Wrestling with the way you work?

In today’s complex world everyone appears to be wrestling with how to strike the perfect balance between work and life and to make it more simple. With increased living costs, the need for extra income is being challenged by wanting to be less stressed. The wrestling is fuelled further by so many views being aired at the moment on the four day week, the great resignation, the keenness to retire early etc, all tugging at people’s heart strings to spend more time doing the things they love.??

But, to achieve this therein lies the fear of not getting things done on time, or feeling overwhelmed that you can’t work at the pace you need.?

So at present, there is a real desire to be more productive to release more time. There is a real desire to get to that place of balance which can be causing more pressure than we realise.??

The reason being is that amongst everything we are trying to do, there are constant distractions, a never ending stream of emails, the people around you constantly asking questions, your mobile phone pinging, apps notifying you that they need attention, social media platforms teasing you to scroll even more.??

So staying focused can be the biggest challenge and staying tuned to what’s important is a skill in itself.??

It happens to us all, you can be busily working away on something really important and before you know it, you realise that for some time, you have been looking at or thinking about something else entirely, or? you have just picked up your phone because it pinged at you to do exactly that, or an email had popped up that you thought would take a quick reply, but 20 minutes later you are still crafting the perfect response.?

How often do you hear yourselves say, I’ll just allow myself 5 minutes of X (low impact activity) before I start Y (high impact task). What if you allowed yourself the 5 minutes of X after achieving Y. Would X even be necessary at that point??

According to the Harvard Business Review, despite? craving the ability to keep focused, we spend 46.9% of our workdays with our minds wandering away from a task at hand.?

So, is mind wandering actually a workplace epidemic that we are failing to address??

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”?Zig Ziglar.

However we describe this need to change our habits, it’s time to recognise that total focus is virtually impossible and creating distraction-free periods of time is the new way of doing things:

1.Find your focus ‘sweet spot’. Track your days for a week. Patterns will emerge to show you when you feel at your best, able to get into the ‘zone’ and when you feel unproductive and struggle the most. Consciously planning your high and low impact tasks to align with these time slots will help.?

?2. Create a routine. Most people know what their best sleeping pattern is to get the best night's sleep, but how aware are you of your best wide awake pattern?Understanding what times to eat, hydrate and have breaks.? If your body isn’t right, the rest of your day will probably go wrong.

?3. Have a good night's sleep!?The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute states that getting a good amount of sleep at night benefits your heart, lung and brain function all of which improves your productivity at work. Lack of sleep can affect your emotional state which may lead to your inability to cope with the demands of your role.?

?4. Retrain your mind. If you want to achieve more, it’s time to start re-training your mind to work in peace, with zero distractions. Even if it is a 15 minute time slot. Your brain will thank you for it. Whilst we all believe we are good at multitasking, we’re not. Working on four things at once to a lower standard is not the same as completing one task, on time really well.?

5. Use positive daydreaming. If you are struggling to focus, stop staring at your screen and allow yourself to day dream about what you need to do. When you daydream,? your mind travels through different parts of your brain and collects bits of information that it may then be able to connect! These connections often end up being the beginnings of new and creative ideas to help you get your task done.?

6. Stay focused on why you need to be focused!?During times of underproductivity, we can wallow, we get exacerbated, we can lose more time than ever.? ’Don’t focus on why you can’t get something done, focus on the reasons why you must make it happen!

Remembering what your bigger picture is, should be your key driver.?Everybody has a dream, but not everyone has the grit and determination to get there. ‘What matters is not necessarily what you do, but why you do it’. Simon Sinek

So as a coach, if I asked you why you waste time on so many distractions, what would you say??And if I asked you why it was so important to change the way you do the tings you do? What would be your answer to that?