Despite a huge to-do list, little sleep in the last days, meetings without end and distractions at every corner, you should still be able to work attentively and productively.
Luckily, there are ways you can make your office life easier.
Defeat fatigue
Everyone knows that feeling when you have to give in to fatigue after lunch (or even before) and everything only goes slowly. It is well known that drinking liters of caffeine is not particularly healthy either.
So what else can you do now to counteract fatigue?
1. Drink!
As simple as it may sound, proper hydration has a very positive effect on the body. So drink plenty of water while you work so as not to limit your performance. The brain needs to be well hydrated and, of course, too little water intake can cause headaches.
2. Walk, get up, move around
Take a short walk after your lunch break, change your workplace, walk the smokers in your office outside every now and then, the coffee drinkers to the vending machine/ or just get up and stretch for a minute.
In this way, you get your circulation going a little and can sort out your thoughts a little during the short break.
3. The right food for lunch
Make sure that you eat something as easy to digest as possible during your lunch break, otherwise your concentration will suffer in the afternoon due to the resulting tiredness.
High-fat and high-carbohydrate food can, for example, make you tired due to the long digestive work or rapid drop in blood sugar. Light food is therefore preferable to high-fat food at lunchtime.
Work more productively
4. Avoid multitasking
One task at a time! Multitasking is a myth and usually even has negative effects. The workflow in which one is most productive must first be built up. This requires calmness and concentration. Building up such a focus mode is difficult. However, breaking it off through distraction is easy.
So when you switch back and forth from reading emails to writing an article, you keep getting pulled out of the flow. It may feel like you’re working on a lot of things at once and making faster progress, but the truth is you’re getting caught up and wasting a lot of time.
5. Day plan through
You can’t be 100% effective without good planning. Why? If you have a time/task plan, you can start working right away and stick to it throughout your working hours. Good planning in advance helps you block out time and protect yourself from distractions. You can think of a plan as a personal coach that helps you stay focused and guides you through the workday.
You can use a variety of planning techniques. There is no right or wrong way. The important thing is to find a system for you and the right tools for it. Planning can start with a simple to-do list and be made more elaborate but effective with time planning and priority planning including time blocks.
Eliminate distractions
6. Order in the workplace
A tidy workplace should not only make a good impression visually. It is amazing what a positive effect on productivity a beautiful workplace has.
The most important tools for working should always be at hand but not in the way.
And you want to make sure, above all, that you feel comfortable at your workstation. Plants, a comfortable chair and an ergonomic table go a long way. Try it out!
7. Block time
One task after the other – as nice as that sounds, it’s hard to really implement. So what could you do to make it easier for you to actually follow through? By setting time blocks, you can assign a time period to certain tasks.
By always reserving some time, so to speak, and then pursuing only this one task in it, this method is very suitable for people who jump from one task to the next or easily lose track of time.
