While the team chowed down on Krissi’s What if Tuesday, Tracey (the efficiency queen) gave the team a session on ways to improve productivity and throughput. Here’s a quick summary for you:

A place for everything and everything in its place
Don’t work in a messy space. Clear your desk from distractions to give yourself the head-space to concentrate on the task at hand. While you’re at it, keep your most frequently referenced materials at hand, to save yourself from wasting time and hunting around for them.

Only keep what you need
Don’t need it? Then don’t keep it! It only creates a build-up of mess on your desk and clutter in the office. No one can successfully work with piles of paper, prototypes and mess around them.

Don’t be a slave to your emails
You know that pesky pop up box that notifies you when you’ve got a new email? Yeah, turn it off. It only breaks your concentration and pulls your focus away from where it needs to be. 90% of the time, those emails can wait an hour anyway.

Don’t double handle things
Coming back to those emails, if you open it up, figure out whether it can be done quickly or if it will take more thought and time to complete. If you can get it done in less than 15 minutes, you may as well complete the task and get it off your list of to-do’s. If not, find a time slot to get it done and schedule it in. It’s also good to communicate your plan to keep everyone in the loop.

Don’t interrupt your colleagues if you don’t need to
We can spend a lot of time accidentally distracting others in our bid to get our work done, especially if you’re in an open plan office like us! Before you interrupt your work mate, stop for a moment and think about if it’s vital to your current task. If not, jot it down and chat about it when they aren’t heads down.

Don’t plan back-to-back meetings
Meetings are necessary, we all know that. But back-to-back meetings can sometimes cause more trouble than good. Leaving no time to download thoughts and prep for the next meeting. If you have time to do these things, you are likely to be more present and an active part of the session – there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who doesn’t know what’s going on in a meeting.

This mantra should also be applied to project work. No time in between means no time for over run or getting meaningful work done, as you’re too busy thinking ahead about the next session. This is an important one.

Don’t always work in the ‘high-importance-low-timeline’ quadrant
While 'crisis management’ will always need to happen, it’s not a safe place to always be. Plan your schedule carefully, blocking out a chunks of time to attend to those 'big rocks’ in your task list and allow the other stuff to filter around it. Of course urgent things will always pop up, put if you are permanently running behind the 8 ball, you’ll soon get overwhelmed.

While a lot of this stuff seems obvious, it’s very easy to forget. By adopting these quick tips, you will be well on the way to an efficient and productive work flow.