Get Ahead At work
Elsewhere on the site we have covered how to work more efficiently, work smarter, save time, conserve mental energy and improve your work. These are hugely beneficial, but they do create a new problem, one that busy, dogged, ineffective employees never encounter – what do you do with the extra time, now that you have mastered your workload?
It is a question of character, which every serious employee discovers at some point.
‘Now I can complete my work and keep the bosses happy in 20 or 30 hours a week, what do I do with the remaining time?’
The better you become at your job, the more gaps in your diary.
Do you…
Ask the boss for more work? Find an online training course? Do some project work? Chat mindlessly & distract others? Tidy up your workspace? Rearrange furniture? Declutter? Start your own business? Polish your CV…? Or just browse the internet for HOURS at a time.?
At various times in my own career in offices I tried all of these. The truth is that those who never get ahead of their workload are forever kept busy and are more-or less happy.
Unfortunately those types who become expert at their jobs & find it a bit too easy might start wasting time through lack of work, lack of motivation & lack of imagination, and these are the workers who can become truly unhappy.
You see it in middle-managers who have stopped aiming for promotion and spend a lot of time loafing, who have all the time in the world to stop and chat about whatever you want – the government, the news, internal politics of ‘this place’. You see it in junior graduates who just play pranks and silly games all the time. Some colleagues moan constantly and butt heads with others, also in this quagmire, to some extent.
As humans we can’t be contented without purpose to our days. So much emptiness in the calendar leads to an internal emptiness.
“If I have finished my work & there’s nothing urgent– and I get paid the same regardless – and I can’t go home… what am I MEANT to do? Course I’ll take it easy…”
What makes it worse for these lost souls is that they have talent, but they either lack the self-awareness to recognise the opportunity or lack the self-discipline to execute on it. When you have cracked how to do your job brilliantly and your boss is happy with your output it is YOUR responsibility to find a way to be dynamic & proactive that inspires you when your position cannot.
Many many positions in the corporate world have no obvious route to promotion, without that carrot it is surprisingly easy to become stunted, and to slide into slacking. If your workload cannot occupy you, and if you cannot find it in yourself to choose something else to start working hard on then you might wind up in the ranks of the perpetually dispirited.
Start by being brilliant at your job.
Before looking at anything else, make sure that it is clear to you, your colleagues & superiors that you are an excellent employee. There is no point being brilliant if nobody knows about it. If there is a bonus linked to performance then make sure that you are a shoo-in for that. If you have spare time but you are not nailed on for 100% performance-related bonus then you need to use that spare time getting better at your job – and advertising your excellence – before anything else.
Ask your boss what you need to do to be considered outstanding – what extra work you might need to take on to make this happen, what behaviours you might need to adopt. Your first responsibility is to your employer who is, after all, paying you to be at work for 40 hours, so you need to be dutiful & ethical there. Being demonstrably & obviously brilliant also puts you in pole position for a promotion if an opportunity were unexpectedly to open up.
Once your reputation is secure you can book time in your diary to do other things. Start by creating a portfolio of your accomplishments – like a CV but with graphs, charts or emails of your victories, a summary of the problem and the outcome.
Keep a list of these and add to it each time you receive some acclaim from the bosses (or any time you deserve it, even if you don’t get it!).
- Identified a problem – Found missing/erroneous master data and corrected it
- Won a contract, or got great feedback from a customer
- Got a tap on the shoulder when a colleague was out of the office – had to cover their work & do something important
- Reduced waste by 25% vs previous quarter.
- Helped out in another department using expertise picked up in a previous role.
- Smoothed-out a crisis at a customer that was caused by one of our employees/subcontractors.
- Created a new Excel sheet that takes 10 minutes to update each week instead of an hour – saving us 50 minutes per week.…
The list is potentially endless. Each day when you set your when to-do list for the following day (Which we cover HERE) make a note of what was done well.
Write a 2-sentence summary when you get a free half-hour & include the supporting data where appropriate. A graph, chart, table or email might sum this up. Analyse your KPIs & trumpet them here.
When it comes to pay reviews the knowledge will be at your fingertips & you can refresh your bosses’ memories with all the good work you have been doing that otherwise wouldn’t get heralded
More than this, though, you’ll be re-presenting your work to yourself & you will come to perceive yourself in a new light – as a problem solver – you’ll respect yourself more & you’ll welcome disruptive events as a fun challenges; good for the dossier, where you solve problems on the fly, extend your reach, skillset, and knowledge.
