Five Practical Ways to Boost Productivity at Work

It’s a rare luxury these days to leave work behind at 5 p.m. with no loose ends. Yet many of us find ourselves stuck dealing with repetitive tasks, searching for the same links or templates over and over, or attending disorganized meetings that eat into our precious after-hours time. Jeff Su, a popular productivity content creator, has shared a helpful set of strategies to tackle these issues head-on. This post distills Jeff’s advice into five concrete tips, rewritten here with fresh headings: Borrow & Adapt, Create Reusable Frameworks, Streamline with Automated Processes, Keep Shared Resources Connected, and Prepare With Pre-Reads. By making small but deliberate changes, you can cut down on busywork, free up mental bandwidth for creative tasks, and reclaim more personal time outside the office.

1. Borrow & Adapt

In his video, Jeff Su emphasizes that often the best way to kickstart a piece of work—whether it’s a slide deck or a budget tracker—is to draw on existing high-quality examples. Instead of starting from scratch, look for the best materials around you, give credit, and adapt them to your current need.

Why Borrow & Adapt?

Reinventing the wheel repeatedly is a productivity trap. If a coworker or friend has already perfected a certain structure or style, borrowing that template saves you from reinventing everything. This doesn’t mean you literally copy entire documents line by line. You adapt it, adding or removing elements to fit your project.

Practical Examples

1. Presentations:
   Suppose your department’s marketing expert created a superbly designed slide deck for a recent webinar. You love the layout, color palette, and transitions. There’s no harm in taking specific slides—like the timeline page or summary table—and incorporating them into your new deck. This can be done in PowerPoint or Google Slides simply by selecting them and choosing “copy selected slides.” If you do remove the original text or speaker notes, remember to mention you got the structure from your colleague if asked.

2. Emails:
   If your role requires you to send monthly or quarterly announcements (e.g., an “end-of-month highlights” email), it’s wise to keep a reference email from someone else in your team who does a similar update effectively. Store it in a personal “templates” folder in your email. Next time, replace the relevant details while retaining the format and sign-off style.

3. Spreadsheets:
   Some teams create particularly clean, color-coded spreadsheets with built-in formulas. Download a copy into your own drive or local folder. Next time you start a new project, open that sheet for a quick reference or partial duplication.

Overcoming the Fear of “Stealing”

Jeff Su points out that it’s not unethical if you’re “stealing” from shared, internal documents to produce something within the same organization. The key is to handle it professionally:

• Acknowledge the original if a colleague wonders how your deck looks suspiciously polished.

• Improve or modify so it’s not a verbatim copy. Typically, you’re only reusing a base structure.

Key takeaway: Borrowing & adapting is about working smarter. You’re not stifling creativity; you’re bypassing basic grunt work so you can focus on higher-level decisions, analysis, or design elements that truly matter.

2. Create Reusable Frameworks

Jeff highlights that certain recurring tasks—like monthly status emails or a quarterly budget review—can be drastically simplified by establishing an initial framework. Once you’ve built that framework, you just “fill in the blanks” each time.

The Power of Frameworks

A “framework” is essentially a template that structures your input. If you do something regularly, it’s wise to do the setup once and reap the time savings many times over.

Concrete Scenarios

1. Budget Spreadsheets:
   Let’s say every quarter you distribute a new tab for each budget cycle. Instead of building a tab from scratch each time, invest five minutes to finalize a “quarterly budget template” tab with the columns, formulas, and color coding you always need. Each new quarter, right-click → duplicate. Done.

2. Progress Reports:
   If you write weekly progress reports or daily stand-up summaries, create a standard doc layout with headings like “Highlights,” “Challenges,” “Next Steps,” and “Needs.” This skeleton ensures you never forget important sections and helps your colleagues read them consistently.

3. Team Emails:
   For recurring updates—like “weekly content roundup” or “monthly metrics review”—save an email draft with placeholders. Each time you need to shoot out that message, you open the draft, replace placeholders with new stats, and send. This might turn a 20-minute write-up into a 5-minute copy-edit job.

