Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done
Set the framework for a daily dose of peak performance.
Sometimes, you feel like you've been extremely busy yet haven't accomplished anything meaningful. These days, you spend all your time checking emails, attending meetings, replying to colleague inquiries, and performing seemingly unimportant duties that do not lead to progress. So, how can you keep these duties from taking up all your time and energy?
These summaries give five ways to help you avoid wasting your time and mental energy on tedious rituals and pointless decision-making. They set some easy conditions for your day and will show you how to work efficiently. This way, you'll get at least two hours of peak productivity daily.
These summaries will teach you.
How to make the most of a sudden interruption.
Allowing your thoughts to wander can benefit your work, and eating fat can boost productivity.
1. To become awesomely effective, deliberately identify your decision points.
You perform a variety of repetitive jobs throughout the day. Consider how often you've gotten out of bed, dressed, checked your emails, and attended weekly meetings without thinking twice.
In these instances, we frequently turn off and go into automatic mode to complete our everyday tasks. We rarely stop to analyze whether our daily activities make sense. Your regular duties may be wasting a significant amount of time and energy without your knowledge.
Take Doug. As a consultant, he was expected to produce a monthly analytical report. Instead of finishing this crucial duty, Doug tended to his inbox, responding to a dozen emails in a trance-like state. Because sorting through his emails is part of his daily habit, Doug prioritized it over what should have been his first priority.
Like Doug, many of us let habits stand in the way of productivity. So, how do we change? By recognizing our decision points.
Decision points are the moments when an activity is finished or interrupted. At a decision point, you can consciously choose what to do next.
Let us look at an example. Assume a colleague approaches your desk and invites you to lunch with him. As a result, you are interrupted when creating a report. You realize you're at a decision moment. You could either decline his offer and keep working or take a break and get some food.
Deliberately considering your alternatives can make the best decision for you and your productivity. You'll be able to be more efficient with your time as you become more conscious of the gaps between activities and make less impulsive judgments.
2. Managing your mental energy will get you closer to being effective.
It is unusual to have only one task to complete at a time. We must juggle our responsibilities to do them all. Should you sort your emails? Should you prepare for today's meeting? You only have so much mental energy to utilize, so choose wisely.
Unfortunately, juggling might deplete our mental resources by generating mental tiredness. This occurs when we overwork our executive functions, the portions of our brain that aid in management, regulation, and control.
Suppose you turn off email alerts while preparing for an impending meeting. In that case, you avoid the hassle of continuously needing to refocus on the preparation and have enough energy to tackle valuable work.
Making several judgments, even if they appear minor or unusual, can exhaust our mental resources more than we realize. Other activities considered mentally exhausting include networking, switching between different tasks, project planning, and scheduling.
Obviously, avoiding all activities and jobs that may tire your mind is impossible, but being aware of which ones do will allow you to focus your mental energy on the most critical tasks.
Begin by identifying the chores that exhaust you the most, and avoid completing them immediately before you need to provide your best effort. If finishing an essential report is the most critical assignment, don't start your day by replying to emails as usual. Instead, start with the report right away.
3. If you want to be highly productive, you must stop resisting distractions.
We've all felt frustrated when we wanted to get work done but were continuously sidetracked by incoming emails, calls, and notifications. It's difficult to focus, but there's a good reason.
Did you realize our brains are made to be distracted? Consider our primordial forebears. Would they have survived if they hadn't shifted their attention from the fruit they were harvesting to the saber-tooth closing up behind them?
Nope! Our brain has developed to become distracted and refocus when our circumstances change. Distractions are entirely natural. With this in mind, we'll be better able to mitigate their detrimental impact on our work.
Workplaces offer multiple predictable sources of distraction, with computers and smartphones being the worst offenders. Even though we love and appreciate what these technologies can do for us, they can also impair our focus and productivity. That's why turning off their distracting features, including notification sounds and pop-up windows, is an excellent place to begin.
But what about unexpected distractions, such as an ambulance passing by your window? Only some diversions are good. We sometimes only need to let our brains wander to improve our focus.
