In this day and age, all of us are complaining about being busy but with poor outputs. However, it’s a fact that we do have some fragmented time before, after, or even during the work time. Especially, have you ever sat in front of the office computer, but hesitating about what to do next?
Everybody hopes to improve the working efficiency, but the secrets of efficiency improvements just hide in your spare time.
Make a to-do list and a monthly plan
Jotting things down one after another is a good way to establish a simple structure about all the things that need to be done. Besides, you can also order these things item by item in priority in case of a super busy day. Otherwise, you might be swallowed by tons of disordered work which could largely sabotage your working efficiency. Making a to-do list is the worthiest thing you can do during your free time.
Like the to-do list, a monthly plan is also a good way to boost efficiency. For example, if you are a blogger, listing a monthly plan about the topic of your future posts will help you prepare and organize all the required content and materials faster when you are ready to get down to it.
Prepare a waiting list for reading
Thanks to Google, we could finally get the right information we need. But sometimes you may have no time to read every page carefully at once, and have to save it for later.
Preparing a reading list is just for this situation. In case that some pages are invalid after a few days, you can use Maxnote in Maxthon5 browser, which is not only a simple upgrade of browser bookmark but also your information assistant. The kinds of stuff could be saved in formats of url bookmark, web content or even snapshot. It’s handy.
Now make full use of these saved pieces of stuff! Anytime you have a little chunk of time, you can open this folder for a quick reading.
Check the inbox
Have a meeting in 5 minutes? Use the 5 minutes to empty the unread emails in your inbox. If you’ve got a lot in your inbox, ignoring and marking all as read is not a good idea because you may miss some important emails at the same time, but checking one by one does need a lot of time.
Then make full use of the fragmented time and get all unread emails done. Reducing the pile can be a big help for efficiency improvements, and besides, having an empty inbox is a kind of wonderful feeling for sure.
Reorganize your files
According to an investigation, the average time a worker spent looking for misplaced documents and emails on their computer per day is two hours. This is a major enemy of productivity. Obviously, you couldn’t spare too much time on organizing these documents every day, which seems not very practical. However, gathering and organizing them with your fragmented time is not only available but also efficient.
Check your recent contacts
When you are free and don’t know exactly what to do next, you can check your recent contacts, such as recent phone call records, Skype, Whatsapp, or any other instant message tools that used during your work. This may give you some clues about what you have done in recent days and hence remind you of what meeting you may appoint with your colleagues or the todos after your meeting.
What are other productive ways to use your free time that you can think of? How do you fill your free time? Don’t hesitate to let us know by commenting directly under this post & happy browsing!