How to Make Work Go Faster: Easy Tips for a Good Day

Making work go faster is not about working more. It’s about finding smart ways to do more in the time you have. A good way to do this is to learn new habits and use the right tools. The biggest change you can make? Stop doing many things at once. When you do just one thing at a time, you can go faster and make fewer mistakes.

Why Is It So Hard to Get Work Done?

Do you ever feel tired at the end of the day, but your to-do list is still long? A lot of people feel that way. Today's jobs are full of things that take our minds off our work. A new email, a message, or a friend asking a quick question can stop you from what you were doing.

Every time you stop, it takes your brain a long time to get back to your work. Stopping and starting all day long makes work feel hard. We think we need to push harder, but the real problem is how we are working.

Why Being Stopped All the Time Is Bad

Our "always ready" way of working is bad for our ability to do good work. When we try to answer an email and be in a video call at the same time, we are not really doing two things. Our brain is just jumping back and forth. It does a bad job at both.

This jumping around makes our brain tired and causes mistakes. The problem is that many of our offices and computer tools are made to stop us.

This hurts our workday more than you think. Studies show that in many jobs, people only really work for about 60% of their day. That means almost three hours every day are lost because of things that stop us or because we jump between jobs.

The real problem is doing too many things at once. It might feel like you are doing a lot, but it can cut your real work by as much as 40%. When we try to hold too many balls, we end up dropping them.

Go from "Busy" to "Getting Things Done"

To make work go faster, you have to be honest about what is slowing you down. It is not because you are not trying hard. It is the habits that make you feel like you are working hard.

Here are some things we need to fix:

• Too Many Beeps: The sounds and pop-ups from email and chat apps grab our eyes and ears.
• Jumping Around: Going from a report to a number sheet to an email without finishing one thing.
• Meetings That Are Not Needed: Those calls that could have been a quick message or a shared paper.

Once you see these time-wasters in your own day, you can start making better habits. The goal is to make a place where you can think hard about one thing without being stopped. It is a simple change, but it is the key to getting more work done without getting tired. To learn more, see our guide on how to increase your productivity.

This guide will help you find and get rid of these hidden problems with easy steps that make your workday better and more focused.

Find and Fix Your Daily Time Wasters

It is often the small jobs we do not see that take up the most time. These "time wasters" seem like a normal part of work, but they add up and steal hours from your week. The first step in how to improve workplace efficiency is to see these little problems and find easy, smart ways to get rid of them.

The best way to start is to pick one job you do over and over. It could be making a project ticket, getting a weekly report, or even answering the same question from a customer. Do not just think about it. Write down every click, every button you push, and every step.

You might be surprised by what you find. Most of us type the same words, click the same buttons, and look for the same files every time we do a job we know. This is a great chance to make things faster.

Fix Jobs You Do Over and Over with Easy Tricks

Once you have your list of steps, look for the parts that you do again and again. For example, if you are always making tickets in a tool like Jira, do you type the same story or rules every time? That is what you should fix.

Instead of writing it all new, make a plan. Most project tools have this, but even a simple file on your computer can work. When you need a new ticket, you just copy, paste, and add the new parts. It seems small, but this little change can make a 10-minute job take only two minutes.

Another sneaky time-waster is typing. A person can type about 40 words in a minute, but we can talk much faster—about 150 words in a minute.

You can get a lot of time back just by changing how you put words on the screen. Talking is almost four times faster than typing for most people. This makes it a great tool for getting work done faster.

Think about how you could use that speed. Instead of typing out long meeting notes, use a talk-to-text app on your phone or computer. You can say all the important things in a few minutes, and the words show up as text, ready to be shared. This is a huge help for writing long emails or thinking of ideas.

We all have these habits that seem small but add up. Here are some common time-wasters and the simple changes that can make a big difference.

These are not big, hard changes. They are small, smart changes that take away the parts of your day that are not helpful. This gives you back time to work on what is really important.

A Smarter Way to Handle Your Email

Email is one of the biggest work-killers in any office. The sound of new messages breaks our thinking and pulls us away from hard work. Many people keep their email open all day, but this is a very slow way to work.

A better way is to check email in groups. Instead of letting it stop you all day, pick three times to work on it: once in the morning, once around lunch, and once before you finish your day.

When you open your email, make choices fast. For every email, pick one of these three things to do right away. This stops messages from piling up and making you feel stressed.

You only need three choices:

• Do It: If it takes less than two minutes, answer it or do the job now.
• Give It: If someone else should do it, send it to them right away.
• Save It: If you need it later or it will take more time, move it to a special folder or add it to your to-do list for later.

