A lot of organizations deal with challenges like maintaining productivity and quality of work. Employees constantly complain about the increasing chaos that hampers their productivity and this directly affects the business. Because of that, managers are quite pressed to find a solution that can motivate their team members while boosting their productivity.

In this article, we’ll share with you few essential tips on staying focused at work.

Prepare a To-Do List

Half the battle is won once you prioritize your tasks. Make a master list of what needs to be done.

For example, you can put all tasks that require urgent attention under “A”.  Create a list “B” for things that are important but not urgent and List “C” for tasks that can wait for a while. Complete all tasks under “A” first before you move on to “B” and “C”.

Plan your day through these lists and set realistic deadlines to accomplish each one of them. Once you’ve completed everything, don’t forget to reward yourself to keep your spirit up. When you start prioritizing, you won’t just be focused but efficient, too.

Start With Cognitively Challenging Tasks

After preparing your to-do list, start with cognitively demanding tasks. Suppose your List “A” has three tasks. Start with the most difficult tasks before moving on to the easier ones. Do the same thing for the “B” and “C” lists.

Once you complete the difficult tasks, you are all set for the rest of the day. Now, you can relax and take care of the other tasks that aren’t as mentally draining.

Schedule Your Work

Don’t overstretch yourself with your work. Rather, split your work into segments and sub-segments. Try working within a 2-hour window and then take a break. Don’t sit for more than two hours at a stretch or else you’ll feel exhausted. Even a leading study suggests that “Sitting is the New Smoking”.

To avoid such burnouts, take a walk to revitalize your brain, allowing it to concentrate better. Though breaks are essential for a healthy workday, you must learn to take them with a pinch of salt. Frequent breaks can be addictive and can hamper work.

To draw a line, you can optimize your breaks by doing the following:

• Schedule your breaks
• Keep a track to ensure you are not overdoing or under doing your breaks

Learn to Set Priorities

Responding to each and every request of your co-workers can immediately affect your focus, preventing you from doing deep work. If you have a habit of entertaining every request, you are most likely to lose your value. On top of that, tackling on-the-fly requirements can also deplete your focus.

With that, you have to make others understand that their requests will be entertained but only once you are finished with your priorities. For better focus and results, it’s also important to avoid indulging in non-work related discussions or “grapevine.”

If there are sudden urgent tasks, you can deal with them with a simple project management tool. Simply make a note of the new task, assign a deadline and you are good to go. Once you’re done with your current task, start finishing the others one at a time.

Desist Multitasking

It might feel tempting to do multiple tasks simultaneously to enhance your productivity. But, honestly, it just makes things worse.

Multitasking drains your mind and it can cause a significant decline in your mental sharpness with time. It can prevent you from achieving your most important goals and make you more vulnerable to work errors.

Avoid Distractions

Nowadays, being online on various social media platforms is a trend. Several notifications pop up every now and then, commanding your attention. If you are constantly attending to such notifications, how are you supposed to do meaningful work?

One of the greatest tips in staying focused at work is to identify distractions and just get rid of them. While working on an important project, put your phone on silent or switch it off. If you really want to stay updated with your social media accounts, you can designate dedicated time slots to check your phone.

Be an Email Ninja

Though emails are important, they can be distracting, too. They have the potential to divert your attention from your work to something that can wait.

So, lay down personal rules and follow them religiously. Set specific times for your emails and stick with them.

Pay Attention to Chat Status

More often than not, people take your chat status wrongly. If your chat status says “available” all the time, they’ll think of it as a sign to forward more requests.

When you are doing a task that demands a razor-sharp focus, set your chat or email setting to ‘busy’ mode. Needless to say, you can change the chat status after you’re done.

Cut Outside Noise

Managing your focus in an office environment can be quite tricky. Until you do away with noise, you won’t be able to focus.

Limiting auditory distractions is crucial in increasing attention span. You can use noise-canceling headphones for that. If you still feel distracted, you can move to a quieter place, such as a conference room. In case that doesn’t solve the problem, opt for remote work for a day or two to regain your lost focus.

Manage Stress

Working on a crucial project with close deadlines? Growing expectations, increased competition, and pressing deadlines can increase your stress at work. This can make your productivity suffer.

To solve this, try turning on a soothing music to lower your stress and calm your mind. Apart from that, you should also pay close attention to your diet. As much as possible, avoid the following:

• Nicotine
• Caffeine
• Alcohol

Don’t forget to exercise regularly and sleep well.

See Also: 4 Ways To Reduce Stress Inside and Outside of Work

Declutter Your Workdesk

Visual clutter can take away your focus, preventing you from doing any meaningful work. Therefore, you must declutter your office desk to increase work performance.

Keep everything that’s essential to your work, like your pen, notepad, marker, and files, on top of the table so you can easily get them when needed. Lock all other unnecessary things inside your drawer.

See Also: 12 Desk Hacks To Make You More Productive At Work

In Summary

Focus on bringing tranquility to your workplace, so the whole environment undergoes a positive change. You can add positive images to your work desk or you can write down quotes to boost your focus. Practice a simple routine of keeping a clean desk and make sure that you don’t leave food or other things lying on your desk.

Keep on practicing these positive habits and you’ll surely see a noticeable improvement in your productivity level at work.

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Business strategists routinely cite several games when discussing the most effective methods to run an organization. Power players in the business world often refer to games like chess, soccer and even poker when deciding upon what strategy to use.

Unfortunately, too much emphasis is placed on the knowns – playing your cards close to your chest, bluffing when appropriate etc. These clichéd adages will not add value to your business operations unless you understand the psychology beneath these references.

