Here are the changes workers can make to improve their productivity and reduce stress in 2024
Welcome to the first week of 2024. Now you have dozens—maybe hundreds—to read! — e-mails that "come back" after the holidays. Your boss and colleagues bombard you with questions about your plans for the year. No pressure, right?
The new year offers workers a benchmark in which to assess what went well, what went poorly, what they want and how to plan for progress, experts say. This can be just as important, if not more important, than setting personal health goals, since most workers spend most of their waking hours at work.
"It's important to take time to assess the past year and look ahead," said Jono Luk, vice president of product management at Webex by Cisco. "It's so easy to go back to the same clip and pace" you had before.
Experts say making significant changes doesn't have to be overwhelming, difficult, or even massive. Even small changes can make a big difference in a person's work.
"I'm a big believer in making small, incremental changes," said Joshua Zerkel, performance expert and global engagement marketing lead at Asana. "You should never turn everything upside down."
Here are 13 ways employees can set themselves up for success at the start of the year.
Restore your boundaries.
Luke said the pandemic has blurred the lines between work and home life in recent years , so this may be a good time to reinforce boundaries, which can look like anything from having a dedicated workspace to resetting your schedule.
"Share your goals and boundaries with others," he said. "So something like, 'If you see me online at 7 p.m., kick me out.' Others will hold you accountable."
Formulate your goals.
One way to think about your goals is to remember what you've accomplished and apply it to what you want to do in the future, said Akhila Satish, CEO of Meseekna, a technology company that uses simulations to evaluate talent. Try to make your goals as realistic as possible with small time frames to make them achievable, she said. You may need to gather feedback to help you, said Anita Williams Woolley, professor and associate dean for research at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. She also suggests setting aside some time each day or week to review your activities and align them with your goals.
"Be intentional and specific about what you need to do to make progress," she said.
Assess your priorities.
What's urgent may not always be important, Woolley said, so make sure you understand your priorities. Once you do this, you can determine exactly what you plan to do and repeat until you create new habits. This might look like adding calendar items to block off time to focus on specific tasks. "Focus on the things that matter," she said. "Don't let them derail unimportant, urgent matters."
Communicate your intentions.
Declare your commitments and intentions for the year, experts say. Sharing your thoughts can be helpful to the rest of your team who may have input or need to adjust their expectations. "It can reduce the number of things that can derail you," Woolley said. "And if you make a public commitment, you're more likely to do it."
Evaluate your performance.
Look at your calendar and assess when you were most productive and when you were least productive, Satish said. This can reveal trends in when you are most and least productive so you can structure future meetings and focus time around that. You should also consider which calendar items are worth keeping, Luke said. That could mean auditing recurring meetings to shorten, cancel or reformat them into emails or other forms of communication, Zerkel said. "It turns out that most people could drop 25 percent of what they do without any impact on productivity," said Harry Kremer, clinical professor of management and organization at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "We do some things just because that's the way we've always done them."
Find your balance.
Think about how you spend the 168 hours you get each week, Kremer said. Divide the percentage of time you want to spend into six areas: career and continuing education, family and friends, spirituality and religious views, health, entertainment, and social responsibility. Then compare that to how much time you actually spend and adjust accordingly, he said. "We have a strange concept of multitasking," he said. "But have we confused activity with productivity?"
Use digital tools.
Saving time can be as simple as copying and pasting a common email response from your laptop's notepad, Satish said. But are there other programs or ways you can digitize small tasks to improve your workflow? Zerkel said you may even need to pare down your digital toolkit to be more efficient. Instead of working in your inbox, for example, there might be a work management system that's more appropriate for teams working on specific projects for which they might want to communicate, share resources, or set deadlines.
Plan a vacation.
Start planning your vacation now, even if it's a vague estimate, Luke advised. If you know you want to take a beach trip in the summer, pick a few perfect weekends and mark them on your calendar so you don't miss out on the planning. Then, when you get closer, you can solidify your plans. "If you don't at least write it down, you won't do it," he said.
Reconnect with people.
The New Year is a great time to reconnect with your professional network, said Satish. So take the time to connect with former mentors and connections. "It's hard [to keep in touch] throughout the year," she said. "But it's very easy to get a 'happy new year' message back in."
Update your resume.
The start of the year is a good time to make sure your resume and personal websites or profiles are up to date , Satish said. "You never know when you'll need it."
Set up notifications.
If you've been working with the default notification settings on your devices and apps, you've probably been distracted all day, Zerkel said. Satish suggests setting focus and mode settings on iPhone and Android devices to filter noise. You can also set time limits for each app under Screen Time on iOS, she added. It could also mean closing email or toggling Slack or Teams notifications for focused time, Woolley said.
Organize and archive.
It is necessary to organize not only a physical workspace, but also a digital one, experts say. That means cleaning up your desktop, moving app icons or documents you regularly need to convenient locations, archiving projects and organizing email , Woolley said. "Clean out the junk so you can get to the things that matter more," Zerkel said. "It might make you feel better."
Get a head start.
Start your day or week by spending the first 15 minutes going through your inbox, calendar and other messages and creating a priority list for important work, Zerkel said.
"You can put yourself back in the driver's seat by giving yourself some space at the start of each day," he said.
