How to Work Efficiently

Image Credit | Pixabay

For some things in life being efficient is not important. If you are going on a picnic at the park with friends or family, you don't need to be on a rigid schedule to ensure that you get through your lunch, walk, or other activities. You want to take time to enjoy yourself at a natural and organic pace. For other things like work, you must act as efficiently as possible. You want to ensure that you can achieve your results with the least amount of effort.

Why does this matter for business? In the business world when you act with efficiency you will spend less time completing tasks, which means you will need to spend less on labor costs. If you are an individual contributor the less time you spend completing a task, the more time you have for additional work or other self-investment, like reading a blog or taking training. 

Ensuring that you act with efficiency both unlock potential value to the organization and to you as an individual. You can more effectively work, increase output and improve your own abilities all of which directly improve your value to the organization and make yourself more marketable in the job market. The more valuable and marketable you are, the more leverage you have when discussing raises or potential new opportunities.

What can you do to become more efficient?

Define the Right Outcomes

The first part of being efficient is to understand what the right outcomes are. If you want to work efficiently toward an end goal, you have to know precisely what that goal is. For example, if you know that you are a pilot taking the plane on a cross-country flight, you need to know what the destination, starting point, and resources are. You need to know both where you're starting from and where you're going so that you can define the right heading to fly on. If you were to take off with a 3-degree variance in your heading from LA to New York, you might end up in Washington DC instead of New York. You also need to know what resources you are working with, so that you know if you have enough fuel, how long it will take, or if the end goal is even possible with the equipment you have. 

That seems obvious when you think about a cross-country flight, but many people and organizations work without clear goals in mind. This results in the workforce performing ineffectively. if you don't know what the goal is and where you're going, you won't know if the work you're doing is adding value. When you don't know if you're adding value, your motivation will decrease.  Over time this can greatly reduce the effectiveness of the individual or the entire organization. Additionally, it's important to have the necessary resources at work. You and your team need to be well trained and have access to all of the tools needed to achieve the end goals. 

Identify the Right Resources

Everyone has specific strengths and weaknesses. Their strengths are the things that they are naturally good at. They often align with the things that those individuals also enjoy doing. When an individual is good at something and enjoys it, they are more likely to do the work quickly and which high quality. 

To work most efficiently, you have to ensure that the work is being done by the right people. Understanding the specific talents of both yourself and those you work with is key to being able to distribute work effectively. If for example, you are not skilled at completing data analysis and a peer is, it would make the most sense to assign that task to your peer while you focus on another task. 

When your team is focused on work that is aligned with their talents, they will work more quickly, they will produce higher quality work and they will be happier at work. You will have reduced time to execution and less stress as either a teammate or an employer. 

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan

Some people like to plan their work and other people like to activate. It is good to have people with both of these strengths on your team. The key to success is to balance the strengths of both individuals. You must temper the activation and desire to jump right into work, while the planner helps to understand the best path forward.

In the military, a tremendous amount of time is spent beforehand planning missions. Understanding the situation, the goals, the resources available helped the commanders determine the best path to success. Once you have a clear plan you are then able to execute it more rapidly. Everyone knows the end goal, why you're doing it, and what resources and tactics they'll be using. 

In the business world, the same strategy applies. You must first plan your work and identify how the project will work. Once you've developed that plan it's time to put it rapidly into action. When you work with a. clear plan in mind, you will be more efficient than if you start working and avoid the risks of heading down the wrong path and having to start over. 

Iteration

Iteration is the process of making small changes to a process over time. These small changes compound and build off of each other to realize bigger changes in the process or end product. Small change by small change bigger things occur. 

As the Chinese proverb goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." What the Chinese philosopher Laozi understood was that a single action may seem small, but when combined with others can have a great impact. Conversely, when a task seems insurmountable, you can identify smaller individual tasks that will combine together to achieve a great result.

In your work and quest toward efficiency, you must try different processes and strategies over time. Make small adjustments to your workflows and measure the impact. If things get better, easier, or faster then keep the changes. If you make small changes and they negatively impact your workflow eliminate them. This evolution will slowly improve your results, without risking disaster from a radical change.

Identify the Waste

In many organizations and in many processes there are wasted actions. There are movements, tasks, and processes that don't add any value. They may be things that added value at one time, but the business or organization has moved in a different direction and the goals have changed. Many times these processes remain in place long after a team's goals have changed out of habit. It's important to identify and remove these processes from your work.

Remind yourself that just because something's always been done that way doesn't mean it still needs to be done that way. As you work, if you think you've identified something that isn't adding value you can do an experiment. For example, if you produce a report weekly and you're not sure someone is actually using it, stop updating it. Wait and see if you get any messages about the missing data. Many times you will find that the task was valuable at one time but has since lost that value. This process of experimentation will identify the waste in your process and allow you to operate at maximum efficiency.

These are some of the steps that I use to operate with efficiency and to work 4 hours in my 8-hour workday. What do you do to work efficiently? Do you work efficiently or do you find yourself working long hours trying to catch up?  Tell me below!