Improving office productivity means different things to different people. There are some who love to work against the bustling background of an open plan office. Others find it hard to work outside a private office. Call center workers, for example, work in the kinds of conditions that a solicitor would find impossible.
But there are ways you can improve your productivity no matter what industry you’re in, and one of the most important is standing up against that constant nagging presence – your mobile phone.
Productivity means not answering a call?
We’ve all been in the situation where we are trying to concentrate on a report or editing an article and the phone starts ringing. Many of us have our emails routed through our phones as well as Skype, so it’s not only the phone calls, it’s the messages – Facebook too – that are constantly pestering us for attention.
Sometimes to get a complex task completed you have to tame that Pavlovian response to respond to your phone as if it were a crying newborn. Similarly, hide your email browser and pretend it doesn’t exist. Not checking it for half an hour is okay if it means you are going to get an important task completed.
Get your diary organised
If you’ve got a busy day, make a list of the tasks you need to accomplish, putting the worst ones first. Getting those out of the way means that mentally you see your day becoming easier as time goes by, rather than harder as you anticipate struggling with a daunting chore.
Streamlining office communications
There are ways that you can redirect calls to your phone and make sure that you don’t miss important ones. You can even get incoming calls diverted at different times of the day or days of the week. It’s done by creating a virtual phone exchange stored in the cloud. By using a toll free number that attaches to your existing landline or mobile, you can access the features of a virtual receptionist.
You can also use the advantages of Email-to-Fax, which means no more waiting to access the office fax machine. Your computer can receive or send faxes using an online fax service such as eFax. Just create an email, attach the document and send it to a fax number. There are no additional phone lines required because you’re sending the fax online.
Plus, the eFax Mobile App means you can send and receive faxes on your smartphone. There’s lifetime storage in the cloud too, so you can keep tabs on where the faxes have gone.
With online faxing, you are empowered to send and receive faxes any time of the day. Productivity will also improve with fewer machines to service and less paper lying around the office.
You can improve productivity in the office in any number of ways, and it can be a relatively simple process, once you identify the main areas where there are issues!