6 Helpful Tricks to Boost Work Productivity and Earn That Raise
Tags: Productivity, Productivity Tips, Career Development, Efficiency, Productivity Hacks

Photo by Prateek Katyal

Are you looking for growth in your professional life? After dedicating your endless hours of hard work to a business, it may be time to ask for a raise in your salary for fair compensation. You’ve proven that you’re loyal to your employer, but is that enough to convince them that you deserve more in return?

Before confronting your employer, you need to consider their perspective on the matter. Yes, you’ve been working for them for a long while, but were you working at your top efficiency? Did you put your whole heart and soul into your projects? Perhaps you invested a lot of overtime, but does that actually prove your work ethic? Time does not represent the quality of work.

If you are starting to realize that you haven’t been at your most productive when working for your company, do not fear. There’s still hope for that raise. You need to prove to your employer that you are fully invested in benefitting their business, and with the raise, you can continue to help it grow. By improving your work productivity, they’ll be driven to reward you so you can continue making your impact on them.

Try these strategies to show your boss that you deserve the pay raise that you ask from them.

1. Stay Organized

As deadlines and assignments are thrown your way, it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in work and don’t know where to start. While your impulse may be to jump right in and randomly choose where to start making progress, you won’t be able to shake that chaotic, overwhelmed feeling. This will leave you frantically and thoughtlessly completing your tasks, leaving you much more stressed and flustered.

As every new task is thrown your way, input it in a dashboard where you can see everything in front of you. That way, you can organize what is to be done first and have a general idea of how to time it according to what is following it. You can keep both daily and weekly tasks organized this way. By doing this, you’ll know what to do in your day and then how to stay organized all week. You’ll enter your tasks with a clear, structured mindset rather than a confused and disarrayed one.

2. Stay Ahead

This method will keep you away from the last-minute panic that often comes as deadlines approach. By proactively approaching your projects, you’ll manage to exceed your employers’ expectations and offer them much relief. Their clients will be in great spirits and feel motivated to continue business if projects are completed early.

Being on top of your assignments will also help you feel a sense of control over your days, which will give you more confidence and a better work ethic. You’ll have a more positive approach to work, as you won’t be perceiving it as a detriment, but rather as another opportunity to prove your worth to your employer.

3. One Task at a Time

According to scientific research, multitasking can negatively affect work productivity levels by 40%. You may have thought that by addressing multiple tasks at once, you could complete them more. Instead, it could cause further delay on your work progress. You could become overwhelmed far more easily when making your brain focus on multiple sources of information at once. This work approach could also cause less-than-quality results, as you were only half (or less) present when addressing the project.

That is why it’s best to stay focused on one task at a time. Allow your brain to hone in on what needs to be done, so you can effectively complete it, and then continue moving forward. It’s better to hand in work that will positively reflect your skills and quality of work than something rushed and done with little invested effort.

4. Allow Time to Reset

Yes, taking breaks will help you in the long run to achieve better work productivity. If you become too wrapped up in the heavy load of work, you may risk mental burnout. This could cause your stress to take over and cloud your ability to effectively complete your work. You may have been spending all of this time with your company thinking that skipping those lunch breaks would make you more productive, but they actually may have done more harm. It’s best to step away every so often so your mind can reset. Stand up after you complete every big task, or every 90 minutes, get a glass of refreshing water, stretch and clear your mind.

5. Acknowledge Your Distractions

It’s best to defy your distractions if you know what they are. Also known as your time thieves, these are everyday elements that take away from your work productivity. They rob you of your chance to get work done efficiently. This is why it’s helpful to consciously track what steals your attention from your work, like your smartphone, certain websites, water cooler talk, snack runs and more. As soon as you get an inkling that your attention is fading away from your task and toward one of these, you can shut it down. This will help you keep focused and get your work done on time.

6. Track Your Time

To determine if any of the above methods are helping, or see for yourself where you need to improve your work productivity, try time tracking. actiTIME is a helpful time tracking software that will make it easy for you to manage your time in your workday and determine whether you are getting enough done in all the time you are investing to work. By recognizing how many hours are being committed to what tasks, you can decipher when your pace starts slowing down in the day and therefore take precautions to prevent this.

Once you feel satisfied with your time tracking data, you will actually have tangible proof to show your employer that you are an effective employee and deserve extra compensation. They’ll know for a fact, according to the numbers, that you are a valuable employee who is contributing to their success. That’s when they’ll be offering pay raises.