This helps you get your email box empty fast so you can go back to your real work. By grouping jobs like email together, you do not get as tired from switching your brain all the time.

Use Simple Tools That Work for You

New tools should make your life easier, not give you more work. The secret to making work go faster is not always getting big, costly software that takes weeks to learn. Often, it is the simple tools that fix one small, annoying problem that help the most.

Think of it like this: a good tool should feel like a helper, not another job. It should be so easy to use that you do not even notice it. It just works, making a hard part of your day go away.

Work Faster Without Typing

Imagine a doctor who has to write long notes about each person they see. After a busy day, they could spend an hour or more just typing everything. This is a perfect place for a simple tool to help.

A talk-to-text tool lets the doctor just say their notes out loud. Since we can talk much faster than we can type, a long job becomes very short. What took 30 minutes to type can now take just five minutes of talking. The tool writes it all down, saving hours every week.

This is not just for doctors. Anyone who writes a lot—like a person who writes ads or a manager who tells people what is happening—can use their voice to make a first copy. It is a small change that can give you back a big part of your day.

A simple change from typing to talking can make you up to four times faster at writing. It is one of the easiest ways to get more done in less time, giving you time for more important work.

Find Your Own Time-Saving Tools

The best tools for you will fix the things that slow you down each day. The trick is to see what small things make you go slow and then find an easy fix.

Here are a few common problems and the kinds of tools that solve them:

• Forgetting what you copied: Do you type the same email address or sentence over and over? A "clipboard manager" tool saves everything you copy. You can find it and paste it again without having to re-type it.
• Getting distracted by websites: When it is time to focus, it is easy to look at fun websites. A "website blocker" is a simple app you can turn on to stop you from going to those sites for a little while.
• Typing the same long words: Do you type the same long name or sentence many times? A "text expander" tool is a big help. You can make a short code, like !myname, and the tool will change it to your full name right away.

Finding the right tools is very important for people who work away from an office. For more ideas, you can check out our guide on the best tools for remote workers.

The Power of Smart Helpers

Lately, tools are getting even smarter. Smart helpers called AI are now here to help with our daily work. It might sound hard, but using them can be very easy.

AI has become a big help for getting work done. Now, 75% of office workers are using AI at their jobs. The people who use these smart tools are 90% more likely to say they get a lot done. It is easy to see why: AI is great at doing the boring jobs that use up our energy.

Many people say it has made them work faster (79%), cut down on boring work (75%), and even helped them do better work (73%).

Think of it like having a helper built into your computer. An AI tool can write down everything said in a meeting and make a to-do list from it. No one has to take notes. The key is to find these simple, smart helpers that fit into your day and take work off your plate.

Build Better Team Habits Together

Working smarter is something a team does together, not just one person. One person working fast is good, but real speed happens when the whole team learns good habits together. It is about making small, shared ways of doing things that make the whole workplace faster and calmer.

A big part of this is how we talk to each other. When news can be shared without stopping everyone all the time, people get the quiet time they need for hard, good work.

Talk Without Having a Meeting

One of the best habits a team can build is to stop having so many meetings. Before you set up a 30-minute call to tell everyone what is going on, try putting it in a team chat or paper instead. This small change is a big deal.

This way respects everyone's thinking time. It means one person's news does not have to stop what five other people are doing. The news is shared, but the work keeps going.

Of course, some meetings are needed. When you do have to meet, make it good. Do not just show up and see what happens. Great teams make every meeting have a point.

• Have a Clear Plan: Everyone should know why they are there and what needs to be decided.
• End on Time: If it is a 30-minute meeting, end it in 30 minutes. A clear stop time keeps everyone on track.
• Pick Someone to Write Notes: One person should write down what was decided and what needs to be done.

These simple rules can change meetings from being time-wasters to being great for making choices.

Help Each Other Get Unstuck Quickly

Another great habit is the quick daily check-in. I do not mean a long report. This is a fast, 15-minute meeting where each person shares what they are working on and—most important—if they are stuck.

This tiny meeting can save a lot of time. If one person is having a hard time with a problem, someone else on the team might have already solved it. A quick question can get an answer in minutes, saving someone from losing hours trying to figure it out alone.

This easy habit makes a team feel like they are helping each other. It turns one person's problems into a chance for the team to help and stops small problems from becoming big ones.

