Being organised makes us more productive. It allows us to plan work effectively, keep track of projects and prioritise to deliver tasks on time. As such, improving your organisational skills is crucial to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in any industry. Here are our top tips for being more organised at work.
1. Make your to-do lists more effective
Most of us rely heavily on to-do lists to organise and prioritise tasks. While this can often make us feel organised, adding a thousand tasks to a list or drowning in post-its can be counter-productive, it’s more likely to lead to frustration and, ultimately, failing to do what’s needed.
The best way to manage your to-do list depends on how you work best. That said, there are a few things most of us will do well to consider.
Make multiple lists
This sounds like making more work, but it is an excellent way to make your lists more productive. Aim to split your lists into varying degrees of time sensitivity. By doing this, you’ll have already cut your urgent to-do list down considerably - an essential outcome when making your list more focused and actionable.
Put your Post-its to work properly
Use your Post-its to keep yourself highly focused. To do this, write on a post-it whatever task you’re currently working on and stick it somewhere visible. Then make sure your full to-do list (or lists) is out of sight.
The idea is that you actively focus on the task at hand with a visual reminder without getting distracted by other list items.
For more tips on making the most of your to-do lists, have a look at our related article: How To Manage Your To-Do List.
Tips to advance your organisational skills at work
2. Use all the tools at your disposal
Organisational tools can be beneficial. There’s now a considerable market of software in this department to help you to be as productive as possible.
From collaborative Kanban boards to online workspaces with powerful templates and even workspaces with built-in AI to help you complete admin and productivity tasks even quicker, there’s a wealth of tools available.
Don’t be afraid to embrace these online tools. Aside from the many features they offer, having everything you need readily available online is preferable to having countless notes in different notebooks that can be easily lost or misplaced.
3. Plan your time
Planning your time may seem obvious… but organising your work daily, weekly and monthly is an essential step to properly prioritising your most urgent tasks.
A good way to do this is to use different calendars to plan your time daily, weekly and monthly. Having all of this broad and granular information would quickly become overwhelming in one place.
Use one calendar to block out overarching projects and deadlines month-to-month, another calendar that encapsulates the detail of what needs to be done every week and use your work calendar to block out time for tasks each day.
Using your work calendar for your daily schedule is key as it will allow you to also account for meetings.
For more tips on improving your time management skills, take a look at these related CPD articles:
When we’re trying to be more organised, it’s easy to get overwhelmed in the minutiae of how to stay on top of everything. This can lead to overcomplicating simple tasks and processes in search of organisational perfection.
You don’t have to perfect every aspect of your work all at once. Make sure to keep in mind the bigger picture of the work that you’re doing and assess whether your attempts to be more organised are helping or if you’re simply changing things for the sake of feeling more productive.
Improve your workplace productivity
5. Have a system
Whether it’s physical filing, digital filing, how you delegate tasks or how you send files internally - you need to have a system. Having universal processes and systems for organisation across your department is essential to ensuring that all team members are as organised as possible. Make sure that these systems are documented and readily available to everyone. Once you have systems in place, evaluate the effectiveness regularly. Encourage team members to offer feedback and possible improvements. This will ensure that the systems are working effectively and that everyone is on the same page.
6. Don’t multitask
Though some people take pride in their ability to multitask, doing two things at once usually means doing two things badly instead of one thing well.
Focusing on one thing at a time is key to being more productive. To do this, limiting the number of distractions is absolutely essential.
Try to keep your phone away from you so no unnecessary notifications come through. You can also potentially disable email notifications temporarily to help you focus.
Being disorganised is also a large distraction. If you’re not on top of things, you’re much more likely to have to keep multiple plates spinning rather than focus on one thing at a time.
If you find that you’re regularly jumping between tasks to get things finished try to understand why this is happening. Is enough time being planned? Is there enough lead time to work on tasks? How are tasks being delegated? Answering these questions will help you to plan your work better and help you to be more focused in completing tasks.
Become a CPD accredited training provider
We hope this article was helpful. Established in 1996, The CPD Certification Service has over 27 years’ experience providing CPD accreditation. With members in over 100 countries, our CPD providers benefit from the ability to promote themselves as part of an international community where quality is both recognised and assured.
If you are interested in offering training courses, seminars, workshops, eLearning, or educational events suitable for Continuing Professional Development, please visit the Become a CPD Provider page or contact our team to discuss in more detail. Alternatively, if you are looking for a free online CPD record tool to help manage, track and log your ongoing learning, as well as store your professional training records and attendance certificates in one simple place, go to the myCPD Portal page.
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