Do you want to get more done in a day? At the end of the day, do you ever feel like you got nothing accomplished that you had intended to? Well, I have some strategies to share that will make you more productive and can be implemented immediately. Yes, these do work and they are things you can do!
PHYSICAL THINGS:
1. Straighten and clean your desk or workspace -who wants to sit down in a mess and start working. Take the time to clean and organize your desk so your tools and files are readily accessible. Personally, I find I can’t focus in clutter.
2. Straighten and clean your mind do a brain dump. Write things down that are on your mind, that will free your mind so that you can focus on your tasks at hand.
3. Turn on some ambient music. Music soothes the savage beast after all, so why not set your surroundings to improve your work mood?
4. Set your phone to silent or do not disturb and turn off that distracting social media! We can lose so much time on social media because we SLPs are so social, aren’t we! That is the biggest drain on my time.
FOCUS ON YOUR PLAN:
1. Create a monthly plan. This is so necessary for us in public schools because we have annual and triennial reviews most every month. We must plan for those because they are those extra things we must squeeze into our daily schedules. If you have a side business like TpT, a monthly schedule is vital to getting new products created or blog posts written, etc.
2. Create a weekly To Do List of your top 5 to narrow your focus. These are based on your monthly plan.
3. Create a daily top 3 to execute that will accomplish your weekly top five.
Doing all these things will make your workload more manageable and you will get things done in a timely manner.
ORGANIZE YOUR WORKLOAD:
1. Batch your work. You’ll get more done by completing similar tasks or several of the same thing.
Example: at the end of the day write your daily service logs for your Medicaid billing, write your therapy summaries for the students/clients you saw today. Make those phone calls to parents to set up meetings or prep those meeting notices.
2. Schedule email time. Whether you wish to do this once a day or 3 times a day. Have a set time to do it and stick to it.
STOP WITH PROCRASTINATING
1. If you are motivated by ticking things off a To Do List then start with all the tasks that will only take a few minutes to accomplish. Put away the therapy materials used that day, or clean off the therapy table. Seeing things getting done will help eliminate the desire to put it off and motivate you to get going on your work.
2. Eat the elephant. We’ve all heard the question how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Tackle that big job by breaking it down into small manageable tasks that can be accomplished in short periods of time. It doesn’t look so big if you simply focus on one little part of it. Having 75 progress reports to write looks daunting but writing 5 right now isn’t so bad.
In my next post, I’ll be sharing 3 specific techniques that are research proved to increase your productivity. See you then!
