Five reasons you are unproductive and one solution to fix them all

Picture this: It is a bright Monday morning and you’ve settled down at your desk to tackle the workday head-on.

Just then, your phone rings – the first of the multiple times it will do so in the day. Between emails, doing research, and attending meetings, the single tab on your browser splinters into several more, and precious minutes are lost in hopping between them. Before you know it, the day is over, with many of your tasks remaining incomplete.

In the thick of things, especially when the boundaries between work and home have become blurred in the current work-from-home (WFH) scenario, it can be a bit difficult to pinpoint just what is reducing our productivity by taking up our time, energy and other resources. Read on to know some of the factors that might be stopping you from working to your full potential and ways to fix them:

Poor communication

Communication and collaboration form the lifeline of any enterprise. Poor communication, or a lack of it, can snowball into negative outcomes like trust issues in the workplace. This can drastically affect output, particularly for remote employees given that double the effort is spent on completing a single task. While there are many ways for improving team communication in the workplace, the uniform usage of a single team communication app goes a long way in bridging this gap and fostering workplace trust.

Multi-tasking: A drain on time and energy

At one point, multi-tasking was seen as the ultimate productivity hack. Why not get more done by sending off those important emails, and meet the deadline on an urgent task? Since then, multiple studies have shown that multitasking actually hampers productivity. This is because multi-tasking simply involves rapidly switching our attention between two tasks, which is not only a less efficient way of completing them but also more taxing for the brain. While it might be impossible to completely avoid multitasking, the ability to focus on a single task for more time might help in the deep run.

Poor prioritization

There are many moving parts in one’s day that can make us lose sight of the bigger picture. Often, we tend to prioritize the first task that comes within our crosshairs, which can be counterproductive. Instead, stepping away from the ordered chaos of the workday and taking a bird’s eye view of the tasks at hand, and allocating most of your time and energy to completing the most prioritised tasks makes all the difference to one’s productivity levels. One way to ensure this is to leverage the right work planning and tracking solutions to your advantage.

Stress

Our hyper-connectivity through the digital medium and being ‘always on’ with the constant barrage of notifications from emails, instant messaging chats and social media has hijacked our nervous system into believing that everything is important, and must be tended to on priority. Such added stress leaves one prone to health risks, both physical and mental. In fact, growing research from HR and health professionals have shown that this ‘always on’ culture has led to diminished productivity, absenteeism and high turnover of employees. Taking breaks and resting a fatigued mind and body is as important to productivity as the tools that enable it during regular work hours.

Too many workplace tools

While the digital age has a lot of potential to accelerate workplace productivity, in many ways, the opposite is also true. Given the siloed nature of work from home tools, they are only able to perform a specific function. It means that a person has to resort to multiple tools to carry out even the simplest of tasks. More tools means more number of tabs, and more tabs means a greater chance of tab switching, which is akin to multitasking and getting distracted. Studies have shown that it takes at least 20 minutes to bring back our focus to a task after getting distracted. And so, it comes as no surprise that the tab switching due to multiple tools limits productivity.

The way ahead

The team at Flujo, a productivity multiplier and team communication platform, has been closely observing these trends, and to that end, it has developed the suite as an enterprise collaboration system.

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At the heart of productivity for any organization is teamwork, along with the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively.

This is a key reason why Flujo’s Messenger features prominently on its interface. The Messenger can replace the clutter and chaos that comes with the traditional practice of exchanging emails internally with the ability to send instant messages to teammates or create any number of teams with them for focused group conversations. At times, not all topics and issues can effectively be communicated over text. To that end, Flujo also offers Audio and Video calling capabilities (upto 100 participants via GMeet) for more nuanced, face-to-face communication, that are ideal WFH tools to help leverage each other's strengths.

Achieving productivity takes coordinated efforts of various team members. This requires clarity from all team members on the priorities of their tasks, and the ability to track their progress. Flujo comes equipped with inbuilt Kanban Boards that help resolve prioritization problems as they can be customized and shared based on varying levels of privacy and access. This ensures that every stakeholder in the project is on the same page, and moves towards their goals in sync, ensuring the productive use of a team’s time and energy.

Flujo prioritizes a focused approach to work by doing away with the distractions that comes with tab switching and multitasking altogether by providing a comprehensive, homegrown set of workspace tools on a single, intuitive interface. From an inbuilt Drive with 100 GB storage that can store a variety of formats including documents, spreadsheets, among others, to tools to manage remote employees, these tools are ready for action the moment you land on your homepage.

My wall is Flujo’s default dashboard. With this, losing your train of thought and productivity by managing and coordinating multiple tools over multiple tabs will become a thing of the past. Flujo also offers integration with popular tools like Google Drive and Meet, Jitsi, Github, and others, to ensure that your work continues unhindered and that a lot can be accomplished from the comfort of your messenger without even stepping out of Flujo.

One activity that takes a significant chunk of an employee’s time and attention is reviewing calendars and keeping track of important updates.

My wall on Flujo is what brings it all together by giving you a complete overview of your day in a single glance. You can view all your important meetings and reminders, and start off on a productivity streak by accessing all your tools in a few clicks.

All essential and customizable alerts that help you to stay on track, right from the reminders you set to whether you're running late for a meeting, are delivered to you by Tac, your own bot assistant on Flujo. Similar to playing fetch with your pet dog, Tac can retrieve information crucial to your day so that you don’t have to, and channel your energies on what you do the best instead.

While productivity is a continuous process of improvement, the team at Flujo constantly strives to develop better communication and collaboration tools that will enable the creation of ideal workplaces where the work flows seamlessly.