Why This Matters

Repetition is great for building muscle memory, but not for draining mental energy on tasks that don’t require creativity each cycle. By predefining a format, you reduce guesswork. Colleagues, especially new hires, benefit from recognizable structures. They learn what to expect, and you spend less time re-explaining the approach.

Key takeaway: Building a framework or template is a small one-time investment. The payoff arrives every time that recurring task reappears on your to-do list, freeing you to finalize the update quickly and move on to more pressing matters.

3. Streamline with Automated Processes

A hallmark of Jeff’s approach is automation—using built-in spreadsheet formulas, linking features, or software connections to handle low-level data tasks, so you can focus on real analysis or decision-making.

Automation in Action

• Summation and Validation: Suppose you maintain a large budget workbook, distributed among multiple owners. If each person inputs their future spending, you can enable formulas (like SUMIF, COUNTIF) to auto-calculate totals. In addition, data validation ensures that if someone tries to type “abc” into a cell that requires a number, they get an error.

• Conditional Formatting: If someone’s forecast overshoots their budget, highlight that cell in red. This is an instant visual that helps them notice they need to adjust—rather than forcing you to track them down.

• Linked Data: In Google Sheets, a single click can embed a dynamic chart or table in Google Slides. Should the underlying data change—maybe from 50,000 to 70,000—the next time you open the slides, you’ll see an “Update” button. One click updates the entire chart. You avoid re-pasting values, reformatting graphs, or possibly forgetting to reflect the new numbers in your presentation.

Efficiency Gains

When your day job relies on multiple steps—e.g., receiving data, populating a table, exporting it to a slide, emailing the slide to a manager—each manual step is an opportunity for error or for you to lose time. Automating small parts can lead to:

• Fewer repeated manual tasks

• Fewer short messages like, “Where’s the updated version? That chart looks outdated.”

• Quicker iteration: If your team decides to tweak the budget last minute, you can reflect it instantly in your deck.

Key takeaway

Don’t be intimidated by the word “automation.” Even basic formulas or simple link features qualify. Start with small steps—like setting up a single SUMIF formula in a widely used tab. Each small automation frees your cognitive load for more pressing or creative efforts, like planning next quarter’s initiatives or analyzing the trends that the sheet is revealing.

4. Keep Shared Resources Connected

Jeff underscores a principle from Tiago Forte: “Organize information by where you will use it, not by where you found it.” The biggest friction at work often comes from searching for references or re-sharing documents. By embedding links in the documents where they’re actually needed, you remove these daily frustrations.

How to Link Smartly

1. Front-page references: If you manage a key spreadsheet for your project, add an “Overview” or “Start Here” tab. Inside it, place direct links to any presentation deck or related doc.

2. Cross-link: The main deck for a given project should link to the final doc, which in turn links back to the data sheets. This ensures new arrivals or your boss can open one file and, by following links, gain the entire project context.

3. Bookmarks: Tools like Google Docs allow you to create a bookmark for a specific heading. Copy that link if you need to share “Section B” or “Detailed Steps” with someone. They arrive precisely where needed, not forced to scroll.

Real-Life Impact

• Less rummaging: You or a new colleague no longer hunts for “Where’s the slide deck we were referencing last month?” because it’s hyperlinked at the top of your doc.

• Team synergy: Everyone is consistently “in the loop” without excessive chat messages or repeated share requests.

• Onboarding: If you leave or shift roles, your replacement quickly finds all relevant references from the doc’s built-in links, rather than emailing you repeatedly for pointers.

Key takeaway: Before finalizing a doc or a deck, do a “link check”: Are all references included in the doc where they’ll be used? Eliminating the “weak link” means no scattered resources, saving everyone’s time.

5. Prepare With Pre-Reads

Meetings can eat up huge chunks of the workday, especially if participants join with no idea what the agenda is or what data to review. Jeff Su’s approach is to prevent those aimless sessions by providing a short pre-read. If you didn’t get a pre-read, he suggests politely asking for it before the meeting.

Why Pre-Reads Matter

• Meetings become concise: If participants have read the background, the call or face-to-face session focuses on clarifications, decisions, or brainstorming.

• No second meeting: Without adequate context, you risk spending half an hour going through a deck or doc on the spot, then realizing you need more time or another meeting to finalize. That’s double the overhead.

