Expert shares top productivity hacks — including Google’s new timesaving features

IT’S easily one of the most irritating parts of office life. But now there’s a new, simple solution we’ve all been crying out for.

MEETINGS — and emails about meetings — are two of the biggest time-wasters facing Aussie workers.

But now, Google has come up with a brilliantly simple fix to help time-poor employees deal with the problem.

Late last month, the company announced two new Google Calendar features that have been designed to help us better manage our work and personal time.

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The first now lets workers set up an “out of office” alert to make meeting management easier by letting workers decline meeting requests for certain time periods in advance, meaning the person requesting the meeting will now automatically know you’re unavailable.

And the second new feature allows workers to set and restrict their working hours for each day separately — so you’ll never have a meeting pencilled in for after you knock off.

Google has added a new ‘out of office’ feature to its Calendar app.

According to productivity expert and Leadership Hacks author Scott Stein, while these changes might seem simple and straightforward, they will likely lead to a huge reduction in wasted time.

“The big battle right now is productivity — how to get more things done in less time,” he said.

“For me, it comes down to three strategies: Being aware of distractions and managing them, focusing on what’s important, and making sure we have meetings that actually work.

“Distractions get in our way, and one of the biggest ones is tech interruptions, with emails and meeting requests coming out of the blue and stopping us from what we’re doing.

“What Google is trying to do is help us hack our activities and make us more productive with these two features.”

Mr Stein said the out of office feature would be particularly helpful as it would help workers “save time by avoiding email back-and-forth”.

“The out of office feature allows us to actually schedule appointments as if we’re out of the office already,” he said.

“If someone requests a meeting during this time, it will automatically be communicated to them that you are unavailable, which saves time for them and for you.

“It means you don’t have to worry when you are on holidays about coming back to all these emails requesting meetings that you’ll need to reply to. It’s about decreasing distractions coming via email.”

Mr Stein said meetings were a big problem plaguing modern offices.

“We lose time in meetings and in trying to find time to meet and schedule them. It’s not just emails,” he said.

“If we’re going to have meetings, we need to hack them because a lot of meetings are a waste of time.”

Productivity expert and Leadership Hacks author Scott Stein says emails and meetings are two of the biggest distractions holding workers back. Picture: Supplied

Mr Stein said workers should always find out beforehand what the purpose of a meeting will actually be.

“There are four main types — report checking, problem solving, decision making or strategy development — and you need to know what kind of meeting it is so you can look up KPIs or market reports or product analyses beforehand to save time.”

He said technology and people were usually the biggest culprits when it came to distractions.

“We have a biological need to keep checking our inbox, but it stops our flow and thought patterns,” he said.

“Don’t keep looking at it. Turn of notifications and minimise your inbox and don’t have it on your screen.

“Another tip is blocking out time to get things done — put a period of time in your calendar so people don’t disturb you, turn your mobile off for a 30-minute window and put it in the drawer … generally if we’ve got time to think uninterrupted, we’re more productive because we’re less distracted.”

Mr Stein said it was also crucial to “hack your inbox” by setting up filters based on category, person or topic to help workers prioritise.

He said the key was to scan emails, delete whatever is irrelevant, sort them into a list of most to least important and then finally respond.

And when it comes to sending your own emails, he recommended including whatever action you want the receiver to take in the subject line or at the very beginning, which will help people easily understand what you need them to do.

He also said it was important to create “visual texture” within emails by putting important information in bullet points, in bold or underlined which automatically draws the eye.

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