There’s only so much time in a day, and sometimes it can feel near-impossible to find the motivation — and the perseverance — to tick off all the things you want to do.

You’re not alone: the average knowledge worker spends 47% of their workday in a state of semi-distraction.

Too often, public servants have to contend with archaic, bureaucratic structures and systems, which can stall productivity. There’s no one quick fix that will help you achieve laser-like focus, but smart tools and tricks can keep you to task.

In this resource, we outline six tried-and-tested ways to achieve better results without working longer hours — in addition to tips from public servants themselves.

This productivity toolkit will teach you how to:

  • Form good habits
  • Eliminate distractions
  • Harness the power of email
  • Learn to say no
  • Manage your energy, not your time
  • Experiment with what works for you

"Employees are happiest and most productive when they have a boss who has a clear vision of the work unit's mandate, is clear with her expectations‎ for the team, respects employees' work-life balance, includes employees in decision-making that impacts the work unit, gives credit to employees and their performance and ideas when reporting to their senior management, and has an open-door policy for work or personal life discussions.

You are spending about 8-10 hours a day at work — it's nice to look forward to going instead of cynically starting a countdown years before your retirement date!" — Anonymous

1. Form good habits

Smart habits can mean the difference between success and failure. But oftentimes we make a change to our routines, and when results don’t manifest quickly, slide back into old routines.

As author James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits, habits should be four things: obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Apolitical CEO Robyn Scott wrote about one particularly transformative habit in a viral blog post, The 30-second habit with a lifelong impact.

After every meeting, lecture or meaningful discussion, take 30 seconds — no more, no less — to write down key learnings. The habit can help you better interpret information, understand others’ needs and prioritise what’s important. Over time, it changes how you pay attention to other people, which helps improve your decision-making.

Other examples of transformative habits include:

  • Morning reading
  • Meditation
  • Exercise and stretching
  • Writing a gratitude and learning journal
  • Taking well-timed breaks

"Encouraging and supporting staff to get out of the 'rut' is what I have found to be most effective in improving productivity. Time needs to be set aside to break the routine of the very processes and bureaucracy upon which state services depend.

Staff need to own this change in routine and to build it into the increasingly fragile work-life balance. By encouraging staff to teach or attend courses or participate in research, they can create opportunities to seek out peers, develop networks, appreciate the complexity of public service organisations and in turn, cultivate a desire to adopt tools to become more productive." — Faisal Shaheen, lecturer at Ryerson University's department of politics and public administration

2. Harness the power of email

Whether you like it or not, email is a crucial part of public servants’ work — which makes learning how to write effective messages all the more important. Dan Oshinsky, head of email consultancy Inbox Collective, has six tips for getting smarter about email:

1️⃣ Decide if email is the best way to communicate your message

If you need to pass along a lot of information via links or attachments, or want to send a quick, personal note, email is fine. In most other cases, an in-person chat or phone call is more effective.

2️⃣ Make your subject line clear

Avoid vague language and trite niceties. Write specific subject lines, like “Can you finish this research by the end of the day?” or “Great job on that brief!”

3️⃣ If appropriate, skip the greetings and get straight to the point

Use the pre-header space — the snippet of text you see in most mailboxes after the subject line of an email — carefully, as your recipient will be able to read the first 5-10 words of your email before opening it.

4️⃣ Personal emails work best

Don’t send mass messages, which will almost always garner fewer responses. People are more likely to write back if they feel appreciated.

5️⃣ Use bullets or numbered lists

Organise your information clearly. People are liable to skip through big blocks of text.

6️⃣ Make your ask as clear as possible

The recipient should know what action you want them to take and that you’ll hold them accountable.

“Break work down into tasks, then allocate them more broadly than the immediate team — it can move a project forward faster than sequential and strictly team-based delivery. It’s just an agile principle of course, but it works in all sorts of work projects, not just IT." ** — Kathryn Cole, Director of People Strategy at the Fair Work Ombudsman**

3. Eliminate distractions

Email may be a key component of public servants’ work, but it’s also one of their biggest distractions.  

The average office worker receives 126 messages a day, devotes 28% of their work week to emails and opens a new message within six seconds of receiving it. We never know when an important email might arrive, so we should keep checking until it does, right?

Wrong. Reaching “inbox zero” is the type of task that gives us a sense of completion, but doesn’t actually achieve much. In fact, any disruption in your work flow can take up to 15 minutes to recover from.

"Turn off email notifications. The constant interruption of arriving mail breaks concentration, and each time that happens, your mind takes time to revert to the work you were doing prior to the notification. This allows you to get into 'flow' mode and to maintain it for much longer.

Most of my colleagues have thousands of emails in their inbox. How can you be sure that you have responded to every important email if it is buried below the bottom of your screen?

