Following on from Part 1, here are a few more tips and tricks that we feel can be useful for our community members in their goal to increase their productivity, reduce stress, and lead a happier and healthier life. Three things that can help with you this include:
- Sleep: This is essential for both physical and mental recovery. As mentioned in part 1, the quality of sleep is also important for this. Little changes that can help make you sleep better include avoiding electronics in the 30 minutes before sleep, ensuring that you have the right type of pillow for your sleeping position, and reserving your bed as a "sleep only" zone (ie, no scrolling on your phone or using a computer in bed!)
- Scheduling: Different from to-do lists, schedules allow your brain to work in order and allocated times, which can be less overwhelming than a mountainous to-do-list. It makes sense why 41% of items on a to-do-list never get done. Whilst some of us have returned to working on-site, for many working from home remains the "new normal". It can be easy to get off track and lose sense of time (especially on warm, lazy summer days!) but it is important for both productivity and goal setting to have some semblance of a schedule to adhere to.
- Remove distractions: It goes without saying, you have to do this to become goal orientated. Recently I have left the social media world and have found that I have more time to do the things I genuinely enjoy. It is easy to open up a social app and then lose minutes or even hours just mindlessly scrolling through random videos and articles. Although there is nothing wrong with being online if you enjoy it, having limits can help cut down on "wasted time" if that is a concern of yours.
If focus is just a distraction from distraction, then the best way to meet your goals and continually progress is to cut out anything that you know isn’t going to lead you to success. This also ties in with the above point of scheduling - make sure to have boundaries between work life and home life and do your best to stick to them! Our Vision trainers are specially equipped to assist you when comes this through goal sessions. We can incorporate the same structure in how we go about setting our goals.
The SMART principle (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time) can help you set and stay on track of both your ‘short-term’ and ‘long-term’ goals. On that note, it would be a good idea to write down your goal, or display it somewhere you can see it to refer back to. Pressing forward from this pandemic, a good question to ask is where do we see ourselves going? Do we want to just ‘survive’ or do we want to ‘thrive’? What we do right now will shape our individual future, whether for the better or worse. The choice is up to us to make the decisions which we know are right and beneficial to us.
