Tips for more productivity during your workday

From hand-written notes to your favourite playlist

Author

Susanne Gmachl

Content marketer

Conny

Without a doubt, Conny is the music freak in our team. Hardly a day goes by without her putting on her headphones and listening to hear Spotify playlists on repeat. When she’s concentrating on getting stuff done, she mostly listens to her “Brain Food” playlist.

Conny’s tips to be more productive:

Conny lives by the motto: “Start your day with easy tasks!” This allows her to tick several items off her to-do list before tackling the rest of her day – and more complex tasks – all motivated.
Conny’s “2-minute rule”: Between more extensive tasks, Conny takes the time to get small stuff done. She checks her e-mails, makes a list of her tasks – basically anything that can be done in less than two minutes.

Conny’s favourite apps:

Paper by FiftyThree: The free app allows you to take digital notes and manage them. Perfect for all those who want to give their notes a special visual touch.
Pocket: The online reader allows you to save articles to read later – for instance, during your bus or train ride home.
1Focus: You’re concentrating on a task when suddenly a message pops up on your screen, telling you that you’ve been tagged in a Facebook post. And there goes your concentration – of course, you have to log onto Facebook to see the post. 1Focus helps you avoid these kinds of distractions, blocking certain websites like Facebook for a defined time.

Susi Holzer

In terms of productivity, Susi is totally old school.

Susi’s No. 1 tip: a quiet location and pen and paper – alternatively, her laptop and a glass of water. That’s when she has the best ideas and works most productively.
Put your mobile phone away! There’s nothing more distracting than a phone display that lights up in the corner of your eye. It’s almost impossible to resist having a look! That’s why it’s a good idea to put your phone in your bag or at least place it face down.
Susi loves music too, albeit – just like Conny – only when she’s working on tasks that don’t require maximum concentration.

Susi Esterbauer

What’s the first thing that Susi does when she enters the agency in the morning? Collect the day’s tasks on a to-do list – in a paper notebook. This helps her keep track of her tasks and allows her to cross off all finished items.

Here are some of Susi’s best tips:

Susi’s No. 1 productivity killer? A messy desk full of cable spaghetti, plates, cups or loose notes.
Structure your day: When you write your to-do list in the morning, loosely plan when you’re going to do a certain task and how long it’s going to take you. Allow enough time for the individual tasks – otherwise things will start to get stressful.
Get up! If you feel your concentration and productivity waning, it helps to walk around the office or nip outside.

Susi’s favourite apps:

Pinterest: Susi loves Pinterest, especially when she’s looking for creative ideas. The perfect platform to find inspiration on all sorts of topics!
Unlike Conny, Susi saves up small tasks for the late afternoon when her concentration starts to slip and bigger tasks get a bit hard going.
Notes: Just like Ines, Susi loves taking notes – from meeting minutes to research keywords and links.

Ines

If you’re late, you pay! What might sound harsh is actually really cool. Why? Because the whole team benefits from it. More precisely: If you’re late for a meeting, you have to feed our unicorn piggy bank. The collected money is used to buy ice cream for the whole team or to go for after-work drinks.

The following tips help Ines to be more productive:

Put your noise-cancelling-headphones on. Close the door. Shut down any unnecessary programmes and enter the “zone” for two hours. During this time, you only do what’s on your list. As a reward, you can look forward to a cup of coffee or a chat with your colleagues.
During internal meetings, Ines cuts right down to the chase, not wasting her time with introductory words or long speeches. And that’s not because she wants to be impolite – if there’s enough time, she loves to chat about the day just as much as anybody.

Her top apps for more productivity:

Wunderlist: … more about it later.
Notes: Whether it’s an idea, a reminder or a task: Ines likes to use notes. Thanks to smartphone synchronisation, she can access her apps from on the go and create new notes.

The punkt & komma team’s favourite app …

… is Wunderlist! There’s no task that’s not listed in Wunderlist for us. The best thing about it? The sound when a task has been marked as done! Conny even uses Wunderlist as a private to-do list for her shopping, everyday tasks or spontaneous ideas.