Business, Management

How to Stop Wasting Time in the Office

  • Mark Edwards ·
  • 0 Comments ·
  • November 2, 2022

If you feel that your team or even you yourself are wasting too much time in the office, it’s time to change that. There are lots of reasons why time might be wasted during the working day, and it’s usually a case of changing a few environmental factors to ensure that doesn’t happen any longer. We’re going to talk today about the specific steps you can take and the changes you might want to make. So read on and learn more.

Avoid Micromanagement and Let Employees Focus

First of all, you should make sure that you’re not falling into the trap of micromanaging your team. You want to make your employees feel free to control their work and to make their own decisions. It might seem pretty obvious and straightforward, but lots of managers and business owners fall into the trap of micromanaging people far too much.

Don’t Encourage Multitasking

You also don’t want people working for your business to feel encouraged to multitask because multitasking is actually very unproductive and ends up in more wasted time. It’s better for outcomes and stress levels if people focus on getting one thing at a time done. No matter what you might have been told before about multitasking, think again. It simply doesn’t help your team get more done and it doesn’t aid levels of quality either.

Block Distracting Websites

It’s a good idea to do what you can to block websites that you feel are distracting in any way. If you feel that websites are taking your attention away from your work or the same is happening to your employees, that’s something that should be addressed. You can make it so that social media sites are blocked on the network of the company, for example. It’s a relatively small change but it can have a significant impact for many.

Change How You Plan and Structure Meetings

The way in which you and your team approach meetings can definitely have a significant impact on how you use time in the workplace. Meetings certainly can be relevant and productive as long as they’re structured correctly. What you don’t want them to become is time-wasting exercises in which you all sit around and do not very much for half an hour or more.

Set Clear Deadlines

Setting clear deadlines is something that’s definitely important when you’re looking to stop wasting so much time. When you and your employees have a clear deadline that you can all work towards, it makes it a lot easier to stay on track. If the deadlines are not clear and not particularly precise, it makes it easier to just carry on wasting time instead.

As you can see, there are lots of things you can do to stop wasting your time, and you can apply these ideas to your whole team. Completing changing the workplace culture and putting the ideas discussed above at the heart of the new culture will certainly help to improve everyone’s output.