My Productive Work Habits
Over the last decade or so, I’ve been finessing ways to be more productive and efficient in my career, and since I work in the public sector, I get the most success from adopting digital tools that speed up the process (not everyone has). I have also picked up some tricks that have helped me demonstrate my effectiveness in my career, and here are some of the ways I’ve done that:
- create a DONE list
This is primarily for annual performance reviews, but is great for an ego boost as needed. I’ve worked for four different cities/counties, and each has handled reviews differently, but my current job tries to do performance reviews at the end of the year. This is a great overview to help you see how you’re spending your time, and then be able to quickly scan it and have projects you’ve completed to highlight to your manager. This is specifically one of the reasons I pay for a subscription to Todoist — they keep a record of all my completed tasks so I can easily find what I’ve done. (If I categorize my work tasks in the same work project in Todoist, it’s even easier to check my completed tasks and see what I’ve done.) Typically I’ll compile my Done List during my weekly review to note down what I did that week, and enjoy watching it grow month to month.
- keep a central to-do list
