Are you feeling overwhelmed?
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work to do? Some of my clients feel overwhelmed and have found the following brain friendly strategies valuable in setting up the week ahead. Hope this can help you to maximise your productivity and make your valuable time count!
How do you eat an elephant? And where do you start?
Neuroscience research has discovered the following facts about distractions to our productivity:
Brain friendly strategies to try
Chunking
The answer to the question above on how you eat an elephant, is piece by piece, but where do you start? I have received various answers over the years & my reply is where are you going to gain the most valuable meaty bite that will fulfil you. This analogy helps to reflect on where are you going to have the biggest impact first? Breaking your day, actions or projects into effective time slots and setting realistic time allocations. Build in time for coffee breaks to socialise and connect with others as gaining key information from other intellects can be helpful & insightful. Monitor what you achieve in these time slots and what distractions arise.
The answer to the question above on how you eat an elephant, is piece by piece, but where do you start? I have received various answers over the years & my reply is where are you going to gain the most valuable meaty bite that will fulfil you. This analogy helps to reflect on where are you going to have the biggest impact first? Breaking your day, actions or projects into effective time slots and setting realistic time allocations. Build in time for coffee breaks to socialise and connect with others as gaining key information from other intellects can be helpful & insightful. Monitor what you achieve in these time slots and what distractions arise.
Working on difficult or brain draining tasks, chunk them into 25min slots and mix it with novelty tasks that will stimulate and recharge your pre-frontal cortex (thinking & problem solving part of your brain).
Prioritising
Identify your key priorities in order that is going to add the most value & business impact (Suggest maximum of 3-4 per day depending on the complexity of each task). Each morning start with one big key strategic task while your brain is fresh, minimise distractions by turning off emails, alerts and putting phone onto silent.
Finish the day with reflecting on what worked & didn’t work with prioritising. Allocate time to set up the next day with the key learnings in mind.
Distraction Management Plan
As mentioned in the diagram above we are interrupted on average once every 5mins. 50% of distractions are created internally by one-self including being hungry, thirty, devices, alerts & day-dreaming.
It is worth observing & tracking what distractions are interfering the most when conducting our most valuable thinking time in order to come up with a distraction management plan.
When do you conduct your most valuable thinking time within the day?
Ideas
Clients who work in open plan office have used traffic light poster on their wall or back of their chairs to indicate whether they are available to be interrupted or not.
Others have used yellow plastic ducks on their desk to indicate they are doing thinking tasks & prefer to not be interrupted unless urgent (urgent will need to be defined & communicated).
Those working from home turn off devices & reminders for chunks of time to get the most important tasks completed. Clients have found their team productivity has increased and feel more satisfied at the end of each day, reducing the amount of over time required.