If your attention is all over the place, you'll barely make any progress. On average, it takes you two hours longer to complete your must-dos. Become more productive and gain more peace, overview and control with these tips.
Worrying about not having time for all your to-do's is the number one waste of time.
Create order in your agenda, then you also create order in your brain. For example, use the Trello app to organize all your to dos.
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When you're under stress or emotional, you get a lot of repetitive thoughts buzzing through your head. These eat up energy and are not good for your focus. For example, it could be tasks that keep repeating in your head and ideas that come to your mind. But also stimuli such as thirst, hunger, being tired, a full bladder or being in love can take you out of concentration.
Shift your attention from thoughts to your body more often. For example by moving, exercising or doing a breathing exercise. This reduces the spinning activities in your brain and you become calmer. What can also help is writing down everything that still needs to be done. This way you break through the loops in your head and you save a lot of energy.
Being distracted by the slightest thing can be a sign that you are too tired. To focus properly, you need two chemicals in your brain. Do you run out of these and continue anyway? Then you live on mental reserves. Take your rest. It takes a while before these focus substances are created again.
Take more frequent short breaks for at least 7.5 minutes. This prevents your mental tank from running out. For concentration tasks:a break of three to five minutes every 25 minutes.
If you're not captivated by what you're doing, your mind will wander. It's a myth that you only use 10 percent of your brain. It is used one hundred percent. An average task (reading, speaking, writing and listening) takes up about twenty percent of your brain capacity. Your brain automatically supplements this with other thoughts, so that at the end of the page or a conversation you no longer know exactly what it was about.
Your brain makes a division between the task, your own thoughts and the environment. If you want to be less bothered by snap thoughts and your surroundings, make the task more challenging. By reading faster, you challenge your brain more, leaving less room to wander and hear ambient sounds.
Phone and colleagues. Typical cases of nuisance, which make you sixty percent less productive. Asking the jammer to dim is symptomatic relief.
Train your focus by having silent blocks in the office. With one or two silent blocks a week, you can focus much more deeply on one task. For example:every Tuesday and Thursday between 10:00 and 11:00 there are no meetings, you do not call each other and you do not answer internal emails.
What you do with your extra time affects your productivity. A drink on the terrace is very pleasant, but it also increases the chance that nothing will come out of your hands afterwards. And then the time savings have the opposite effect on your agenda.
Take advantage of less busy moments by picking up chores that are left behind. Once checked, it will give you an energy boost. Do you just want to lounge around? Then set an alarm. This way you prevent time from slipping through your fingers.
Text:Esmir van Wering Source:Santé May 2019
