How to maintain productivity: Useful tips and practices
Despite the fact that in cloudy weather it works better (and what remains to be done - you don’t want to stick your nose out onto the street), the cold months are not the most pleasant period even for a city dweller who is provided with all the necessary amenities. In the rain, one distraction becomes less, but from a biochemical and psychological point of view, autumn is really difficult for a person - zero mood and apathy also have an effect on efficiency. In the journal Science in 2011 published a study of sociologists Scott Golder and Michael Macy: they analyzed the tweets of users from different parts of the world and came to the conclusion that we wake up at any time of year about the same mood, but it gets worse the faster day.
Bad weather does not make us monsters of concentration, but only removes one distraction: the thought stops spinning in my head where to go to have fun after (and better instead) work. It is proved that in the fall, workers tend to stay in the office for about half an hour longer than in the warm season. The problem is that not always the quantity develops into quality, although it seems to us and vice versa. According to this logic, we, for example, can feel like heroes of labor after an exhausting 10-hour working day, even if we were hanging out on social networks all the time. Moreover, if the task took “only” two hours of effective work, it seems to us that it was certainly not done well enough. Behavioral economist Dan Arayli says that one locksmith began to pay less tip just because he began to do his job with experience faster - it seemed to his customers that he was being tinkering. The same considerations guide users of online ticket search services: if the aggregator “thinks” longer, it seems to them that it makes more efforts to search, although this is certainly not the case.
Productivity generally depends much more on a personalized approach than we used to think. On the 99U site dedicated to her, at one time, a classification of types of productivity appeared, according to which workers are divided into four groups: prioritizers, planners, arrangers and visualizers. So, prioritization is extremely important planning, they hate empty chatter and much more worried about how to perform their work on time, and not about what methods it is more convenient to perform for themselves and others. They will be helped by planners and trackers that streamline the workflow, for example, the famous Pomodoro timer (you need to rest 5 minutes after every 25 minutes of work) and 42Goals to maintain a list of planned tasks.
Planners also love to paint things in order, and still love to dive into even the smallest details of the process and lay everything out on the shelves (so their business correspondence is replete with bullets). They need similar tools: cool diary like Toodledo, HabitForge and Agendas anchor for creating an agenda. Desktop organizers, folders and files will also be useful: in the physical space around the scheduler, for his peace of mind, everything must also be in perfect order.
The latter two types are just as different from the first two as they resemble each other. It is easy and pleasant for arrangers to work in a team, and, on the contrary, it is vital for them to at least occasionally have a word with their colleague. They don’t need any planners, but the focus @ will service comes in handy, which selects the right music for the job, and visually pleasing notebooks, pens, and other small things. Visualizers hate to work on the same type of tasks, constantly generate ideas, and therefore it is important for them to provide complete freedom of action and at the same time remove distracting things from view. To do this, you need Zen services like Ommwriter, a text-writing program and mind mapping applications, such as MyThoughts.
But do not write off the universal recommendations. Most of us receive a huge amount of correspondence during the working day, and there is a risk of getting bogged down in it from morning to evening. It is clear that there are always urgent calls and letters that are best answered immediately, but you need to learn how to separate them from those that can wait until you complete the task. If, because of the messages, you can’t concentrate at all, there is the Antisocial service, which disables the social networks, and there is also Freedom, which blocks the Internet completely (for a given time).
If autumn melancholy unwinds before depression, you must first turn to the therapist. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), it is often necessary to work in this state. Depression reduces faith in your own strength, so that even familiar tasks that you have already performed more than once can cause anxiety. If the assignment seems to you overwhelming, it is best to break it into its component parts and set separate deadlines for each. The easiest thing to understand is the text: if you are horrified that you have to write 10 thousand characters, set a goal to write two paragraphs (or one or two sentences - until the mission seems real to you). When you cope with one such task, your mood will slightly increase, and pieces of work of the same complexity will not be frightening.
In the office it is worth adjusting the situation to your own needs. The point is not only what place in the openspace to take and which headphones to choose in order not to hear household noises. If you know that you can get stuck during a working day from a sudden task, an unpleasant remark or a banal situation like a coffee machine breakdown, you should enlist the support of a colleague. You may not become best friends - and this is normal, but the opportunity to share a sudden anxiety helps to stop and understand it - and this is the main weapon against anxiety. In addition, do not be afraid to admit to the boss that you are depressed: even if your relationship cannot be called trusting, you can streamline health problems (there is no lie here) so that he does not have the thought that the work has ceased to be interesting for you or you are just lazy.
Photo: 1, 2 via Shutterstock
