When the end of the workday approaches, many people who doesn’t need to work overtime may get very excited and intend to rush out of the office once getting off work. The high spirits can keep them energetic on the one hand, but make it hard to focus on current tasks on the other, like the only thing in their minds is the upcoming free time. But in the fast-paced modern society, is it really okay to waste the last 30 minutes of every workday?
You’ve probably been there before: it’s still not the end of the day, you’ve fulfilled the job duty and bum around waiting for the time of liberty. In this process, you may also find a fact that the idle time passes much more slowly than the substantial time. So why not enrich the empty waiting with some meaningful activities?
Here’s what you can do in 30 minutes:
- Review and Record You Workday
People’s memory is not always reliable. You may remember what you’ve done yesterday, or the day before yesterday, but in a long-term work, the memory of a few days is obviously not enough. So it’s very important to review the whole day’s work, and take them down in your notebook or computer.
In a modern paperless office, it may be better to record the status and progress of your work in an Excel spreadsheet. Thus you can edit it anytime and record the complicated information in a more intelligentized way. Moreover, with some useful Excel tips and functions, you can significantly simplify the data processing.
- Make Your Schedule for the Next Day
The prospect is always come along with retrospect. You may already get something to do tomorrow, and there must be an order of priority for different tasks. If you can make a schedule to specify what to do first, and what to do next for tomorrow, you won’t be panic or forget something important then.
Even when tomorrow comes, there are some newly assigned tasks for you to achieve, the only thing you need to do is checking your schedule, and adding these new items to proper places.
- Tidy up Your Desk
At the end of a workday, your desk must be fully piled up with all kinds of files and office supplies. If you just leave it aside and get off duty rapidly, next day you come to the office will see a messy environment at the first sight, which can simply worsen your mood and lower your efficiency.
A productive office should enable you to find what you want in the most reasonable position immediately. So don’t be lazy, spending 5 minutes every day to keep your desk clean and tidy, it will eventually save more of your time on working.
- Check Your Mail
If your job involves e-mail communication, it’s a very good habit to check your mail box before getting off duty. Especially when you are talking with someone in a different time zone, once you miss a single mail, the whole communication will be badly delayed.
So, don’t let a slight oversight lower your efficiency. Make it part of your routine to check the mailbox. It may only take you several minutes every day, but keep you away from avoidable delay in business.
- 5-Minutes Safety Check
Whether it’s for privacy security or power security, make sure that you’ve turned off the computer and other appliances before leaving work.
And if you are the last one in the office, don’t forget to turn off all the lights, air conditions, windows and doors as well. You won’t like to become the reason why your company waste tons of electricity or lose important properties.
