As the summer heats are upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, the allure of relaxation and leisure can be overpowering. It can be challenging at times to remain focused on your professional objectives. However, it’s crucial to strike a balance between indulging in the season’s delights, having a healthy dose of summer fun, and staying productive.
Companies all over the world have become obsessed with meetings, so much so that they dedicate several hours each week to sitting in them. In US, on average, employees spend 33 percent of their workweeks in meetings and will attend between 6 to 15 meetings per week. Unfortunately, not all of them are productive. Quite the contrary! Some team meetings often pull employees away from periods of concentration where they can work without disruption.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, we are constantly bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information. Emails flood our inboxes, instant messages pop out, social media platforms lure us in with endless scrolling, and we find ourselves drowning in a sea of news articles, videos, and advertisements. This phenomenon known as information overload is silently killing our productivity.
Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, your productivity levels will ebb and flow throughout the day. Some people are alert and ready as soon as the day starts while others do their best work in the evening. However, there’s a window of time that is almost universally unproductive—the late afternoon slump.
It’s hard to make it through the workday without hearing the word busy. People talk about how they are too busy to take on extra tasks or lose track of the day because of how full it is. However, being busy doesn’t always mean being productive.
Most of us can agree that teamwork is more than just a buzzword, it is a cornerstone of success in business. Harness teamwork and this team-oriented approach will ensure that everybody is working in sync, driving innovation, and improving overall performance. Still, we might not realize just how beneficial it is for problem-solving, communication, decision-making, innovation, organizational efficiency, and overall performance.
If you’ve heard of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), you might associate it with those dark, cold winter months. However, while less common, SAD can occur in the spring as well, with symptoms like restlessness, anxiety, depression, insomnia, agitation or limited attention span. Also known by its more colloquial name, spring fever, this form of SAD can pose a threat to your concentration and productivity at work.
Over the past few years, burnout has become a major topic of conversation—especially in the wake of COVID-19 as chronic stress, overwhelm, and exhaustion reached alarming new levels. But there’s another less talked about phenomenon that could be even more detrimental to your work performance (and other facets of your life, too). This silent saboteur is called rust-out, and almost 70 percent of employees have dealt with it.
It has been demonstrated that attention spans are shrinking. People are constantly inundated with short videos, bite-size content, and endless stimuli that prevent them from really focusing on one thing at a time. Even corporate training materials have moved toward digestible content. Though not necessarily a bad thing, it highlights the necessity for companies to accommodate workers who are easily distracted. Similarly, as you tailor your marketing messages for your target audience, you must also modify your communication methods to suit their attention span.
Communication plays a crucial role in problem-solving and decision-making processes within teams. More than 70 percent of leaders feel that effective communication skills boost their team’s productivity. So what is the correlation between strong communication and a high-quality job performance? And how can you develop this trait to bolster your own career success?