• Attendee accountability: When people expect to see a summary or doc link prior, they can come prepared with suggestions or data.

How to Do It

• 1–2 sentences of background: “In today’s marketing strategy meeting, we aim to finalize the Q4 budget allocations. Here’s the link to the updated plan.”

• Explain objective: “We need to confirm these amounts for each region before next Monday.”

• Attach or link: “If you need a deeper dive, check the attached doc or spreadsheet (with relevant sections bookmarked).”

• If you’re the invitee: If your calendar invite says “Weekly check-in” with no details, message the host: “Could we see the outline or objective so we can arrive fully prepared?”

Key takeaway

Pre-reads aren’t about burying colleagues in pages of text. A short, clear briefing can make or break the productivity of a meeting. Once everyone is on the same page, the actual meeting time can revolve around decisions, not reading.

Bringing Everything Together

Borrow & Adapt, Create Reusable Frameworks, Streamline with Automated Processes, Keep Shared Resources Connected, and Prepare With Pre-Reads—these five strategies from Jeff Su’s productivity insights can transform a chaotic routine into a more predictable, less stressful workflow. Let’s recap how:

1. Borrow & Adapt: No more blank-page worries. Start from proven examples in slides, docs, or emails. Enhance them slightly and move on.

2. Create Reusable Frameworks: For tasks that occur regularly (weekly or monthly updates, repeated project proposals), build a base structure once and reuse it.

3. Streamline with Automated Processes: Use spreadsheet formulas, conditional formatting, or linking features so data updates reflect automatically in your slides or other doc references.

4. Keep Shared Resources Connected: A single doc or deck can lead to all relevant attachments and references. No one scrambles for missing links.

5. Prepare With Pre-Reads: Meetings pivot from “reading documents out loud” to actual dialogue. When you share or receive a pre-read, the group arrives informed and can proceed to problem-solving.

Time Freed, Stress Reduced
These changes might feel modest at first—like setting up a small formula or linking a doc—but they accumulate to save hours each week. More importantly, they remove friction for you and your coworkers. Everyone invests less time in re-explaining old processes or searching for the right data. That synergy, in turn, can lead to a more harmonious team environment.

Picking a Starting Point
If adopting all five seems too much, choose one to focus on right now. For instance:

• If your biggest problem is that you’re always building the same doc or sending the same email from scratch, prioritize creating a “reusable framework.”

• If your biggest frustration is your jam-packed meetings, push for pre-reads and see how quickly you reduce wasted conference calls.

• If you’re re-checking spreadsheets manually for every small change, set up a simple automation or formula first, then build from there.

The Ongoing Mindset
According to Jeff Su’s broader productivity philosophy, these tips are not about micromanaging every detail. Instead, they help you focus on genuinely value-added tasks—the analysis, strategy, and creative thinking that push your role forward. Over time, these small enhancements create a work environment where tasks flow smoothly, leaving you enough mental space to be thorough without feeling overburdened.

Long-Term Benefits

• Better morale: Because you’re not using prime time for grunt work, you’re less drained and can end the day with leftover energy for personal pursuits.

• Team cohesion: Your colleagues appreciate well-linked references, and they’ll likely reciprocate.

• Scalability: If you ever get promoted, shift to a new department, or take on more responsibilities, your personal systems are robust enough to handle the transition.

Final Thought
Productivity shouldn’t be about hustling into late nights. These five tips from Jeff Su emphasize clever reusability, mindful linking, and minimal friction—leaving room for more meaningful contributions during work hours, and thus more rest and personal time after hours. That balance is the real heart of productivity: doing less repetitive busywork so you can spend your energy on high-level problem solving, innovation, or simply finishing early enough to enjoy life outside the office.

So pick one tip—maybe the “Borrow & Adapt” approach if you’re designing a slide deck next week or “Prepare With Pre-Reads” if you have frequent, directionless meetings. Try it out for a few cycles. If it works for you, incorporate the other four. In synergy, these five strategies form a powerful system that can revamp how you and your team handle day-to-day tasks, ensuring more satisfying work—and a more balanced life.