Doesn't this seem like a paradox? But there is truth in it. According to a 2012 study from the University of California, while dealing with tasks such as creative problem-solving, allowing our minds to stray occasionally improves our effectiveness. So, how do you let your thoughts wander without losing focus?
You can purposefully encourage mind wandering by doing an unrelated and cognitively easy chore, such as cleaning your desk or making lunch, after focusing on a challenging subject for a set amount of time. You can also allow passive mind wandering by allowing yourself to drift off, becoming aware of your distraction, and then returning to the activity. Both ways provide your brain the respite it requires to address problems successfully.
4. A healthy body is a productive one!
We're all aware that exercise is essential for healthy physical health. If that isn't enough to inspire you, consider its benefits on your mental performance.
These effects were discovered in a study where participants were given color words printed in different shades of ink (for example, "yellow" in green). Participants were then asked to say either the color of the word (green) or the written word (yellow) before or after physical exercise. Participants who completed this task following physical exercise provided accurate responses more quickly, demonstrating that physical exercise improves the brain's ability to make decisions and solve issues.
Another study discovered that physical exercise improves your concentration. Participants were instructed to aim at a target on a screen while avoiding distracting stimuli on either side. Participants' ability to focus and disregard distractions improved after they exercised.
As a result, schedule some time to work on your critical projects right after you return from the gym. But what if you don't have time to exercise?
Fortunately, many nutrients can also boost your degree of efficacy. For example, carbs and fats: According to research, ingesting carbohydrates immediately improves your ability to focus.
However, it is short-lived, and other executive functions may deteriorate after only one hour. Fat may be more beneficial than carbohydrates. One study found that some fats are likely to improve many executive functions even three hours after consumption. Dehydrated people will suffer increased fatigue and difficulty concentrating; drinking water is also essential to improve your performance.
What happens inside your body is not the sole thing influencing your productivity. What happens outside of your local environment is also essential! Learn more in the final summary.
5. Adjust the noise, lighting, and items around you to create a highly productive environment.
Are you one of those individuals who requires perfect silence while working? Do you worry that music and background noise may disrupt your concentration? In reality, noise, such as sporadic talking and music, reduces your capacity to perform well at work.
Intermittent speech is words or sentences with gaps in between - essentially, office conversation. Several studies have found that interrupted speech impairs your capacity to stay focused, read, and process content.
If you want to be productive at work, closing the door to your office or reserving a conference room is an intelligent idea to escape the distracting talk.
Furthermore, some types of light enhance your productivity. Blue light and brilliant white light both favorably affect your capacity to focus and can help you battle mental weariness.
Research in the United Kingdom exposed two almost identical workplaces to distinct light sources: white and blue-white. Workplace employees exposed to the bluish-white light reported enhanced concentration and performance.
However, if you cannot increase the lighting in your office, there is one more thing you can control that can make a significant difference: clutter. All those notes, unfiled paperwork, and free samples compete for your attention, reducing your capacity to concentrate on your most vital tasks.
Being unable to move around also reduces your productivity. If you have the opportunity to get up and walk around every now and then, you'll be astonished at how much you can sharpen your attention and return to your work in a more successful mindset than before.
So, once you've finished reading this synopsis, get off your chair and stroll! When you return, you'll be ready to implement your learned strategies, giving yourself two beautiful hours of productive, successful work.
Final Summary
Daily, you can gain at least two hours of incredible productivity by implementing five simple strategies: recognize your decision points, manage your mental energy, quit battling distractions, utilize your mind-body connection, and make your workstation work. In this manner, you will give yourself the psychological and biological circumstances required for peak performance.
Actionable advice: Sort it out!
Step away from your workstation the next time you feel like you're having a mental breakdown and your focus has vanished. Exercise is just what you need. Remember, the gym isn't the only place to workout. Be creative! Simply going for a stroll in the area where your workplace is located or jogging up and down the stairs for a few minutes will make you feel more mentally nimble, focused, and, most importantly, ready to tackle the most essential tasks of the day.