With trying to keep up with work life, family life, and still finding time for ourselves, we all wish we could maximize our productivity on a daily basis. We have gathered 5 tips on how to maximize your day. While they may not exactly be secret, they will be helpful in maximizing your day’s potential.
5 Secrets To A More Productive day
1. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
While most of us know getting regular sleep, meals, drinking lots of water, and exercise is good for us we may not realize that it does help our productivity. There have been many studies done on ways to increase productivity and many of them point to us taking better care of ourselves.
Fast Facts:
By drinking enough water every day you can increase your at work and home productivity by 14%
It has been shown that food has a direct impact on our cognitive functioning. Not eating can be more detrimental than taking the 20 minutes to stop and get something to eat.
There is a common misconception when it comes to sleep. Thinking you might sacrifice one hour of sleep a night to work on a project is helpful when in reality it impacts your productivity for the entire next day. Even small amounts of sleep deprivation have been proven detrimental to overall health, mood, cognitive capacity, productivity, and most importantly our general happiness.
2. TAKE A BREAK
When it’s crunch time and deadlines are looming it is really easy to sit in front of a computer and lose all track of time. Studies have shown that this isn’t the most productive use of your time. Having a small diversion or distraction once an hour has been shown to increase productivity. It gives our brains a chance refresh and come back to the task at hand with new focus and energy.
3. MAKE AND SET REASONABLE GOALS AND WRITE THEM DOWN
The phrase, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” exists for a reason. Whether you are building an empire or running a marketing department realizing big changes, projects, and goals are not obtained overnight is critical. It is important to have a sense of
accomplishment at the end of the day. Setting your daily goals too high is only setting yourself up for failure. Start with attainable daily goals and narrow it down to 3-5 tasks that can be done in a single day. Once you’ve narrowed it down, make a list. It helps to have a list every day that you can refer back to because as the day progresses, things come up and you might be pulled in different directions and by keeping a list you can stay on task. Plus, there is a certain amount of satisfaction in crossing something off a list.
4. STACK THE DECK
Whether you are a morning person or a night person you are reasonably aware of when you are able to work to your best potential. If you are a morning person schedule tasks that need a lot of detail and attention early in the day. Save the easy monotonous tasks for the evening when your brain isn’t as sharp. Employ the reverse if you are a night person. Either way, just schedule tasks for when you are at your best.
5. USE TECHNOLOGY
Technology is all around us and many of us do not use it to the potential we should. By integrating your calendars with your email and having a calendar for both work and personal you can be on top of meetings and events. There are multiple list and project management apps available for both iPhone and Andriod. Check out Wunderlist, Trello, and Asana to name a few. They all have personal list functions as well as team and project management functions. Make your life easy by letting technology help.
While many of these tips might not seem like secret information, they do have vital information that can only help your productivity. Sometimes we all get so distracted in what we are doing that we lose sight of whether or not it is the most productive use of our time.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-study-shows-drinking-water-can-increase-14-percent-hunt
https://hbr.org/2014/10/what-you-eat-affects-your-productivity
https://hbr.org/2011/03/sleep-is-more-important-than-f/