Efficiency improvement

Professionals fight an ongoing battle in order to get better and more work done in less time. Here, you'll find tools, etc. to help you work more effectively. Read about time management, optimizing processes and LEAN.

TIME MANAGEMENT

Create more time for the important work

TOOL | A week consists of 168 hours. A part of it is spend by sleeping, some is used on working, relaxing and being with family and friends. Unfortunately there is also way too much time being spent on unimportant assignments. Assignments you do not need to do and which could be delegated to others or changed.

Work sheet: How to prioritize

TOOL | When you are capable of prioritizing your work assignments, you will experience less stress and more energy to solve the assignments. To be efficient is about prioritizing!

How to fight the Peter-principle

TOOL | In 1969 Dr. Laurence J. Peter concluded in his book “The Peter Principle: Why things Always Go Wrong” that employees in a hierarchy-build organization are promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer capable of doing their job properly. And there they will stay.

How to efficiently plan your time

VÆRKTØJ | Too many projects gets stranded or ends up exceeding deadlines. How do you escape this vicious spiral? Here are four steps to plan your time efficiently.

Time log

TEMPLATE | Do you find it hard to have enough time? Is keeping appointments and your own plans a problem? And don't you know what's wrong? Try registering how you use your time for a short period of time.

4 paradoxical reasons why you do everything in the last minute

TOOL | Do you sometimes feel powerless, too, when, once again, you procrastinate on that 'one' important assignment, you know you have to do? Then you are certainly not alone.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD)

TOOL | Have you lost your broad view of things, do you skip between assignments, and never feel that there's enough time? Are too many assignments falling through the cracks at the same time? This was the situation that David Allen attempted to do something about 20 years ago, when he created the Getting Things Done method.
OPTIMIZING PROCESSES

If the boss sends fewer mails, the coworkers will follow

THEME | The amount of e-mail that a boss receives keep growing, and the time needed to sort, read and answer grows accordingly. Processing emails becomes a bigger and bigger part of your everyday life.

How efficient are you and your employees?

Time, and preferably a little more of it than the 24 hours that fills the day, is something we all wish for now and then. Some more than others. If you want more time on your hands, you need to read this. We talk about how you and your employees can learn to prioritize your work better to free valuable time.

Improving meeting efficiency

TEMPLATE | Download Word document with the following templates: Rationalization Scheme, template meeting agenda, meeting rules and routines.

Efficiency (1/4)

VIDEO | Do you want to become more efficient? In these four videos René C. Larsen shows us how to become more effeicient. You can work on your personale efficiency, the way you prioritize, your company's meeting culture or use some simple tools to make your daily life more structured and thus more efficient.

To do or not to do

TOOL | Many Leaders use to do lists for prioritizing their work tasks and limited time. But these lists are a waste of time, if they aren't made and applied the right way. In the following you find 11 guidelines on how to make an efficient to do list.

Business Process mapping

TOOL | There are several advantages to gain from using business process mapping. One of the most important is that the method can create a view of your different processes and thereby for instance reduce waste and expenses or streamline workflows.

Turn your company into an anthill and become more efficient

TOOL | It can be difficult for leaders to find the right balance between time spend on meetings and time spend on completing tasks. But researchers from Wayne State University believes that the behavior of ants gives us an important lesson on how to do it best.

Decision fatigue: Why you make bad decisions when you are tired

TOOL | Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister’s research show that there's a limit to the number of good decisions we are able to make during a day. The more decisions, small or large, we have to make, the worse they become. And at the end of the day all of us will typically decide on an infinite amount of things. Which drain our willpower.

Here's what almost everybody gets wrong about the 10.000-hour rule

TOOL | How deliberate practice, top-to-bottom thinking, feedback loops and flight of ideas are connected to success. And the explanation of why I'll never excel at French.

Solving tasks too early can be just as bad as solving them too late

TOOL | Even though your schoolteacher and your mother always said the opposite, there are actually advantages in waiting for the last minute to do your school assignment, the annual accounts or your next presentation.

Circular economy: How business can help reach climate goals

Circular economy includes a products entire life cycle to give it the smallest influence on the environment. Preferably a negative influence. While the production process must factor in environmental concerns, another of the core point of circular economy is that it must also be financially viable for companies.

Eliminate paralyzing rules (and get more done at the same time)

Do you, too, feel that you’re wasting a lot of time on work assignments that basically don’t help you solve your core assignment? That measuring, KPI’s, rules, procedures and structures don’t necessarily make you more productive and, perhaps, even make you less productive? Then you’re not the only one with this feeling. Research show that companies’ ability to be more productive are decreasing.
LEAN

Open plan offices – heaven or hell?

THEME | Open plan offices cost companies billions. This is the claim by a new Swedish study. Noisy offices makes people tired and demotivated and costs companies over two billion a year. We focus on the positive and negative sides by open floor plans, and gives you some tips on how to handle the large open offices best.

Strength-based Lean

THEME | Lean-thinking means to do more with less. Lean production is based on a constant effort to eliminate or reduce loss or waste in a production process. It is not just about the waste of resources, production-time or waste of time are equally important components of Lean production.

LEAN thinking

TOOL | The main idea behind Lean, which was developed at the Toyota factories of Japan in the 1960’s, is that you only produce what your customers are willing to pay for. Everything else in your organization is considered as waste and must therefore be eliminated or minimized.

Strength based LEAN (1/3)

VIDEO | In these three videos business psychologist Henrik Kongsbak shares a thorough walkthrough of strength based LEAN. Among other things an introduction to the research behind, why it works and how you do it.

Rise in productivity keeps jobs in Denmark

CASE | Grundfos was awarded a productivity award in 2012 for creating a 23 % improvement in productivity in two years. Here, you find inspiration to adapt the lean principles, combine automation and manual labor, change leadership focus and involve everybody.