Optimize your workflow
If you know me, you know I love productivity hacks, keyboard shortcuts & most definitely optimizing my workflow.
So what is a workflow and why you should optimize it?
Definition
The sequence of processes or steps through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.
Why optimize your workflow?
Once you have a workflow in place you can break them into 2 categories.
- Steps to complete the process.
- Time to complete each step.
Identifying how many steps you need to complete something can be very eye-opening. Realising how long the whole process takes can make you take a step back and think, there’s room for improvement here.
As humans, we fall too easily into habits and just keep doing the same things over and over. Do you consider the cost of these habits?
My goal here is to help you remove waste and save time.
So the big WHY?
Optimizing your workflow saves you time, saved time means you can focus on what really matters.
Let’s look at how we can optimise your workflow.
Stepping right into it
Think to yourself, what is a really important process that you either do daily or on a weekly basis.
What are all the individual steps taken to be completed? How many steps are there and is each step actually needed?
Now, try think if every step is essential, can something be removed or make simpler. You might be surprised that you have been doing something out of habit which isn’t really needed anymore.
When optimizing your workflow ask yourself these 2 questions.
- How can I do this better?
- How can I do this faster?
Let’s explore some ideas below around doing something either better or faster. These ideas may seem small but every small optimization you make over time can compound like a snowball ending up making a huge impact on your productivity. I’ve been doing these tips and tricks for a few years now and it has helped me become more productive, allowing me to handle a lot of pressure than what I was used to.
Keyboard shortcuts
The more I think about time, I realise how important it is and how little we have of it. Our time is so limited, every second counts!
It really bothers me when I see someone trying to copy & paste something without using keyboard shortcuts.
You see this person slowly moving their mouse, shacking it to find the cursor on screen, selecting the word, right-click, look for the word “copy”, find the spot to paste then again right-click, look for the word “paste” and click it.
Isn’t there a better way & faster way?
Of course and it’s keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are my bread and butter to increased productivity.
I recorded a simple example to copy and paste a line of text. See the difference for yourself.
Using my mouse was about 8–10 seconds and using the keyboard shortcut was between 2–3 seconds. That’s a whole of time saved! You can even use keyboard shortcuts to select a whole sentence or world instead of using the mouse which will be every more time saved.
One benefit of keyboard shortcuts people don’t realise is, you can keep your eyes on the screen and your muscle memory using keyboard shortcuts can make you really fast. If you use keyboard shortcuts correctly you can get into a state of flow becoming a productivity master. You goal is to reduce friction to the point of what you think just seems to happen on the screen.
Your life projects and work are a more satisfying when you reduce friction instead of struggling to so something as a simple tasks like copy paste using your mouse.
Review the common tasks you do throughout the day and look for ways to optimize your workflow. This will help remove the unneeded work and stress from your day.
Did you know? The most-used apps have keyboard shortcuts built in to help you be more productive. Google search your most use apps keyboard shortcuts and learn 1 or 2 of them.
Merging passive tasks?
This optimisation is about maximizing your time when you are doing either passive or shallow depth tasks like commuting, cleaning, exercising etc.
Now let’s merge it with some other tasks so that you get a 2 in 1 effect.
Activities you can merge with passive tasks can be listening to something like and Audiobook or Podcast or getting in touch with a friend or making a business deal.
Next time you find yourself doing a passive last like driving, cleaning or going for a walk why not put on your earphones and give someone a call or learn something new with a great book or podcast.
Keep it DRY
In programming, there is a concept called DRY which stands for Do Not Repeat yourself. I like to think of DRY in my normal day to day activities.
An example many people can find helpful is making their Email experience better. If you send a lot of emails to customers or clients many email clients like Gmail have a feature called Templates — I’ve included a link for you to see how to set it up.
Using a template can help you reply to many customers with the same basic responses to questions like “what is your price list”, “how does your service work” or if you making a monthly invoice you can have a template for that.
Another great tool for this is something like TextExpander which allows you type a unique phase and a whole text block will appear. I use this for creating my Unit Tests when programming.
All I type is aaa the text snippet appears.
The goal here is to automate the simple stuff you find yourself always doing. Once you remove the noise of simple and annoying stuff you can then have the ability to focus on what’s the most important.
I encourage you to think what can you can automate in your workflow and with so much cool technology out there, you can definitely figure out looks ways to avoid doing the same thing over and over. In many cases, there is an app or a keyboard shortcut to help you.
I also use Siri Shortcuts to automate a few things on my iPhone and iPad and if you want I can share some of that for you in another post.
Summary
If you got this far in the post, thank you! Hope you found this helpful, here’s a virtual high 5!
How much more productive can you be if you optimize your workflow? Well a lot and it shouldn’t be too hard to get started.
Here’s some tips to remember: Reduce the friction, keep it DRY and find ways to automate simple things.
Anything that slows you down can be considered friction, I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. Copy-paste on a keyboard is much more efficient than right click, look for your mouse and then paste.
Finding automation or any little time saver helps over time.
Keep it simple, experiment, optimise, automate, repeat.
“Reusable shortcuts, programs & automation means reusable time.”
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If you want to learn more please visit my Notion page for more info.
