Stop Wasting Time at Work: Practical Tips to Beat Common Traps

In the management environment, managers struggle to be ‘busy’ with activities that in fact, obliterate organisational efficiency. Managers often spend a lot of time on communication, meetings, and other digital activities because they think they are heading projects into the right direction. However, a closer look into it reveals four major time-wasting trends which are always very destructive to productivity in the workplace and a drain on managerial time.

Management meetings have turned out to be the traditional tool of communication in today’s integrated organizations. Managers often bring together their teams, thinking that more often than not keeps things on track for the project. But when their goals and objectives are not well defined and the meetings do not have a proper schedule of activities, issues to be discussed in the meeting turn into time-wasting formalities that create more fog than light. Effective managers understand that effective collaboration can be a planned and purposeful process which involves clear goals and objectives as well as well understood participant roles.

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How ordinary meetings can be turned into extraordinary ones? Through proper planning. It is troubling that, in many cases, the amount of time spent on various tasks is poorly managed and unproductive; creating specific agendas with clear objectives and goals and expected results and individual accountability can significantly decrease such losses. Managers need to set the right tone before the meeting so that people are not just engaged in meetings that are not moving the company forward.

The use of technology in workplace communication has brought significant change in workplace communication but has also presented an unpreceded challenge to the managers. Persons receive emails every few minutes which disrupts workflow and gives an impression of productiveness while in fact it reduces critical evaluation. The immediacy of written communication is mistaken for efficiency, which generates fast, ineffective reactions that may exacerbate misunderstandings and take time away from actual work.

Digital communication, therefore, is a thoughtful and conscientious process. Managers need to create discipline in terms of when they are writing emails, and dedicate a few seconds to think about properly constructing emails and ensuring that the emails they send are clear, complete and concise. This approach entails going through correspondences several times to minimize chances of response ambiguity, and to show responsible writing that enhances healthy organisational relationships.