I noticed that there are times of the day that I didn’t feel like being productive or just don’t think as efficiently and there are other times of the day that I would be able to get my best work done. I’m not a morning person, so even if I started on a task in the morning, I wouldn’t get really meaningful progress done on it until later in the day. By instead using the mornings for meetings and going through emails, I was able to free up my afternoons for serious project work, and so was able to be much more efficient by just changing the times that I work on certain tasks. Also, for difficult tasks, it’s hard to get motivated to jump back into it when you get interrupted, so I would work on these when I knew I had a big chunk of uninterrupted time.
Basic triage of my tasks helped, bucketing them into easy vs hard and high impact vs low impact, and then knocking out all the easy + high impact tasks ASAP, working through the others more slowly, but basically ignoring the hard + low impact tasks indefinitely.
In addition to my regular tasks, I like to set aside 4 hours a week for process improvements, optimization, and automation. Especially in the first few months of a new position, there’s inevitably quite a few things that are taking a lot of time and don’t need to be.
Automation: Good candidates for automation are any repetitive tasks... I’ve had lots of jobs that required updating graphs and spreadsheets with weekly data which I’ve just written macros to do automatically. In my profession, the vast majority of emails I got were unique and required a lot of thought to address, but other professions would greatly benefit from setting up a few quick email rules to sort and even respond automatically.
Process Improvements: sometimes just the act of documenting a process illuminates superfluous steps or other ways that it could be improved. Also, by documenting a process you can possibly offload the whole task to an intern or lower level staff member. Knowing what should be delegated is an important piece of efficiency.
Optimization: For any task that I’m doing, I’m thinking about what the ultimate goal of it is, and this helps me ensure that I’m not missing something that could make it better. For example, with home repairs my ultimate goal is to have as little ongoing maintenance as possible. So I’m not just thinking about how to fix the immediate problem, but also how to prevent any future problem and how to optimize so that any future fix of the same thing is much faster and easier next time. In another example, product design, the ultimate goal is total user experience, so although my task is to improve one specific use case, I’m thinking about what the second and third order effects of a design decision are and ensuring that a change to improve one isn’t going to mess up another.