Here are the changes employees can make to improve their productivity and reduce stress in 2024
Welcome to the first week of 2024. Now you have dozens—maybe hundreds! —of emails to read that “come back” after the holidays. Your boss and coworkers are inundating you with requests for your plans for the year. No pressure, right?
The new year offers employees a benchmark in which to assess what went well, what went wrong, what they want to do, and how to plan for progress, experts say. This can be as important as, if not more important than, setting personal health goals, since most employees spend most of their waking hours at work.
“It’s important to take the time to evaluate the past year and look ahead,” said Jono Luke, vice president of product management for Webex by Cisco. “It’s so easy to fall back into the same clip and pace” you had before.
Experts say that making significant changes doesn't have to be too difficult, overwhelming, 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, productivity expert and head of global engagement marketing at Asana. “You should never overturn everything.”.
Here are 13 ways employees can set themselves up for success at the start of the year.
Restore your borders.
Luke said the pandemic has blurred the lines between work and home life in recent years , so this could be a good time to reinforce boundaries, which could 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 think about 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 assess talent. Try to make your goals as realistic as possible with short 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 of the research department at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. She also suggests taking a little time each day or week to review your activities and align them with your goals.
“Be conscious and specific about what you need to do to make progress,” she said.
Evaluate your priorities.
What’s urgent may not always be important, Woolley said, so make sure you understand your priorities. Once you do that, you can identify exactly what you plan to do and iterate until you create new habits. This might look like adding calendar items to block out time to focus on specific tasks. “Focus on the things that are important,” she said. “Don’t let them get derailed by unimportant, urgent tasks.”.
Announce your intentions.
Announce your commitments and intentions for the year, experts say. Sharing your thoughts can be helpful for the rest of your team, who may need 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 and least productive, Satish said. This can reveal trends in when you’re most and least productive so you can structure future meetings and focus your time around those. You should also review which calendar items are worth keeping, Luke said. This 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 cut back on 25 percent of what they do without any impact on productivity,” said Harry Kremer, clinical professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “We do some things just because that’s how they’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, spiritual 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 this weird concept of multitasking,” he said. “But are we confusing 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 apps or ways you can digitize small tasks to improve your workflow? Zerkel said you might even need to pare down your digital toolkit to be more efficient. Instead of working from your inbox, for example, there might be a work management system that’s more appropriate for teams on specific projects where 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 this summer, pick a few ideal weekends and mark them on your calendar so you don’t get caught up in planning. Then, as 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, says Satish. So take the time to reach out to past mentors and connections. “It’s hard [to stay in touch] throughout the year,” she said. “But it’s really easy to re-engage with a ‘Happy New Year’ message.”.
Update your resume.
The beginning 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’re probably distracted all day long, Zerkel said. Satish suggests setting Focus and Work Mode settings on your iPhone and Android devices to filter out the noise. You can also set time limits for each app in the Screen Time section on iOS, she added. That could also mean closing your email or toggling Slack or Teams notifications to focus time, Woolley said.
Organize and archive.
It’s not just your physical workspace that needs to be organized, experts say. It’s also your digital one. That means cleaning up your desktop, moving app icons or documents you use regularly to convenient locations, archiving projects and organizing your email , Woolley said. “Clear out the clutter so you can get to the things that are more important,” Zerkel said. “It can make you feel better.”
Get a head start.
Start your day or week by spending the first 15 minutes reviewing your inbox, calendar and other messages and creating a prioritized list of important work, Zerkel said.
“You can get back in the driver’s seat by giving yourself a little space at the beginning of each day,” he said.
