Eric Morgan is CEO of AtTask. AtTask is a cloud-based enterprise work management solution, meaning it provides a single, central place to manage and control the chaos of an entire company's or organization's work. The goal of AtTask is to improve visibility and productivity by eliminating wasted time dealing with fragmented, siloed tools and processes.
JD: Let's start by talking about the organization, productivity, and efficiency. How important is organization to a team or business' ability to be productive and efficient?
Eric Morgan: Productivity is about doing the right things with the right quality in the right timeframe that deliver the right business outcome. It's about eliminating wasted efforts, timing delays in projects, and unnecessary busywork (efficiency gains) and working on the right tasks, providing necessary approvals when needed, engaging in productive collaboration to deliver on better outcomes (effectiveness gains).
JD: In developing AtTask, did you do any research to better understand what people or teams actually need to do in order to be more efficient, more organized, more productive, and ultimately get their tasks done? What have you learned?
EM: Enterprise teams have fragmented systems and tools and are stuck in email hell, which results in silos of information, with information about a task or project scattered across the organization, making it impossible to find.
Enterprise work is also surprisingly disconnected from the strategic direction of the company, the department, and the team.
We also found inconsistent processes for common work elements, for example, in work requests where people might use email, IM, meetings, office visits, phone calls, and sticky notes.
Another common problem is managers, executives, and team members have no visibility into what other people were working on.
JD: Can you share with us a few tips or tricks for increasing productivity? I'd like these to be personal to you.
EM: As an executive, here are ways that I increase my productivity, and how I increase the productivity of my organization.
- Know when to say "no" and say it.
- Don't use email to manage work.
- Over-communicate, even if it feels redundant and overdone.
- Start everyday thinking about work, not just doing it.
- Use AtTask because with a glance, I know what people are working and if it is aligned to our strategic vision.
Source: pcmag.com
Productivity Tips From Experts
