Career Advice
Boost Your Efficiency With Chunking
Glassdoor Team
Glassdoor Team | Author & Career Expert at Glassdoor | 28 Nov 2016
There are many strategies that can be employed in order to make yourself more efficient and productive. One such strategy, which you are probably a lot more familiar with than you realise, is known as ‘chunking’.
It’s recommended by many professionals such as Tony Robbins, and it involves chunking specific sets of tasks together so that you can stay mentally focused as you work through them. If, as some people try and work, you flit between tasks that require different approaches or are of a different nature, you are constantly playing mental catch up with yourself as you tackle each new piece of work.
This also applies to distractions; if your phone keeps going off or you constantly check your emails, then you are breaking your focus and stream of productivity, and have to reapply this as you turn your attention back to the important tasks.
Chunking helps you to structure your day better, get through your tasks quicker and complete them to a much higher standard. It’s more difficult to stay productive without this approach as you have to physically and mentally spend time realigning your focus to the new task at hand.
Chunking, as well as being a great efficiency tool, is also an effective memory technique, and one that you’ve been using since you were a child. It’s taught to children at an early age to help them with their revision or for texts of a challenging length.
You will also still use the chunking technique more often now than you may think. When reciting your phone number, it’s unlikely that you read it out as one long string of numbers, but instead have broken it down into memorable chunks. When going to the supermarket, have you split out your list using factors such as “meats” and “fruits”? If so, this is chunking.
It helps to reduce the cognitive load that you have to handle, and so is a vital skill for the world of business. It can be extremely useful when we have multiple goals, targets, and projects, or if we have to manage multiple teams or clients.
How you choose to chunk is entirely up to you, but it always starts with analysing your tasks at hand. Notice the similarities between them and group them together. After you have done this you can decide how to break it up; maybe by working on a different project each day of the week.
Keep distractions to an absolute minimum, and this includes checking e-mails! If a client has an urgent request, chances are they will call you. Like many experts, such as Tim Ferris, recommend, check your e-mails only twice a day; although we like to feel productive when answering e-mails, if they aren’t urgent then they are breaking our productivity streak for our more important work.
Chunking is an incredibly simple yet effective technique that can boost your productivity, bring a new level of efficiency to your projects, and help you to work to the best of your ability. If you have multiple clients or projects on board, it can seem a daunting task to sort through them, and chunking acts as a great way to bring structure and calm to our busy working schedule.
Glassdoor Team
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