Being effective at work

 By Yetunde Fate

Hello friends,

It’s a wonderful day and I’m really excited and in the mood of Christmas already however, I stumbled onto this nice piece and I thought I should share it with you guys. Do you consider yourself to be effective at work?

Here are a few tips that might be of help?

Step 1: Identify Priorities

If someone asked you what your job was truly about, would you have a good answer?

One of the most crucial steps in becoming fully effective is to know your purpose at work. After all, if you don't know what your job is there to achieve, how can you set appropriate priorities? (If you don't set priorities, you'll be forever buried under a mountain of work.

Step 2: Adopt a Good Attitude

Effective workers have a good attitude. How does this come into play?

People with a good attitude take the initiative whenever they can. They willingly help a colleague in need, they pick up the slack when someone is off sick, and they make sure that their work is done to the highest standards

So, focus on adopting a good attitude at work, and make decisions that intuitively "ring true." At the very least, you'll sleep easier at night!

Step 3: Build Essential Skills

Chances are that you have a lot of competing demands on your time. One of the best ways of becoming more effective at work is to learn how to manage your time more efficiently. Other key areas include learning how to manage stress, improving your communication skills, and taking action on career development. All of these can have a major impact on your effectiveness at work.

Step 4: Time Management/Productivity

Probably the most crucial thing that you can do to become more effective at work is to learn how to manage your time. Without this skill, your days will feel like a frantic race, with every project, email, and phone call competing for your attention.

Being effective at work means you use time to your advantage. Schedule your highest value work for the times of day when you're feeling the most energetic. This increases the likelihood that you'll resist distractions   and enter a state of flow  when working; and Are you a Procrastinator?   Self-test will help you deal with a serious, effectiveness-killing habit.

Step 5: Goal setting  

Is another important element in working productively Once you've done a Job Analysis, you should have a clear sense of what your role is all about. Use this information to set short and long-term goals. The advantage of doing this is that your goals act as a roadmap – after all, you'll never get anywhere if you don't know where you're going!  

Good organization   is also important for working effectively and productively. If you're disorganized, you can waste a huge amount of time just looking for lost items. So learn how to file   properly, and find out how to create an effective schedule  .

Step 6: Communication Skills

Think about just how often we communicate every day. We make phone calls, attend meetings, write email, give presentations, and talk to customers, and so on. We can seem to spend all day communicating with the people around us. This is why good communication skills   are essential, especially when your goal is to work more effectively.

Start by developing your active listening   skills. This means that you're making a concerted effort to really hear and understand what other people are saying to you.

Don't let yourself become distracted by what's going on around you, and don't plan out what you're going to say next, while the other person is talking. Instead, just listen to what they're saying. You may well be surprised at how much miscommunication can be avoided simply by listening actively.

Next, look at your writing skills . How well do you communicate in writing? Start with your emails. Most of us write dozens of emails every day. But there are many techniques that we can use to make sure we write effective emails   – ones that actually get read!

Step 7: Stress

A little bit of pressure can be a good thing. But when pressure exceeds your ability to cope with it effectively, your productivity goes down, and your mood suffers. You also lose your ability to make solid, rational decisions; and excessive stress can cause health problems, both in the short and long term.

No matter what you do, you'll likely experience stress numerous times throughout your career, perhaps even on a regular basis. This is why learning how to manage stress is a key factor in becoming more effective at work.

Try to get a good night's sleep   every night, and do your best to avoid taking work home with you. It's also important to relax when you get home in the evening.

If you're not sure what triggers your stress, keep a stress diary   for a week or two. This helps you to identify the events that cause you stress, and understand the degree to which you experience it. When you're feeling calm, you can then analyze these triggers and come up with effective strategies for managing them.

Step 8: Career Development/Learning

No matter what your field is, it's important that you keep learning and developing your skills. To begin with, carry out a Personal Analysis   to identify the areas that you need to work on.

In addition to the technical skills required to do your job, you also need to focus on soft skills   These include areas such as leadership skills, problem solving techniques, emotional intelligence skills, and creative thinking.  Anything you can do to enhance these skills will pay off in the workplace.

If taken seriously, the following tips can help us in our career and our projections for the year 2014. It can help teach you the skill and knowledge you need for a happy and successful career next year.