Imagine retelling this latest crisis, in a future networking or interview context. Another anecdote where you employed your talent, positive attitude, dynamism, and versatility.
Think of this dossier as the supporting documents you’d have on-hand during a job interview for the competency based questions… ever cut expenditure? Led a team to success? Overcome resistance in the workplace…? When you have supporting information on the tip of your tongue it adds a great deal of credibility and professionalism to your answers, especially when you have memorised the numbers involved – “reduced shortages by 79% Year on Year…”. If you can weave a compelling story around it, all the better.
Re-read these documents as you compile them. After 6 months you’ll not only be a more productive, more dynamic, self-motivated employee, you’ll feel like one as well, and carry yourself like one. You’ll be in pole position for promotion, you’ll have powerful arguments backing you for pay negotiations, for job applications elsewhere, your CV will be in great shape if a job opportunity crosses your desk, you’ll have an arsenal of answers at the ready if you attend an interview, or if you find yourself talking to somebody you’d like to impress at a networking event.
This keeps your career on the agenda throughout your working life, not just when you hear redundancy rumours.
When you immerse yourself in the daily work entirely and focus single-mindedly on the daily grind it is all too easy to forget the career. You might find yourself treading water for months or even years at a time with no real progress to show for it. Reflecting on your wins weekly, and how they feed into your longer-term goals, helps you evaluate & steer you career strategically. You should be able to rattle off some of your career highlights whenever questioned, as well as what you are working on right now & what you envisage next.
Businesses love problem-solvers but will certainly take them for granted if the opportunity is there – like the office admin assistant who has been with the business for years, has a disproportionate degree of wisdom & experience, often consulted by those seniors, who never asks for a pay-rise. Don’t be afraid to know your worth & talk about your valuable contributions & solutions, as well as any occasions you were able to do more than your pay-grade demands.
Solve Bigger Problems WOOPing
If you are performing to an excellent standard in your day job set aside half an hour a week to record & reflect on your recent achievements & goals,
If you still have time to spare, start to look for inefficiencies in your month & how to trim them.
This could be reports you run that take too long, or clunky processes that bug you – then find ways to make them better.
You might not find this easy; it might require some personal growth., a better grasp of the software that you use, or a new software. It might mean requesting time with 2 or 3 colleagues to review how the data can be collated more effortlessly.
If you end up saving colleagues more time than you save yourself it should still feature in your folder of highlights & achievements.
One framework you might want to use for these mini projects is WOOP – Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. There are dozens of popular strategies for overcoming work-based problems, but I find WOOP to be systematic enough & flexible enough to be useful across most settings and it never itself becomes bloated. It doesn’t inadvertently add more admin. to the process, which can be the downfall of some over-prescriptive management methodologies – you don’t want to spend more time tracking where you are in the process than you do solving the problem.
There is a strong scientific basis for WOOP, rooted in the psychology of visualization & mental contrasting. it was devised by psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen at New York University & published in her book Rethinking Positive Thinking in 2014. It was devised more for personal ambitions, goals, dreams than for work-based projects, but it is highly functional here too.
If you envisage in your mind both the wish fulfilled and the obstacles that bar your progress you are able to anticipate and disarm the pitfalls before they catch you out. Forewarned is forearmed. It has been tested in academic settings, and used extensively in schools, gyms, and workplaces. It is NOT merely ‘wishing’, ‘manifesting’ or ‘positive thinking’ your goal. It is far more like the visualization techniques popular in sports science for decades, employed by Michael Phelps and Lindsey Vonn among many others. An example might be…
Wish:
Streamline the process of getting invoices authorised each month.
Outcome
The most irritating, stressful and time-consuming component of the monthly workload is now slick and takes a few hours, rather than a few days.
Obstacle(s)
Colleagues uncooperative, (a)
Internal systems that track invoices are clunky and time consuming (b)
Holidays & absences cause delays (c)
Plan
Colleagues uncooperative, (a) Secure buy-in of colleagues & upper management in advance – present business case for resolving invoices quickly through enhanced co-operation – summarise on slideshow (a)
Systems tracking invoices are clunky and time consuming (b) familiarise myself with software to clean the existing sheets, PDFs & standalone files into one document that can be emailed out & serve as the agenda for a meeting. (b)
Holidays & absences cause delays (c) Set up & organize a monthly Microsoft Teams call for all participants, with established deputies (c)
It doesn’t take long. When you lay out what you want, how it benefits you, why you are not doing it already, and how you can start doing it in the future you’ll be empowered & motivated to proceed. If it does not work perfectly review & tweak as you go until happy.