Knowing how groups grow is important for this kind of teamwork. To learn more, you can read about the 5 stages of team development in our detailed article. This can help leaders show their teams how to work at their best.

Make Things Easy to Find

Think about how much time your team wastes just looking for things. A file, a link, a password—these small searches stop everyone from thinking. A great team habit is to have one place for all important information.

This could be a shared paper, a company page, or a special chat room. When a new person starts or someone needs to know something, they know where to look first. This easy system stops the "quick questions" and lets people find what they need without stopping others.

By making information easy to find for yourself, you give everyone on your team the gift of time without being stopped.

See Your Progress Without Someone Watching You

How do you know if these new habits are working? Trying to get faster without seeing if it is working is like driving with your eyes closed. You need a way to see how you are doing that feels good, not like someone is always watching you.

The real trick is to stop counting hours and start looking at what you get done. Seeing your progress is not about showing you are busy—it is about showing your smarter work habits are working.

Look at What You Finish, Not Hours

A great way to see real progress is to measure how long a whole job takes. For a writing team, you could see how long it takes to go from a small idea to a finished story. If that time gets shorter over a few weeks, you know you are getting faster. It is that simple.

This works for almost any team. Instead of asking, "Did we work hard?" the question becomes, "Did we get the right things done, faster?"

It is a small change in how you think, but it changes everything. When teams see they are getting better, they feel proud and want to keep finding better ways to work. In fact, Gallup data shows that workers who are told how they are doing are 3.6 times more likely to want to do great work.

Try Your Own Small Test

You do not need a boss or a big plan to see how fast you are working. A simple, private test can tell you a lot about what is really slowing you down. For just one week, keep a "distraction list."

Here is how easy it is:

• Keep a small notebook or a file open on your computer.
• Every time you are pulled away from your work, quickly write down what stopped you.
• Do not think too much. A quick note like "Slack message," "new email," or "got coffee" is perfect.

At the end of the week, look at your list. This is not for your boss; it is just for you. You will probably see a pattern. It will show you your top two or three things that stop you. This information is very strong because it tells you exactly what to fix.

Keeping track of what stops you is like being your own coach. It helps you see the things you cannot see that break your focus so you can take back control of your time.

Measuring What Matters for Different Teams

Looking at what gets finished will be different for each team. The key is to find a way to measure finished, good work. Watching the clock almost never works, but celebrating faster, better results always does.

To help you start, here are some ideas for how different teams can change from tracking time to tracking real progress.

Measuring What Matters for Different Teams

Examples of how to measure efficiency by looking at results instead of just tracking hours worked.

When you choose the right things to measure, you make a good circle. Teams see that their hard work helps, which makes them want to keep getting better. It helps everyone understand how to improve workplace efficiency by connecting the small things they do every day to bigger, better results.

Frequently Asked Questions

When you start new habits to work faster, you might have some questions. Let's look at some common ones so you can start feeling sure.

Where Is the Best Place to Start?

Do not try to change everything at once—that will just make you tired. The smartest thing to do is to pick one small, annoying thing that you deal with every single day and just fix that.

Think about it: Is there a report you have to make from scratch every week? Make a plan for it. Do you type the same answer to a question many times a day? Write the answer and save it.

When you fix that one little problem, you feel good right away. That small win makes you want to fix the next small thing, and then the next. That is how real, good change happens—one smart fix at a time.

How Can I Get My Teammates to Try These Ideas?

Showing a good example works much better than telling people what to do. People are more likely to try a new way of working when they see how it makes their own lives easier.

For example, instead of saying "we need fewer meetings," try something else. The next time you have news, send a clear, easy-to-read email with all the important information. When your team sees they just got 30 minutes of their day back, they will notice.

When your friends at work see that a new way helps them—by saving time or making things less annoying—they will want to know more. Showing them it works is always better than just talking about it.

Another great idea is to ask to try it for a little while. Say it is a small test: "Hey team, what if we tried this new check-in for just one week?" This takes away the worry of a big change. If it works, the team will want to keep doing it.

What if My Job Has Strict Rules?

Working in a job with many rules, like in a hospital or for a lawyer, does not mean you cannot work faster. In fact, it makes it even more important. The key is to be smart about the tools you pick, and always think about being safe and following the rules.

When you look for new software, find tools made for your kind of work. For example, many talk-to-text tools are built to be safe for private information, with special locks to keep things secret.

You can also get better at your own work habits that do not use private information. Getting better at making your to-do list, setting up your day, or having team meetings are all good things to do. There are always smart, safe ways to work better, no matter how many rules there are.

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