24 Ways To Be Uncommonly Productive Today. Save Our Inboxes! Adopt the Email Charter! 5 Productivity Hacks for the Startup CEO. Ashish Rangnekar is the CEO and Co-Founder of BenchPrep, a marketplace and learning platform for exam prep and assessment courses. Follow him @ashishrangnekar. Startups are all about speed, efficiency, and maniacal focus. It’s exactly this breakneck pace and agility that enables them to beat large corporations at their own game. The startup CEO must also embody this speed and efficiency while managing exponential growth and, very often, the pains that come with it. SEE ALSO: Bad Tech Etiquette to Avoid at Work While a startup can grow from two to 100 employees and one to one million users, its CEO remains with just 24 hours a day to manage it all. 1. Before you start the day — at the office, home or on the road — jot down three important tasks that you must finish that day at any cost. 2.
Continuous access to an avalanche of emails can make you feel obligated to frequently check your email. 3. 4. 5. Hacks or no hacks, managing time is a challenging task and it can wear you down quickly. 5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work [INFOGRAPHIC] Aside from the time you purposefully waste at work — checking Facebook or playing Draw Something, as the kids do — there's a lot of other stuff that can slow you down at the office.
The productivity of a "knowledge worker" (read: non-farmer) hinges on communication and the ability to locate information quickly. VoIP communications company Fonality conducted a survey to find out which mundane office tasks suck the most time out of the day. Pinpointing and compiling all those wasted man hours could save companies some substantial coin. The folks at social performance management tool Rypple compiled the infographic below based on that data. The top time stealer? Trying to contact customers or colleagues. Duplicate or unwanted information (including spam) ranks highly as well. SEE ALSO: The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC] The study also proposes that "unified communications" (UC) solutions can reduce much of this waste, though it's difficult to determine by how much.
Design Interrupted: Design-time Versus Meeting-time. Ever see sleep histograms like the one pictured below? There are levels of sleep, and the deeper you go, the better the sleep you're getting. But it takes time for you to get to the sweet spot of REM sleep and achieve quality sleep. And if the neighbor's dog barks (or, in my household, your toddler yells “mama!”)
And you wake up, the whole process has to start over. An article I read a while back caused me to reflect on how we scheduled meetings at Adaptive Path and how that might affect my colleagues' ability to achieve quality design work. Essentially, Graham describes a “manager's schedule” as hour-based and centered around switching tasks. Graham continues by saying that “there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. I am definitely guilty of booking check-ins that work for my “manager's schedule” moreso than our teams' “maker's schedule.” Another meeting overhaul happened about a year and a half ago.