Cape Town - You have landed your first job and want to ensure you are a recruit who is productive, reliable and efficient.
Online microlearning platform Grovo has some tips for you, and their bite-sized video lessons make learning quick and easy for those with busy jobs and limited time. IOL has teamed up with Eiffel Corp, the accredited reseller for Grovo in Africa, to give you a chance to win 3 months access to the platform's 2000+ lessons at the touch of a button. Grovo uses 60-second on-demand learning videos to deliver content in a fun and engaging way. See details below.
Clare Reilly, Marketing and Sales Manager at Eiffel Corp, used a few of Grovo's videos to bring some guidelines for being efficient and effective in the workplace.
1. Time management
Being new in a job can be overwhelming and one of the biggest challenges can be time management – how do you decide on what is priority and keep to deadlines? Last-minute requests can often compete with long-term plans.
Effective prioritisation helps you get things done on deadline and avoids wasting time on things that don’t matter. Stephen Covey famously identified four categories to manage your time more effectively:
- Important tasks that contribute towards your personal and professional goals – make sure you schedule time for these, so they don’t fall off your radar.
- Urgent ones demand immediate attention and often relate to someone else’s goals. Beware of this category, it is easy to mistake a task’s urgency for importance. Try and say no to distractions that keep you from the other focus areas.
- Important and urgent include crises and pressing problems that need to be addressed immediately. These could be unforeseen emergencies or things you left to the last minute. Deal with these or delegate them immediately.
- Distractions – these might trick you in to feeling productive, but spend as little time on these as possible.
2. Documents that save time and look great
According to the International Data Corporation, organisations lose up to $20 000 (R260 000) per employee due to time wasted dealing with document challenges. Utilising the latest document techniques and tools can save hours of time every week with better ways to store, analyse and communicate information.
- Lay out your document clear and concisely so that it’s easy to read by the intended audience.
- Use headings and sections to break up the document into clear areas that indicate separate thoughts or ideas.
- To ensure visual consistency, it’s advisable to use a template – a preset format filled with example content. The template has default fonts, colour palettes and styles which assist with the look and feel of the document.
3. How to work distraction free
We’re more connected than ever before. With our devices, we’re always available and always on, and easily distracted by phone calls and social media notifications. The secret to staying productive is eliminating these unneeded distractions.
- Start by disabling notifications you don’t need on all your devices as these create hard to ignore audio and visual distractions.
- If the internet is distracting you, either switch off access or limit access to certain sites in certain time frames. With World Cup Football just underway, sports channels will be a big distraction in most offices.
- If you’re in a noisy or busy office, wear headphones to drown out audio distractions and to show others you don’t want to be interrupted.
- The best tools to help you stay focused at work are those that help eliminate distractions – figure out what distracts you from being productive and remove it from your desk wherever possible.
* ENTER OUR IOL/Eiffel Corp competition and stand a chance to win 3 months access to online microlearning platform Grovo. Answer the following question and mail your answer to [email protected]:
How long is an average Grovo learning video?
Competition Rules:
The IOL/Eiffel Corp Grovo competition will run for five weeks until July 6. Two winners will be picked per week.
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The winners names may be published on our social media pages.
Employees of Independent Media, the sponsors & their agents, or any company associated with the competition & their immediate families are not eligible to enter. • Prizes are not transferable or redeemable for cash. • The judge’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. • Receipt of entries will not be acknowledged. • The entrant accepts that entry to the competition does not constitute a contract or any form of legal commitment between the entrant and the IOL.