of whether that job progressed easily or had complications.
If you get similar work in the future that record can help work out how to approach it and possibly which people should work on it.
Time recording should not be about traditional "time sheets" or making people log a certain number of hours each day or week. It's about focusing your team on jobs or projects.
Sure, it can be a culture change but one that's very positive if done in the right way.
Take a break!
When you or your team have been working on something a long time, make sure you take a break.
Coming back to a task with fresh eyes (either yourself or asking a colleague to take a look) can put a new perspective on the task and work out what is left to do.
It's easy to overlook and overthink elements when you work on something for a long period of time. Fresh eyes can help you to spot a mistake or even realise, it's actually going better than you thought!
Automation
Are you doing the same manual tasks repeatedly? If you are then you need some automation in your life!
Perhaps this can be creating a job or project from templates that can be selected to get your new work up and running.
Or, using the data in your job management system to drive processes such as approvals or email reminders. Make sure your systems are supporting how you work, not hindering it.
