Hack Your Work to Work Less and Achieve More

Hack Your Work: 23 Ways to Get Ahead, Work Less and Achieve More – Dumb Little Man
none of these tips will turn your life around. But they can make a big difference, and when used together, your work life might just be enjoyable, productive, low-stress and high fun. My favorites:

Work from home. This is not a miracle solution, but it’s something many people would love to do. And it’s completely possible — more people are doing it every day. Is it something you want to do? Give it some thought, and find a solution that works for you. You could telecommute for your current job — plan your pitch to your boss today, making sure to focus on how it will benefit your company. Or you could find another job that allows you to work from home — even if the pay is a little less at first, you will have reduced costs from not having to commute or eat lunch at work or buy expensive work clothes, and you will also have increased satisfaction.

I recently switched to working from home, and aside from the real-time benefits (saving 90-plus minutes each day of commute time) and obvious savings for parking, bus passes, etc., working from home has allowed me to really focus in on

Come in early. If telecommuting isn’t your thing, try getting to work 30-60 minutes before the rest of the crowd. Or even more. This might require you to learn to wake up early, but the benefits are many: you skip the morning traffic, you can work without distractions until the rest of your coworkers come in, you can get a jump start on your day, you can be ahead of the crowd and get more done. Getting an early start is a great way to start your work day and to become more productive.

Before I worked from home, I did this for five years — first as part of a compressed work week, and later just as a way to beat traffic and get tons done before anyone else came in. It also helps that I work with a lot of East-coasters, and the 1-hour time difference meant I was still in before my boss usually, and always avaiable for morning meetings.

Work 4 days. If you can control your work schedule (or can convince your boss to change it), try working fewer days. Working four days a week not only gives you an additional day off, but it forces you to be more productive in the days you do work. Think about it: if you knew that you had to get your work done by the end of Thursday, you will focus more on what really needs to get done, and goof off less too. What would you do less? Email? Read stuff on the Internet? Chat? Play solitaire? Those unimportant things fade away when your time is limited.

I really miss doing this, but it’s fraught with danger in an office setting. People get really jealous of the “extra” 50 days of “vacation” you get, and I’ve found that those who are pulling “normal” hours (and then some) get very bitter, regardless of how much you’re getting done.

MITs. Each day, make a list with only three items: the three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Make at least one of them related to your One Goal. The others might be something you’ve been procrastinating on, or a big project that’s due today, or something similar. Ideally, these MITs are really important tasks — ones that will gain you longer-term recognition or income. Now focus on these, making sure to accomplish them. It’s best to do your MITs first thing in the morning, before you get interrupted by a bunch of other things. If you do only three things today (you could choose more or less than three MITs, but I’ve found that three works for me), make it your MITs.

This is where I spend my early-morning hours. Huge help to get a good running start and know that the “big stuff” is in progress or behind you by mid-day.

Batch process. There are usually a bunch of smaller tasks that we have to do that aren’t that important. Email, paperwork, phone calls, things like that. Instead of doing those little things throughout the day, giving you busywork to interrupt and distract you from your important tasks, batch them together and do them at one set time each day. Write these tasks down on a small list, and with an hour left in your work day (or whatever works for you), start processing them as quickly as possible, ticking them off your list.

I don’t do this yet, but I love the idea. Doing these at the end of the day would really make me crank them out so I could get done and out of the office!

Freelance as a 2nd job. This is something I do, and I earn an extra $2,000 a month doing it. It’s extra work, but it helps me to pay the bills (and pay off debt and save). Eventually, if you get good at the freelancing gig, you could make it your full-time work. To do this as a second job, set aside some time each day for freelance work. I’ve used early mornings (I get up an hour earlier and do one assignment), my lunch hour, work time (with permission), or evenings. If you could do 1-2 assignments a day, you will be making a decent extra income, and starting yourself down the road to working for yourself.

I need to keep reminding myself to get after these freelance shots — so much of my volunteer time is eating into BizzyWeb time that I need to re-evaluate how much I’m doing. Aside from paying the bills, having an iron or two of my own in the fire does wonders for my level of engagement and happiness with my career.

Take high-profile projects. If you just take the grunt work, your boss might or might not appreciate it, but it certainly won’t make you a star and you won’t go very far. Instead, volunteer for the big projects, the ones that will make a name for both you and your company. If there aren’t any available, make your own. Be sure you can do them well, but if you do, these projects will have a huge impact on your life. The tasks on these projects should be your MITs every day. If you take on high-impact projects, you can be more productive working a half day than if you worked 10 hours a day on tasks that won’t matter next week.

I’d wager that 75 percent of my forward momentum in my career has been a result of high-profile projects that I’ve taken charge of.

Automate your business. If you have your own business, or set one up on the side, find ways to make it automated as much as possible. Everything can be outsourced, from manufacturing to mailing to advertising to taking orders to customer support to credit card processing. Put your business front online, with online ordering, and give your outsourcers the ability to make decisions (with certain limits, following rules you set) without your approval, removing yourself from the bottleneck. If it’s completely automated, your business will require minimal work from you once you’ve got it set up. Now all you have to do is check now and then to make sure things are running smoothly, and make sure your money is being deposited in your bank account. Nice.

I really need to do this with BizzyWeb. Going to be the key to making a successful run at expanding.

Clear your desk. A messy desk might be the sign of a creative mind, but in my experience (I’ve tried both messy and now clean desks), having a desk that’s clean is much more calming, much more productive, and more organized. Most importantly, it reduces visual clutter and allows you to focus on the task at hand, increasing your productivity. Clearing your desk can take a chunk of time, but it’s worth it: take all your papers (everything!) and put them in your inbox, or in a pile if they don’t fit. Now process through them, one at a time, from top to bottom, filing, acting upon, delegating, trashing each document or noting tasks on a to-do list for later (and filing the to-be-acted-upon documents in an action folder). Remove other knick knacks and put any office supplies or tools in a drawer (and empty out your drawers while you’re at it). From here on out, everything goes in your inbox, and you process it to empty every day using the steps outlined here.

Obvious hints at GTD here, and I’m working on the processing of tasks every day now. Regardless, I’ve found that whenever I’m feeling overworked or overwhelmed, and getting lost in a project, cleaning my desk gets me back on task faster than anything else. In fact, you can probably guage my stress and productivity levels just by looking at my desk on any given day — the messier it is, the more stressed out I am, and my productivity is on its way down. When I’ve just cleaned up, it’s GO time.