Not mere fantasizing about the work getting done, not throwing in the towel as soon as we hit a bump in the road. This is a hands-on alternative. Breaking up the challenge and switching mentally between problem solver and devil’s advocate and back, you’ll have mentally mapped out what the likely problems are with your plan – and how to overcome them – before starting
When the outcome is achieved (perhaps not exactly as you first envisaged, it may be far better) you can add it to your career list of problems solved & set a new WOOP.
You’ll find that the more WOOPs you complete the more time you save, so you can tackle bigger & more ambitious WOOPs in turn. This is because each WOOP has the potential to make your workload a little quicker & slicker, your self confidence & authority a little greater. You’ll spend less time ensnared by problems and more time proactively coming up with long-term solutions to problems. It is a compound effect.
Witness Personal Growth
You’ll often find that you need to develop skills to resolve your problems quicker & easier – after all, if you were already the finished article and the skills were already embedded then it wouldn’t be a growth challenge. You might have to look outside your own small circle and enlist others to tackle bigger problems. Sometimes your initiative, leadership, and organizational skills will be tested. Don’t underestimate the huge savings you can make though.
Mastering new software makes a powerful impact –
i. You become an authority, an elevated position from which you can help others.
ii. You are demonstrating a commitment to continuous growth, which is impressive in itself and looks great on a CV or LinkedIn profile.
iii. The big one – you save so much time automating tasks, that you complete everything thrown at you. You remain composed, smooth & groomed from work that would see anyone else frazzled & snowed under.
Over and above these, you are also helping to protect your long-term brain health through lifelong learning, which promotes neuroplasticity. You are also protecting your long-term employability; nothing makes you futureproof like being an advanced user in the next big software. It could even lead to a new career path if you become truly adept at it.
Crystal reports, SAP, SQL, Excel, Python, there are countless tools you might leverage to help in your career, and you can become proficient after as little as 20-30 hours of committed practice. YouTube, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Udacity, Freecodecamp… there are still more platforms popping up that provide free & paid training. Speak to your bosses about paying for training for you, but if they won’t then do it anyway; it is a price worth paying. Start with free training like Excel tutorials on YouTube & build from there. You’ll immediately spot ways that will free up your time every week.
To Summarise
This does not mean spend a lot of office time not working. Avoid falling in among the lost souls at any cost.
Don’t forget that a 2% improvement in your productivity per day adds up to 1 free week per year to work on something else.
2% is just 10 minutes of your 8-hour day, or 50 minutes per 40 hour week.
The formula is simple;
1. Become excellent at your job.
2. Free up time to record & review your own excellence
3. Dedicate your remaining time to solving knotty business problems that concern everyone.
You inevitably get better, faster, and more productive by honing under-used skills & by actively adding to your skillset. Just don’t – whatever you do – free up an afternoon a week through these approaches & use it to talk about football.
Tim Ferriss wrote a bestseller called The 4-Hour Workweek – in which he reduced his own working hours to 4 per week. Could you cut your own by even a quarter by working smarter & avoiding distractions? Before you answer… A survey of 5265 workers released in Jan 2023 claimed that the average office-based worker wastes 4 HOURS per day. Other surveys make similarly eyewatering claims for the amount of non-work that is done in offices. The findings could be challenged, sure, but it’s what you think about your own time that matters.
Now if you thought that you could spare 48 minutes per day at the moment – be honest – switching between tasks, getting distracted, running into a colleague in the corridor & stopping 5 minutes, visiting non work-related websites, booking your car in at the garage, on hold at the doctor’s surgery… 48 minutes per day is 10% of your entire year when you extrapolate it out – You could be saving a 4-hour block every week. Think harder & be honest; mobile phone checks, Twitter, filing, chatting, texting… tea breaks, toilet breaks, calls from your spouse, could it even be an hour of your day? You could be dedicating 4 hours a week to self-improvement, annual goals, performance targets, eye-catching projects & CV highlights. You could be compiling a dossier of your achievements – training yourself for the role you want, not the role you have, committed to life-long learning, establishing your authority, and happier too.
Exponential Growth
A final thought from Darren Tracy – author of The Compound Effect – in a capitalist marketplace your salary more or less matches your output, with few exceptions the market levels this out in the long-haul. So if you earn £50kpa now, improving your output by 10% a year, you could expect your income to increase from £50K to £130K in ten years… or you could be kicking back with the other lost souls. Ditch distraction, cut the slack, dedicate yourself to the path of excellence & make your own rewards.
