I come from a sales and recruiting background, and those worlds combined result in some great tips and tricks to boost productivity. I’ve learned that there are small changes you can make everyday, which lead to big results. So stop the bad email, phone and meeting habits and start being more productive with these simple tips.

1. Constantly Checking Email

How often are you checking your email? How often are you checking it without even thinking about it? In a recent RingLead webinar poll, 55% of attendees check email constantly. That is not productive. 

There have been countless studies that show that people cannot truly multitask. We are all hardwired for single tasks. Let’s say you have to write two different papers and you spent five minutes on one and five minutes on the other. Would that ruin your flow? Yes. Be aware of your unproductive habits and stop doing them.

2. Buying into Dogma

Dogma is simply being trapped in the mindset of other people’s thinking. Defaults are the dogma of technology. It’s something that someone else decided on, and if you’re not taking control and changing them, you’re literally losing huge amounts of productivity.  

Here’s an example. How do you schedule meetings and what time allotment do you use? Is it by the default, i.e. 30 minutes or 60 minutes? That’s dogma. Instead, think about productivity and schedule 25 and 50-minute meetings because that gives you time between meetings to plan.

In the same webinar, we polled this question about meeting default times. 80% of attendees schedule the default 30 and 60 minute meeting. It’s commonplace and dogma, but it can be changed. 

3. Not Owning the Agenda

Set the initial agenda of a meeting to ensure you set the pace and remind the attendees that you’ve given them 25 minutes of your day to have a conversation. This avoids an unorganized meeting, which is a waste of time. Kindly remind them of the time during the meeting, such as the halfway point, in order to stay on track. Your goal is to cover everything you need to cover in that time period without going over or having to schedule a similar meeting again.

This approach may sound forward, but it’s productive and the other meeting attendees will actually appreciate it. They also structure their day to make sure that their time is used most efficiently.

If you want to be productive, and if you want to get more done, seriously consider these process improvements. Stop checking your email constantly, don’t fall into the dogma trap and organize your meetings as efficiently as possible. These small changes will give you five to ten minutes back in your day, which adds up to hours a week.

This post originally appeared on the RingLead Blog.

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