2 Key Areas to Boost Workplace Productivity

It is common not to have a precise idea of 100% of the tasks that one must perform, nor in what order one must perform them according to their urgency and importance. We therefore end up dealing with tasks that are not urgent first, to the detriment of others that were. We may indeed have part of our tasks in a notes file, another part unread in our emails, another on paper... and worse: part stored in our head. The latter is the most problematic, because it forces us not to forget important things, which generates unnecessary stress.

A good practice is to centralize all of your tasks in one place.
In this way, you will have a reliable source where everything you need to do is located, and you can prioritize them as you see fit. There are many tools to do this, such as Trello for example.

To prioritize tasks there are several methods such as the Eisenhower Matrix.
To deepen this concept of task optimization, I advise you to read The GTD Method which details this very precisely and in a very actionable way.

Overall, a good mastery of your tasks will make you more efficient, because you will perform the right tasks at the right time. You will not be tempted to disperse on the latest tasks arrived (the famous problem of the last request processed first, which gives the impression of not moving forward in his day).

Once all your tasks are listed and prioritized, we can tackle all the unnecessary ones that are often not tasks in the strict sense.

• Knowledge management:

The time lost searching for documents or information in the company is becoming an increasingly present problem. Some employees lose up to 1/2 day per week to this.
With the explosion of digital data stored in more and more tools (Sharepoint, emails, Teams, servers, CRM, etc.), it is common not to find what you want.
As a result, we solicit our employees to find the right information. This is therefore a waste of time for oneself and one's employees.
The knowledge management is therefore becoming a central subject in companies, with many tools such as EDM (Electronic Document Management) software, knowledge bases, and search engines for companies.
Properly organizing the company's knowledge facilitates its use, and allows to capitalize on it rather than recreate existing ones.
Employees will be more autonomous (no over-solicitation), more efficient in their search for information, will not re-create existing documents, and will be more productive.

• Meetings:

The time spent in meetings represents for some half of their working time. Often not very useful for everyone, and little questioned about their usefulness, meetings represent a big lever to save time and therefore productivity.
To help you identify meetings where the presence of some is not relevant, there is the ROTI (Return On Time Invested).
This consists at the end of the meeting, to ask the participants a vote from 1 to 5.
• 5. Excellent meeting: It was worth much more than the time I spent there.
• 4. Good: It brought me more than the time I spent there.
• 3. Average: I didn't waste my time, but nothing more...
• 2. Not very useful: It wasn't worth the time I spent there.
• 1. Useless: I didn't gain anything from it.
If the score is less than 3, the question arises of his participation in the next one, or how to make this type of meeting more relevant for everyone.
Another good practice: limit the number of participants to 8 people. Beyond that, it is rare that the presence of everyone is really relevant.
There are obviously many other areas for improvement to boost productivity depending on the trades and companies, but these points are already a good base, often in suffering in companies.