Poker Pros and Business Leaders: A Deeper Understanding

World-class poker players and strategic business people have many things in common. They know how to read situations and they both have big match temperament. Winning the war is what they do, even if it means losing a few battles along the way.

An astute poker player is much like an astute business person. Both of them have great mental acuity to understand what is needed in a situation and how they can make the most out of their resources and environment.

Of course, it pays to be humble in victory and gracious in defeat. Nobody likes a braggart in the game of poker or in the game of life. And nobody likes a sore loser, too.

In business and in poker, everybody wins and everybody loses at some point or another. The goal is to smoothen out that whipsaw motion and build a strong uptrend over time.

Fold to Play Another Day

The world’s most skilled poker professionals take it all in their stride, much like the legendary business people of our time – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

Business and poker are predicated on hard data and not on intuition. Professional online poker players dabble in numbers, whether it’s Texas Hold’em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Stud or Razz.

Pro players know how to pick their battles. They are strategic about the games they play and the competition that they go up against. They carefully pick the right variant of the right game and the right betting structure.

Whether it’s pot limit, fixed limit or no limit, be sure that your bank account can service the game’s requirements.

It is no secret that the world’s finest poker players, such as Nate Silver, are experts at probability. They are skilled at adopting a multi-option approach to betting and the associated probabilities.

In much the same way, a typical business person cannot expect his high-tech startup to be as big as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. That is simply delusional thinking. Poker players aren’t expected to continuously pull an inside straight flush either.

The game of life, like the game of poker, is based on reality. The shrewd player knows how to manipulate odds in his/her favor by molding the situation to expectations.

Defeats Serve as Lessons

Poker players and business professionals should bear in mind that losing is okay. What’s not okay is accepting defeat and not learning from it. Everybody loses a hand every now and then since there are things that are out of our control.

If you are given lemons, learn how to make a lemon juice. If you know you have an edge over your competition, make sure to maximize that edge by fully exploiting it.

It’s okay to sacrifice short-term profits for long-term gains as that is the name of the game. Many business professionals and market leaders make seemingly silly short-term decisions. Why did Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos purchase the Washington Post? We’ll know in the long-term.

Perhaps the most important lesson we can take from poker players and business professionals is the following: Don’t throw good money after bad. You must know when to throw in the towel so that you can live to play another day.

Most skilled online poker players and traditional poker players sit out most starting hands. They simply don’t want to chase down pots with weak hands.

It never pays to get baited into a game if you don’t have the goods to deliver. Fold now and live to play another day. In a no-win situation, why waste valuable resources? If you’re dealt a poor hand, suck it up and toss in your cards. Be patient since it can’t rain all the time.

See Also: 7 Poker Skills You Can Use in Real Life

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Collaboration is what the new workplace is all about. These days, it’s all about keeping everyone involved in all facets of a process so that everyone can contribute his or her expertise.

This rise in collaboration has made frequent meetings a necessity. Unfortunately, however, they aren’t always as productive as we would like them to be.

How Much Time Is Actually Wasted In Meetings?

The average worker attends or prepares for meetings more than a quarter of his work week. And almost never do you walk out of a meeting feeling like every second of that time was completely productive.

There are anywhere between 36 and 56 million meetings every day in America with ineffective meetings costing the U.S. economy as much as $283 billion a year. In this age of amazing technology, why are we still wasting so much time?

Some of the biggest pet peeves people have about meetings include:

• 76% think most meetings are unnecessary
• 58% report that meetings are repetitive
• 59% report that meetings don’t stay on topic
• 51% of people say that others will take calls in the meeting

Three-quarter of people report that they try to complete other tasks during meeting time. These tasks include things like eating lunch, taking a restroom break, checking personal emails and responding to work emails.

Unfortunately, multitasking isn’t usually very effective. So, why are we spending so much time in meetings when that time could clearly be spent better elsewhere?

How To Make Meetings More Effective?

Clearly, we need to stop wasting everyone’s time and make sure that meetings are more meaningful and productive. Collaboration depends on it, so getting everyone on the same page is important.

In order to waste less of everybody’s time, here are some of the things you can do:

• Utilize collaborative tools to eliminate the need for status update meetings
• Clearly define meeting objectives ahead of time
• Make sure that everyone stays on the topic for the meeting
• Check in after the meeting and see whether everyone got the right message
• Utilize technology to make meetings with remote workers or clients more productive

It’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page but it’s equally important to recognize that meetings are not the best or most effective way to do that. Survey the needs and consider the goals of your team.

Meetings are great for things like brainstorming and team building. However, for keeping everyone on the same page, collaborative tools might be a better bet.

How Can Tech Make Meetings Better?

One of the biggest and most common gripes about meetings is that the tech doesn’t work properly or that it doesn’t work easily. Updating your tech can help eliminate some of the biggest sources of stress and frustration from within your team.

Start with the WiFi. When was the last time you got a new router?

Having trouble connecting to the WiFi is one of the most common problems to have in an office or conference room and it’s also one of the easiest to fix.

There are also great new collaborative tools that can help bring everyone to the same page – literally. Using a screen sharing software is a great way to ensure that everyone is seeing the same thing at the same time, even if they are in different locations. Interactive whiteboards can also help make collaborations more effective.

Many of the available tools today are very easy to set up, which is great because 79% of workers say they would be more open to using these tech tools if they were easy enough to set up.

Learn more about how to make meetings more effective with technology, check out the infographic below.

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