Do you ever find yourself feeling like a robot while at work? It’s hard not to when a large portion of your time is dedicated to manual and tedious tasks. In order to focus on the tasks that challenge and satisfy you, you need to incorporate some development work hacks into your arsenal.
Not too long ago I decided to track everything I did at work. I did this because I was exhausted, I felt like I was getting nothing done and I wasn’t satisfied. What I came to realize was that the majority of my time and energy was spent on things that did not benefit my top priorities, they were labor-intensive and had little to no return on investment.
After reading this post you’ll have 13 ways to make your life a thousand times easier. You’ll understand what red flags look like in an office setting and you’ll have guidance on how to handle them. The goal is to have a job that develops and fulfills you. Not one that makes you feel like a babysitter.
This post is all about the 13 life-changing development work hacks that you need to adopt in order to save time.
Development Work Hacks: Communication
1) Time block when you’ll respond to emails
This happens to everyone. You find yourself in a groove, getting things done, but then an email comes in and you respond. Two hours pass and all you’ve done is respond to emails.
It’s essential to answer your emails in a timely manner but the problem is it’s a black hole that’s difficult to escape. You lose sight of what you’re trying to accomplish and instead spend time assisting others.
Blocking off time on your calendar to respond to emails will give you the best of both worlds. You’ll be able to assist and answer others while completing your projects.
2) Put on a do not disturb-status while working
Along with emails, most companies allow their employees to ping and message each other throughout the day. Again this can be quite disturbing to your workflow and now there’s a request you can’t avoid or deny because it’s been made in real-time.
Change your online status to “Busy” or “Do not disturb”. I had to do this recently because I was working on a few projects and I wasn’t able to work on any one of them fully due to the different collaborators that requested my immediate attention. Once you change your status you’re able to protect your time and improve the quality of the work you’re delivering.
3) Reduce the number of meetings you need to attend
People love to have meetings and they can be very enlightening when clear agendas and goals are set beforehand. However, every now and then you’re invited to one that does not follow those two standards. Avoid attending these meetings.
If you do not, you’ll find that people would like to set agendas and goals together, which is fine if you have time for it. Nonetheless, it’s inefficient to have a pre-meeting before the meeting. It only takes one person to set up the guidelines.
4) Pay full attention to the meetings you join
Once you decide to attend a meeting make sure to give it your full attention. Otherwise, you just wasted your time and everyone else’s time.
When you pay attention in meetings, you’re able to ask the right questions and solve problems together as a team. The worse is when an issue keeps getting revisited because people become aware of what was being discussed after the fact.
You need to come prepared with your game face. Ready to question and work through any issues together.
5) Share your takeaways with other attendees
During meetings, people typically take notes for themselves. That is great and highly recommended.
Another action that is highly recommended is to share your takeaways and calls to action. This allows the team to be on the same page and informs everyone of what their responsibility is. Also, it allows you to be corrected in case you misunderstood something.
It’s a huge timesaver and allows you to truly have productive and efficient meetings.
Development Work Hacks: Tasks
6) Spend the first half hour to an hour responding to emails and planning what tasks you’ll tackle
When first starting your day, you surely have a few emails that have come in and a few meetings scheduled for the day.
Go through your schedule for the day and time block or update it based on your goals. Doing this will prevent you from spending hours on one project, it allows you to complete the most urgent items, and scheduling little breaks now, before you start, gives you permission to recharge throughout the day.
It’s all about balance, we want to bring our best selves to our work.
7) Spend your mornings on the difficult tasks
It’s only natural for you to get tired as the day goes on. Usually, people have a coffee first thing in the morning to wake themselves up and by the end of the day, they’re crashing. Use this to your advantage.
Set up your most complex and difficult challenges for the beginning of the day. Confronting these problems first thing in the morning allows you to have the whole day to work through them and it gives you the opportunity to step away and come back to them more freely. Do not procrastinate on your tasks.
Also if you spend your afternoons on meetings, you won’t be distracted by the projects you need to work through and you’ll be able to provide an update on your work if needed.
8) Question tasks before you accept them
Once you become a helpful and valuable member of your team, random people will start coming to you with all sorts of requests. You’ve helped them once, so you’ll probably help them again or so they think.
It’s great to be in this position but we also want to be mindful of our time and how things operate. Before accepting requests, question why you’re receiving them in the first place. Are you even the best person to complete it?
This protects your time, your team, and the quality of the work that is being produced.
9) Track your work
We all need to keep track of the items we’re working through. Most likely you’ll be working on multiple projects at once.
Stay on top of all of your responsibilities and deadlines by tracking them. You can use excel or even a word document.
Doing this allows you to revisit the project and know exactly what your next steps and status are. Without it, you can lose a lot of time going through documents and emails to figure out if a project is closed or to define what’s missing.
10) Spend your last hour of work wrapping things up
It’s tempting to spend the last hour of your day getting one more thing done. If you adopt this habit you’ll find yourself working later than scheduled more times than not. It’s easy to underestimate how much time something will take.
The recommendation is to spend your last hour cleaning and organizing the items you completed that day and answering emails.
You don’t want to be rushing against the clock and you don’t want to leave for the day with unanswered emails in your inbox.
Development Work Hacks: Outside of Work
11) Be strategic with where you sit in the office
It’s important to socialize with your coworkers and build strong relationships. Still, you don’t want to find yourself completely distracted. Be strategic with where you sit.
The best thing to do is to sit close enough to your friendly coworkers so that you can visit them throughout the day but not next to them. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in a conversation that lasts the whole day.
Remember you want to protect your time and their time.
12) Make time to be social
With that being said, socializing and networking are incredibly important and beneficial for your career. Schedule time to have catchups and to go out for drinks with your coworkers.
It’s during these conversations that you learn about new opportunities and people that you should connect with. Working in an office environment is very political.
The goal is to be ambitious and hardworking along with being the most popular person in school. Once you’re able to balance those two items, the sky’s the limit for you.
13) Be flexible (The most underrated development work hack)
Give yourself grace. We aren’t always able to meet our deadlines without sacrificing our free time and we may find ourselves in crisis mode as urgent matters pop up. It happens. You may have to once and while forget all of these tips and that’s okay.
Just make sure to reward yourself when you find yourself in these kinds of situations, and make sure they’re the exception not the standard. Meaning – make sure this doesn’t become an everyday thing. Your bosses will appreciate your hard work but remember that this is only temporary.
Leave a Reply