Seven Habits to improve efficiency

Lead:The key to success is not hard work, but smart work. To improve work efficiency, I have changed the following seven work habits.

When I was 17 years old, I could spend 20 hours studying and working every day. I go to school every day, use my recess to finish my homework, and then run a non-profit organization at night. At that time, my hard work earned me a lot of honors. However, as I grew up, I began to look at this issue from another perspective. I found that hard work is not necessarily the only way to succeed. Sometimes, less work can achieve better results.

Many entrepreneurs are busy every day. However, hard work cannot beat millions of competitors. Time is always limited. An entrepreneur can work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. However, competitors only need to spend a little more money to build a better team, so that all your time is wasted. Some may ask: "Why have many small enterprises finished what they cannot do ?" For example, Facebook spent billions of dollars to acquire the instagram of only 13 employees; Snapchat, a startup with only 30 employees, was eligible to reject the invitation to buy Facebook and Google. The success of these small businesses is partly due to their good luck, but more importantly, they have high productivity.

The key to success is not hard work, but smart work.

There is a clear line between effort and efficiency. The essence of improving work efficiency is not time management, but energy management. This is the essence of business. We need to learn how to spend the least time to achieve the maximum effect. I am glad that I have a good team, and everyone in the team can help me improve my work efficiency. I used to work 80 hours a week, but now I only need to work 40 hours a week. Although my work time has been reduced, my work has increased.

To improve work efficiency, I have changed the following seven work habits:

1. Stop working overtime and improve work efficiency per unit time

Have you ever wondered how the law came about when you worked 40 hours a week? In 1926, Henry Ford, an American industrialist and founder of Ford Motor Company, conducted an experiment and came to an interesting conclusion: When workers work from 10 hours to 8 hours a day, in addition, after the change from 6 days to 5 days every week, the worker's work efficiency will be improved.

In the short term or long term, the longer you work, the lower your work efficiency.

"Compared with a team with 40 hours of work per week, if a team has more than 60 hours of work per week and only needs more than two months, the cumulative effect of the team's productivity decline is, it will lead to a longer time for them to complete the same project."

Another study pointed out: "sleeping for less than an hour every night for a week will lead to degradation of human cognitive level, which is equivalent to getting drunk when the amount of blood reaches 0.1 ." If you are still working all night, your boss may think that you are drunk to go to work and fired you.

After a night of sleep, you will have multiple negative reactions in the next day. For example, fatigue can lead to low mood. More importantly, this kind of negative mood also affects your thinking and action abilities, making you more impulsive, compassionate, or even less intelligent.

It is very important for us to avoid excessive work and get adequate sleep, which can improve our work efficiency. According to research, 70% of modern people suffer from sleep insufficiency. Next time you find that your work efficiency is declining, you may want to go to bed for a while.

"Sleep" celebrity

Da Vinci does not go to bed much at night, but may go to bed several times during the day.

Napoleon has the habit of taking a nap every day.

Although Edison was a little shy about his nap habits, he insisted on it every day.

Kennedy could not eat in bed every day. After eating, he went to bed directly.

Churchill needs to take a nap every day when he does not move. He believes this will increase his daily work efficiency by two times.

Since I started to ensure 7-8 hours of sleep every day, I found that my work efficiency has become higher than when I used to work 16 hours a day, although the work time decreases, the daily work load increases. For entrepreneurs, sleeping is also a powerful weapon.

2. Do not say yes easily

Partito's law states that the 80% output you get is produced by 20% of your efforts, while the remaining 20% of the output consumes 80% of your efforts. We should not only focus on hard work, but also on top of the most important work. Focus on the 20% output that only requires 80% of effort, and temporarily discard the remaining 20% output. We must stop saying yes to each task, because many of these tasks require you to spend a lot of energy, but it is almost impossible to return without you. The difference between a successful person and a very successful person is that a very successful man-machine will say "no" to every thing ". -? Warren Buffet.

