Don’t Want to Work? 5 Tips to Help You Be Productive Anyway
We all have days when we don’t want to work. Instead of trying to ignore that you don’t feel like working, recognize that it’s impossible to be at peak efficiency and performance every day and give yourself a break.
Here are 5 tips that can help you make a less-than-ideal day as fruitful as possible.
1. Start the day with an easy project – pick a task or project that doesn’t require a lot of thinking or focus. Sometimes doing something easy without feeling guilty and crossing it off your to-do list can motivate you into wanting to tackle something a little more difficult.
If you end up feeling motivated, take a short break after the easy task and then tackle a more challenging task. If you don’t feel motivated, and assuming you have no impending deadlines, pick something else that you’ve been putting off that is fairly easy – it might be the perfect day to tackle some paperwork, reorganize a few things on your desk, or purge your filing cabinets.
2. Be even more careful with distractions - just because you’re picking "light" or easy projects to work on doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aim to focus on them and make the time count - you will always get more done than if you work scattered.
3. Take breaks – if you find yourself getting distracted more than usual, take more frequent scheduled breaks. Knowing that you are not going to force yourself to do more than what you can and that you’re going to reward yourself with a break can be an added incentive. Sometimes even the best single-taskers need a little bit of distraction.
4. Set a cutoff time and finish strong -pick a time for ending your workday and use the last 15 or 30 minutes prior to leaving to think through the tasks you completed and decide on the top 2 or 3 priorities that you will work on the next day. It’s better to finish a low-energy day a little earlier than usual and put in some extra time tomorrow.
5. If you can, take the day off – sometimes this is the only solution and the only way to re-energize and regroup. If you do, though, use it wisely and detach completely from work – no thinking about work, no checking emails, no filing. Go do something fun or relaxing that you know for sure will leave you feeling great.
What about the guilt? If you’re usually productive, let it go. If you’re usually not productive, let go of the guilt too – but resolve to figure out why and what you can do to change it. Either way, acknowledging these "off" days and finding ways to work with that reality will always yield better results than staring at your screen or shuffling papers around trying to force yourself to work on a difficult project when your mental energy just isn’t there.
Personal Productivity Coach Claudine Motto shows home office solopreneurs how to regain control, make time for priorities, and get more done.
For more productivity, time management, and office organizing tips, go to http://www.vistalnorte.com
To set up a complimentary 20-minute coaching session, visit http://www.vistalnorte.com/contact.htm
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