7 productivity hacks to add hours to your day

Last month I spoke about the importance of face-to-face contact. Whether it’s with your clients or your colleagues, ensuring you make time to be in the same room with people is invaluable to your relationships and business.
I know that this is all good and well but, if you’re managing a large book of clients or your team is spread out over a few offices, how can you possibly find more hours in your day in order to do this? Well, stay with me folks, I may just have the answer! Read on for my 7 productivity hacks which will give you back some much-needed hours in your day.
1. Restrict Social Media – there’s a few ways you can do this. Either, allow yourself 20-30 minutes a day to check your socials or consider removing them from your phone altogether. If you’d like to try a softer approach, you can hide them on your iPhone by setting up a folder and making sure your biggest time wasters are hidden away on the second page of that folder.
2. Turn off notifications to all unneccesary apps – you really don’t need to know when your half-sister’s, friend’s, daughter has listed an item for sale on a page you forgot you were following. In fact, you probably don’t need to be notified about half the things you get pinged for. Go through your apps and turn off notifications. That way, you can control when you see and respond to your updates.
3. Set your phone to Do Not Disturb for the times when you really need to concentrate – we’ve all been right in the zone, only to receive a call from a telemarketer which bursts the bubble. Even if you choose not to take the call, the moment will have been lost. When you need to focus, set your phone to Do Not Disturb. If you need to be available to someone, set them as a favourite and their call will still make it through to you.
4. Schedule your day – don’t spend your day flitting from task to task, working reactively as emails or phone calls come through. Prioritise your tasks and plan your day accordingly. You could even try batching, where you save up all the same, or similar, tasks and complete them together
5. Add deadlines to your to-do list – I’m sure most of you have a to-do list and are pretty familiar with the importance of it. If you’d like to take yours up a notch, try adding due dates. It’s easy to push something from one week to the next as other seemingly more important things come up. However, if you set yourself a time in which your tasks need to be completed, your chances of success will be much higher.
6. No phones in the bedroom – this is one which we’ve recently introduced in our house and I love it! We leave our phones in another room overnight, eliminating phone time before bed and the chance of those sneaky phone checks when we wake in the middle of the night. Without those bright lights and endless scrolling, there’s a noticeable difference in the quality of our sleep.
7. Get up earlier – if you’re in a position where people are constantly contacting you throughout the day, making it impossible to complete a task, try and get a head start in the wee hours. If you can get out of bed, even one hour earlier, you’ll be able to spend a decent amount of uninterrupted time making a dent in that overflowing inbox before it begins to refill.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we have never been more contactable. While this can be a good thing, it also significantly raises the expectations of our availability. It’s important to know that it is you who should be in charge of this and to put yourself back in the driver’s seat. By enacting these 7 steps, you should be able to get a cheeky hour or two back into your day and feel much more in control of your workload.

Shannon Wood, Managing Director S8 Expert Recruitment Solutions. I have over 14 years recruitment experience specialising in the animal health industry across the ANZ region. Areas of expertise include sales and marketing, technical roles (Quality Assurance, Quality Control & Regulatory Affairs) and operational & financial positions. I work extensively in the veterinary, ruminant, monogastric, aquaculture and the pet specialty industries and I look forward to the next 14 years.