Having a less is more approach in the office can be a very helpful in keeping your work efficiency at its maximum.
This train of thought can translate into many different aspects of your working habits and capabilities.
Some people are very detail oriented while others work better under organized chaos.
Whatever type of worker you consider yourself to be, this article will be able to fine tune your abilities helping you grow in a professional work environment.
One of the broadest areas to utilize this is with how you communicate with customers and fellow employees.
Communication
Communication in modern times can occur in many ways: email, telephone, face-to-face, videoconference, text messaging, etc.
In business, time is money.
Being concise in your communication will help to save time and help others to understand you.
People have short attention spans and will only retain part of the information that is being presented at any given time.
This can apply to closing a sale, giving a presentation, or training a new employee to name just a few examples.
The information that is being presented should be non-ambiguous, keeping the audience engaged with the major points of interest.
In the case of writing emails, for instance, a person may receive an email that is 250 words and may have to read it twice over simply because the information trying to be conveyed may be convoluted or too wordy to decipher efficiently.
Reading efficiently and extracting the overall message of an e-mail is something that most of us have room to improve on.
When it comes to speaking with people that have English as their second language it is important to avoid the use of colloquialisms.
In most cases the person will not understand you and you will need to explain yourself or describe things in a different manner, often causing you to repeat yourself and waste valuable time.
If you are clear cut, direct, and articulate your message more directly the ‘less is more’ mantra will ring true.
Keeping What You Need
To further complicate our lives, some of us tend to be packrats and keep everything we have ever touched.
This leads to files full of outdated documents and useless information cluttering our workspace and adding even more distraction.
Every worker should have a common practice of cleaning up emails, shredding or disregarding old documentation, and only keeping those items that are needed in our workspace.
When you do have that extra clutter hanging around it takes you more time to search through files for information, whether digital or physical.
Your digital archive will take up memory on your computer causing it to perform less efficient as well.
Physical files will take up space forcing you to find new places to put things.
Only keeping the necessary information and tools in your surroundings will help with your time management and productivity.
While it is important to have your information backed up in case something happens, avoid doing so out of paranoia.
Having multiple copies of the same document may be unnecessary and cause clutter that might otherwise be avoided.
Work smart to reduce the number of tasks you perform by efficiently managing the information and tools that surround you.
