10 Office Productivity Hacks for 2024

Jan 18, 2024

Looking to boost your productivity at work? Here are 10 tips for how to make that happen!

Start by creating a plan. Consider creating an Eisenhower matrix: a two-by-two square grid. On top of the two upper squares, write “Not urgent” and “Urgent”. On the left side, write “Not important” and “Important”. That will create four squares: Not urgent and Not important, Urgent and Not important, Not urgent and Important, and Urgent and Important. Divide your daily tasks into these four categories. Do the Urgent and Important tasks first; see if you can squeeze the Not urgent but Important tasks into the day, or postpone them to another day; delegate the Urgent and Not important tasks to other days; and get rid of the Not urgent and Not important tasks altogether.

If you are a Zenbook DUO user, you can keep your to-do list displayed somewhere on the screen you use less (if you’re in a desktop or dual-screen mode) to always keep in mind what work is ahead and motivate yourself to get the current task done as soon as possible.

Divide your day into 30-minute blocks to allow for better scheduling. This way, you can better manage your timetable and give yourself mental deadlines for tasks, creating a sense of urgency and boosting your drive to finish tasks or meetings before the 30 minutes run out.

As a Zenbook DUO user, you can always have the schedule displayed on the less-used screen to be able to always keep track of the upcoming blocks.

On top of dividing your day into 30-minute blocks, you can take advantage of the Pomodoro technique. Its basic premise is that for every 25 minutes of work, you should take 5 minutes of break. This way, you get bits of rest between tasks, which can be a big productivity boost. You can track the breaks using a timer on your cellphone, an app or your laptop, or a special website.

Zenbook DUO users can display the timer on one of the screens to help manage your work better while keeping a better track of the time left until the break.

Take advantage of your calendar scheduling function on your phone or laptop and block out times for breaks, meals, and uninterrupted work. Your colleagues can then schedule meetings around the times blocked out in your calendar. This helps ensure that spontaneous, unscheduled meetings don’t distract you from tasks at hand.

Once again, keeping the calendar window open on the less-used Zenbook DUO screen can help better keep track of how much time you have left in the current block and see what’s coming up next.

Make sure that you get enough fresh air and natural light throughout the day. Office workers often complain about the feeling of drowsiness, which can be related to high levels of CO2 in the air. Taking a stroll or opening the window can help battle that. Another natural productivity booster is sunlight. Office jobs are a recent invention, and our brain hasn’t evolved to accommodate for that. A part of our brain called suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is responsible for regulating our biological clock, and that system relies on sunlight. If you don’t get enough sunlight throughout the day, you are risking deregulating your biological clock, affecting your sleeping schedule. This can lead to not getting enough sleep at night — which in turn affects health and productivity. During your break outdoors, you may want to take your mind off work, too, and catch up with friends or family on a quick call or watch a movie.

An OLED display like the ASUS Lumina OLED on both the screens of Zenbook DUO offers great visibility and exceptional color performance in most light conditions, and protect your eyes at the same time by reducing the blue light emissions by as much as 70% compared to traditional LCD screens.

The open floor office plan has a lot of advantages, so it became the go-to design for many modern offices. However, a big downside is noise — especially if you sit close to people whose jobs require a lot of calling and discussion. To stay focused, you can invest in noise-cancelling headphones and listen to music. It would be a good idea to opt for soft sounds, preferably music without lyrics. You can even find playlists online specifically designed for focus and productivity.

If you are in the dual-screen mode or desktop mode, you may want to find some space on the same screen where you’d be displaying the schedule and other useful but not primary windows and apps for your music app of choice to be able to switch songs and regulate the volume without having to resort to your mobile or switching an app window (which can be a distraction and throw you off your rhythm).

Having a workspace designed with ergonomics in mind can also be a productivity booster. Sitting in a wrong position, for instance, can lead to lower back pain or discomfort in other parts of the body, which, aside from obvious health disadvantages, can be distracting. This also goes for headaches, which in office environments can be the result of improper lighting or improper screen angles. To learn more about ergonomics and healthy laptop use, check out this article.

ASUS Zenbook DUO comes with a built-in adjustable kickstand cover that helps you raise the top screen to the optimal height so you can sit straight and see well. You can place the laptop at the right distance and use the wireless Bluetooth keyboard that comes with the laptop to place it closer to you, at a bit of distance from the laptop to ensure proper ergonomics. The Bluetooth keyboard comes with a comfortable touchpad to help you navigate the laptop, but if you so wish, a wireless mouse is also a good option.

Many office workers opt for a multi-screen setup at work. The reason is simple: it allows for more to be viewed while helping users avoid constantly switching between apps, browser tabs, and windows. Having two or more screens available can help in multitasking — especially when projects require assets from multiple sources, you view multiple app windows at once without having to lose focus and this allows you to keep an eye on everything important while still being concentrated on the task at hand. Zenbook DUO comes with two screens straight from the box, so you can take advantage of the dual-screen setup wherever you are — in the office, at home, while commuting, or while taking a break in your favorite café at the corner.

If you’d like to boost productivity and allow yourself to stay focused, you must cut out the distractions. These days, smartphone notifications are a big source of interruption, so this is where you should start minimizing distractions. While using the smartphone can be a necessity at times, you can mute certain kinds of notifications or even put your phone in a focus mode (if it has that function). It also helps to put the phone away completely — but that can be hard or even impossible for some of us. Using some of the apps you have on your smartphone on your computer instead can help — a notification will still be a distraction, but at least you won’t have to take your eyes off your computer to read a message or switch a song.

On your Zenbook DUO, you can do most of the work on your primary display and open apps like messaging or email clients on the other, side by side with other essentials like the calendar.

As AI tools are becoming more and more popular, it could be a good idea to start taking advantage of some of them to speed up work you do or boost your creativity. Some new laptops, including the Zenbook DUO, come with processors that feature dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPU) — dedicated AI processors. This helps not only with generating graphic and text content or enriching creative works, but also simply simplify everyday productivity tasks — e.g. quickly summarize meeting contents or put together a slideshow.

Some new laptops from ASUS, including the new Zenbook DUO, come with Microsoft copilot and designer features that were designed to boost productivity at work.

These days, laptops are the go-to solution for most companies. Portability is one obvious reason for this trend. But some laptops are better suited for office tasks than others. The new Zenbook DUO may just be the best productivity tool on the market right now. It allows you to take advantage of a dual-screen setup wherever you are — not only at your desk. It offers four usage modes — dual-screen mode, laptop mode, desktop mode, and sharing mode — for ultimate flexibility to meet any need at any moment. And it’s a powerful machine, too, so you won’t be limited in what you can do simply because you’re using a laptop. It also features a new CPU with a dedicated NPU for AI processing and comes with Microsoft copilot and designer. To learn more about how the Zenbook DUO helps boost productivity, check out this article or click the button below.