This leads to another problem: what should I say yes to and no? If you are not sure whether a job is worth a lot of time and energy, you can consider a simple split test. When testing, record everything you do and analyze it.

3. Don't do everything yourself and learn to get help from others.

At some stage of my career, I managed a very large user community, which overwhelmed me. I try my best to do everything. Finally, I was unable to stand up, and the user community began to manage myself. I was surprised that the user management was much better than I did. I began to understand how important the collective power is.

Consumers know what they want, and they know more about their own needs than all marketers. Do you know that on the YouTube platform, the number of videos uploaded by users is 10 times the number of videos uploaded by marketing personnel? When looking for information about a specific brand, 51% of consumers believe the content published by other users, while only 16% believe the content of the enterprise website, only 14% of consumers believe that enterprise content is published on social networking websites. Marketers must maintain an open mind and seek help from the brand's user community.

A good content marketer aims not to create the best content, but to build a community for members of this community to help you create excellent content.

Remember, when you need help, you should seek help. We cannot do everything on our own. It is very important for you to share your work with others. This will give you more time to focus on those most important tasks. Do not waste time on all projects.

Even if your friends cannot help you, staying with them can improve your work efficiency.

4. No more perfectionist

Dr. Simon sherry, professor of psychology at Dalhousie University, said: "We found that the perfectionist plot affects professor's work. The more perfectionist the professor is, the lower the work efficiency ."

Perfectionist usually has the following problems:

It takes longer for them to complete a task.

They always delay time and wait for "perfect moments ". In business, perfect moments usually mean that everything is too late.

They focus too much on details and ignore the whole.

The perfect moment is now.

5. Stop repetitive work and learn to use automation software

Tehys solutions conducted an experiment. They found that although we were more familiar with this work during repetitive work, in fact, the time for completing this work has increased. If you use automated software to do this, it will reduce a lot of unnecessary time consumption.

A week ago, I spent 15 minutes writing a basic Python program that extracts content from the data. It took me a whole day to complete this job, but it took me 5 minutes to write this sort. Now, when I need to repeat the job (more than five times), I will ask myself if I can find a similar program to help me complete the job.

You don't need to know how to use Automation programs to do repetitive work. Of course, it is better to write programs by yourself, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't. If you do not write a program, you can purchase a program.

People always forget that time is money. During some simple work, we tend to work manually. But in fact, these simple jobs will consume a lot of time.

If you don't solve the problem yourself, hire a professional to help you. Remember, you spend money to make money, and time is your most important asset.

6. Stop guessing and use data to optimize your work

If you want to optimize your website for search engines, you can optimize your life and grow to maximize your potential.

There are many studies that allow you to optimize your work. For example, do you know that people are the most difficult to concentrate between 12 noon and four o'clock P.M? You can adjust your work schedule based on such data. Even if you cannot find the data you need, you can perform simple tests and experiments on your own.

You should constantly require yourself to test and analyze your work efficiency, and then optimize your work according to the analysis results.

7. Stop your work and learn to leave it empty.

Most people do not realize that when we focus too much on something, our thoughts will be locked in a small box. In this case, leaving the office for a while alone becomes very important. A research article called "the power of being alone" points out that being alone is very beneficial to both the brain and mind.

A study at Harvard University shows that our memory length and accuracy increase when people experience solitude. Although excessive loneliness is harmful to human growth, the study points out that in the age of teenagers, a certain amount of time alone can improve our mood and academic performance.

It is important to learn to leave empty. Sometimes, a solution to a problem is like something you haven't seen in your house for a long time. You can't find it when you're looking for it. When you stop and take a rest, it is actually at your hand.

Improving work efficiency is not achieved overnight. Just like other things in your life, you have to work hard until now. Sit there and wait. You can't change it. We should better understand our bodies and constantly optimize our energy so that we can pursue a more successful and happy life.