Only retain emails in the inbox that are awaiting action — file all the rest in suitable folders, and delete the rest. Doing this allows you to prioritise daily tasks much better, and will reduce stress.” – David Noble, lecturer and course coordinator at Southern Cross University

Change begins with self-awareness. Track how many times you check your email a day — or iMessage, or Slack, or Twitter — and aim to cut that number significantly. The best way to do that is to “batch” your email by choosing to check it only at set times. (Most people choose three daily batching periods.)

You can also avoid distractions by:

  • Putting your phone on do not disturb or airplane mode
  • Using a tool to block social media
  • Closing unnecessary tabs before starting to work
  • Putting on a playlist that can help you concentrate — we recommend Spotify's Deep Focus — or using earplugs
  • Cleaning your desk: people with neat offices are more productive and less frustrated, according to one study. A clean desk can help you stick with a task more than one and a half times longer, the researchers found

"It's amazing how much time we can lose when we 'quickly check' our phones throughout the day. When I really need to focus, I silence notifications on my phone and put the ringer on vibrate. I also set the phone to grey-scale, which makes it less engaging to look at if I do pick it up. Finally, I place it out of sight on a table behind me," — Signe Hanson, senior policy analyst at Manitoba Justice

4. Learn to say no

People are reciprocal beings: we overcommit our time and energy by saying yes to too many of the tasks that come our way. Living in a “yes” culture affects women most: they often feel pressure to be obliging, and guilty when they aren’t.

Research shows that:

  • People expect women to agree to requests more frequently than men
  • People are more likely to expect women to volunteer for administrative jobs at work
  • If a woman declines small requests at work, she’s likely to get fewer recommendations for promotions and worse performance evaluations. She will also be considered less likeable by her colleagues

One New York University professor created the “The No Club” to solve this problem. The club gives women a place to give and get advice about which opportunities are worth their time, and to be held accountable for acting on it.

5. Manage your energy, not your time

"Automate any task you do repeatedly, even if you can't code. Start by making a checklist of the steps you need to perform for the task. Add hyperlinks to each step that open the files you will need with a single click — spreadsheets you need to record data in, address lists of people who should receive that step’s email, boilerplate text for notices you need to send, and so on. It will save time and reduce errors."  — David S. Reed, founder at the Centre for Public Administrators

No one can work at peak performance all day. The key to optimising your routine is to manage your energy, instead of your time.

Find the time that you function best — for most people, that’s the morning — and concentrate on work that requires deep thinking, like writing briefs or speeches, strategy writing, governance board planning or other high-value tasks.

When you’re tired and hitting that 2-3 pm slump is when you should focus on more mindless tasks, like responding to emails and scheduling or setting agendas for meetings.

An effective way to go about doing this is to label your week’s tasks. Put them in different buckets, ranging from easy to hard, based on how much time they take, their intellectual difficulty and the uncertainty involved. Limit yourself to three “hard” tasks a day.

6. Experiment with what works for you

“I use a few different productivity tools to assist with my productivity, including Trello for project management. You can allocate specific tasks and items to team members, including members of the public, to assign work, delegate information and receive input on the task.

I oversee the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative here at the City of Windsor and have a team dedicated to it with a board for every action item. In each of the boards, I invite the relevant people and assign the work to them. By using this, I am able to see what people are completing and have an easy way to follow up” — Jamie Kramer, human resources assistant at The Corporation of the City of Windsor

Public sector workflows can be rigid — but as governments modernise old-fashioned systems, the rules are changing. If the traditional approach isn’t working for you, try another, rather than hammering away fruitlessly. Experiment with different systems until you find the one that works for you.

  • Take regular breaks: use the Pomodoro Technique, which divides your workday into 25-minute chunks separated by five-minute breaks. The time management system reminds you to take regular breaks, which can boost your productivity
  • Write out a to-do list every morning
  • Change your scenery: get away from your desk and try working at a coffee shop or a common area for a few hours
  • If your computer screen is hurting your eyes, try working on paper or by using voice notes
  • Shorten meetings by coming to each one with an agenda. Try to keep agendas to less than three items. (See our Public Servants’ Guide to Better Meetings for more tips on how to hold effective meetings)
  • Drink lots of water! 🚰

“We don't appear to value investing the time and energy required to plan things properly and do them properly the first time. Even when we have the time, we dive in and do the minimum, then dive into the next thing, never really pausing to make sure it's been done well.

We never realise just how much productivity we've wasted by re-working failed efforts and starting from scratch something we — or someone in a related team — has already done.”  — Chris Malcher, Business Architect, Australian Department of Social Services

Additional reading

(Picture credit: Death to the Stock Photo)