If you feel yourself squeezed at the middle of working day when three to four working hours await, read this article to the very end and find out how to control your internal energy and to restore it.
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1. Determine Your Top Performance Time
You need to experiment a bit to do that. Work in the morning during a week, then shift your activity peak to afternoon time, and then try to work at night. It is highly recommended to refuse sweets, caffeine and other stimulators for that period.
Many people feel performance decrease in the afternoon period, and top-activity time is often early in the morning or late in the evening. According to psychological researches of Dan Ariely, 40% of participants said their highest performance to appear between 9 and 12 AM.
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2. Sleep During the Day
People often have to deal with sleep deprivation due to early wakeups or late falling asleep. Use midday activity decrease to fill this gap.
NASA researches about the influence of day-sleep onto the job of pilots showed, that 26 minutes of sandman sleep increase performance on 34%.
Even 10 to 12 minutes of sleep turn one working day to two. Usually, people at the office feel themselves like sleepy flies in the afternoon. But if to have a few minutes of sleep during this time, you’ll feel like a new working day has begun. To deal with a slight being sleepy after day-sleep, you can drink some coffee.
Some people drink it before day-nap and then set up an alarm signal in 15-20 minutes in order to wake up exactly when caffeine gets into blood. This is called “Coffee Nap”. It invigorates much better than coffee or day-sleep separately.
If there is absolutely no possibility to have a nap at the office, devote your lowest performance time to routine tasks (cleaning or emails checking, for instance).
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3. Choose Simple Decisions
The process of decision-making is energy-consuming one.
It is much simpler to not order food at all, than to choose what and where to order.
Simple rules allow on saving energy in a tough world.
There is one more way to catalyze the process of decision-making. Blogger John Bell shared it once. When his colleagues couldn’t decide where to go for diner and nobody offered variants, he said: “Let’s have a dinner in McDonald’s”. Everyone refuses and starts claiming ideas.
The solution that you know is unfitting, serves as an anchor to push from in order to think out better decisions. If you waste much time to take even the simplest decision, try finding the worst one among all possible variants. This will help you get out of a stun and to start looking for fitting solutions.
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4. Free Your Memory for Really Important Things
When you free your mind from “ongoing” tasks, you’ll feel it became much easier to think. You need to unload your brain for that.
Take a list of paper and write down all the ideas and tasks that are in your head. The process will be chaotic, this is fine. Just try start your tasks with the verb. Then group them into different fields of your life: job, studying, travelling, etc. Divide these tasks into those which you can complete in a few hours or days, and those which need long-term work.
After you load them out, insert your tasks and projects into a comfortable external storage system, for instance, Maxdone or Wunderlist. You’ll receive additional energy after that, you’ll feel it became much easier to work. You won’t have to waste your energy to remind yourself about tasks you’ve got to do and to worry about forgetting something.
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5. Scroll Newsletters and Social Media Less
Why do you need to sink in flows of low-quality contents, spend time to filtrate it, when there are fundamental books, authors, press and conceptions? Their meaning is a long-term or eternal one. It is not effective to study info which means something only a few minutes or hours.
Attention is a priceless but limited resource.
Spend it to generate knowledge (writing an article, reading a book, visiting trainings) or emotions (watching good movies, hanging out with friends).
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6. Make Breaks
It is useful for your health, and breaks are required to restore your cognitive resource and concentration.
To rest is to change one kind of activity to another.
You can rest from your gob in different ways:
- Have a walk in a park nearby, or just go to a water cooler once in 30 minutes;
- Get out of a keyboard and display, draw something on a paper;
- Use a break to call your mother or close friend.
- If you are a freelancer, insert your home tasks into working timeouts (wash the dishes, talk to your cat).
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7. Go in for Sports
There is a serious delusion about sports: it is said to take out your energy. Like, hey, I’m tired already! I don’t want to hear about running or gym.
But really, sports GIVE you energy.
If there are no serious goals like marathon or triathlon for you, sport does not require special eating or resting regime. Three to four trainings a week for 30-60 minutes (running, bicycle riding, swimming, other aerobic loads) will give you cheerfulness, good mood and ability to keep up with the working rhythm much longer.
If you can’t allow yourself that, just increase the amount of movement you have. The easiest way is to refuse using elevator and to go upstairs. Nobody says you to climb the 20-th floor of office skyscraper, but you really can go up for two-three floors. You don’t even need to put on your sneakers to do that.
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8. Watch what You Eat
One of the key rules here is to consume mainly natural, whole food.
Use products with low level of sugar, too. There are six main groups of these products:
- Vegetables and fruits;
- Nuts and seeds;
- Natural oils;
- Natural meat, fish and seafood that was not processed on fabrics;
- Cereals;
- Milk products.
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9. Analyze the Past Day
Spend 5-7 minutes in the evening to analyze the day that passed and to actualize meetings and task-list.
You can devote 10-15 minutes of your weekend, too.
This is a very easy practice that lowers the part of chaos in your life. The lower is the chaos, the less energy is being wasted in vain.