How do you stay productive/ organized at work?

I work an hourly position, and because all the tools we use are web based (email, asset management data bases, remote administration..ect), I find myself tempted to work for free from home often.

I'm convinced that If I was more productive, I could get more done in less time by being more organized, and automating routine tasks. The goal is to not to work after hours(stop laughing).

What do you do to stay productive and organized?

Here's what I do/ use to stay productive

Evernote - Syncs well with my phone. Central place to paste notes and attachments for various projects

Excel - So I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but office is standard in my organization. Entry level skills with this application. I'm sure if I dedicated some time it could do more for me.

I take photos of everything. Notes, instructions, receipts, serial numbers..ect. I try not to write anything down. I find that
paper tends to be my enemy and source of clutter at my desk.

Google Drive - anything important goes in the drive folder. I do my best to keep organized directories.

Gmail - I wish more organizations would buy into gmail. For a small fee they offer custom domains. I hate supporting outlook

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Comments

webgeek

vaguemedia wrote: »

I find myself tempted to work for free from home often.

NEVER DO THIS!

I stay productive at work by completing my tasks, correctly, the first time. I also study while on the clock since it is encouraged where I work.

vaguemedia

I just don't have enough time. I travel throughout a good portion of my state, and some weeks I'll be away from the office 70 percent of the time. I logged 660 miles last week. Luckily this month will not include so much driving.
If you've got time to study, that's great and I envy your position. We're spread thin most of the time, and there's always something to work on.

dover

I have to agree with webgeek. If you have too much work to accomplish in your 40-50 hour work week management needs to be made aware - either by talking to them or by not performing the weekend work and allowing the incidents/trouble tickets to back up.

With that said, I have frequently been guilty of doing exactly what you are talking about - particularly early in my IT career. You want to be the go to guy and the one everyone relies on to get the organization running when stuff hits the fan. Emergencies are one thing but if you are completing day-to-day activities at night and on the weekends it really seems like there is a disconnect between work-load, individual productivity and management involvement.

After hours work is a fact of life in IT and sometimes I like to work on the weekends. I schedule all of my maintenance windows to occur over the weekend, but I make sure management is aware of the activities and projected time involved through change management notifications - which I implemented just for that reason. I always come to some kind of agreement beforehand for some kind of compensation: k-time, flexible hours etc.

Automation is key too. If you have to do the same task more than three times, figure out a way to script it using your language of choice: PERL, WMI, Powershell, simple batch files - whatever it takes.

Paper is an enemy for me too. I tend to use OneNote (yeah another Microsoft app but it really helps me). I store my notebooks on MS Skydrive so I can access them anywhere. I tend to photo everything as well: racks, wiring closets, anything that could be helpful later.

I had the road warrior job for a long time. Use it to make your mark and show them that you are the guy they want to keep close to the office so that you will be available to react to the important incidents/outages. Once you aren't juggling endless site visits for printer setups and malware removal/reimaging you'll be much better able to make your day more productive.