Things to Avoid Before Starting Your Day So It Doesn’t Hurt Your Productivity
Every morning you wake up filled with energy and enthusiasm.
It’s time to head to your workstation and start performing your daily duties. And when doing so, you have to stay motivated and undistracted so it does not impact your productivity in any particular way.
But even though your enthusiasm is peaking, you still often find yourself failing to meet the goals you set out for yourself to achieve for the day. It makes you wonder why is it happening, doesn’t it?
Well the answer is simple, you’re not letting your mind filter the non-essential from the essentials.
This usually couples up with intaking caffeine at the wrong time of the day because as humans, we are finely attuned to grabbing that hot cup of coffee right from the start of the morning, aren’t we? It’s because we haven’t researched that early morning is the time when stress hormone (cortisol) is peaking and instead of letting it get enough room to settle down, we just amp up its effect by taking in more caffeine. Therefore, scientists commonly advise people to consume coffee during the mid-day.
While, having coffee during the early hours of the day is one of the habits you need to change alongside a few others if you want to stay productive throughout your average working day.
What are these habits? Let’s delve in and read all about it.
Habit # 1: Don’t Check Emails Right Away
We all have a very bad habit of going through our emails, the first thing in the morning. And even though it’s one of the most important things to do because it has all the responses from our previous working activities, it’s best to initially give yourself some me time and prepare for it rather than going head-on. Yes, it’s where the work happens, and yes it’s very important to reply back to them. But, what if you start your day with something different like covering up an activity to give yourself a positive boost. Start with something that inspires you, ignites passion and triggers your creativity first.
Habit # 2: Don’t Log Into Your Social Media
Social media is a menace. We don’t realize it until we find ourselves trapped in the social media trap. What happens when you log into your social media account right from the start of your day, let me tell you what happens. You come across a list of unwanted distractful content and your cortisol filled mind just takes a notch up to adding more anxiety to your present situation. Black oppression and civil right war in the USA, Coronavirus spreading like wildfire, world economy shutting down, these things just add more to your worries. And before you know it, your motivation simply goes down the drain.
Habit # 3: Not Emptying Your Brain Before Work
The brain is the powerhouse of your body. Yet, it is also the place where you generate ideas & come up with solutions. When starting work, if you fail to empty your mind and just get on with your tasks for the day, you will eventually regret it. Firstly, because a jumbled mind will find it hard to focus on one thing at a time; secondly, it will not be able to classify essentials from non-essentials and will overwhelm you instead. So it’s best that when you begin your day, you first take at least 10 minutes to unwind. Let your brain go through the process of releasing negative energies and then begin work.
Habit # 4: Going Straight into a Meeting
If you happen to arrive at the office in the morning and conduct a meeting straight up, well it’s not going to be fruitful for your productivity. Believe me, it won’t! You just walked into the office and right now there’s nothing more in the world that you want then to get started with the work. But, if you do so by conducting a meeting first thing, here’s what’s gonna happen, you will sound like a tyrant to your fellow members. Yeah it happens. Give yourself time, talk to the people for an hour at least to let the work blues fade away and when you think you’ve got the swing, start with your meeting.
Habit # 5: Creating Self-Imposed Deadlines for Tasks
We all want to achieve the best of what we have and when we go to work, we want to prove it. So, in order to do that, we create our own deadlines and then eventually feel burdened over it. And the worst part is, we don’t even realize that while creating these deadlines, we add all essential/non-essential tasks in the same list. As a result, we are often completing unnecessary tasks first leaving behind the essential ones and only regret later when we see that we have missed out a deadline on an important one. It not only hurts our productivity but also kills our motivation to fulfil our set goals & objectives.
Habit # 6: Starting with 3-4 Tasks at Once
We have a habit of making ourselves busy right from the start of the day. And in order to do that, we initiate work with at least 3-4 tasks at an instance. We open a number of tabs in our web browsers and log into different platforms. We start working on all of these together which is not correct. We are already high on cortisol, plus sipping away our cup of coffee and now getting head-on with multi-tasking, we may find the surge to perform for the next couple of hours but after that our mind tells us that we have worked too much for the day and it’s time to unwind which hurts our productivity.
It’s best that you should change the habits that are becoming quite the hindrance in your productivity. There are so many things that we are doing on a daily basis that we don’t realize are becoming a cause of stress for us. So when you start your day every morning, it’s best that you avoid these things first. Kill the bad habits, and replace them with productive ones like focusing on a single task in the morning, not consuming caffeine during the first couple of hours, talking to your colleagues to unwind.
These minor life changes will only add up to your positive attitude and give you the boost you need.
