Today I bring you 7 ideas so that you can be much more productive in your day to day, but as I always say, without losing your inner peace!
Being productive does not mean being a super woman or having to reach everything. I always bet on slow productivity, that is, I prefer to do fewer things and those that I do are of higher quality and that fill me up more.
In this post I tell you all my secrets that I put into practice every day to keep my work up to date. The truth is that these tips came in handy when I combined my doctoral thesis with my work as a meditation guide.
And you can also implement these during bed time. Cause, personally I’m considering this as the answer of “how to meditate in bed”.
I hope these tips help you as much as they have helped me.
Let’s get started!
Why do we scatter, get low in energy, and drop in productivity to infinity and beyond?
Mental dispersion is very common, it happens to a lot of people, so don’t feel bad or guilty because you feel like you have a thousand things on your mind and you can’t focus on what’s important.
We are continuously exposed to many technological stimuli, to an excess of information through many different means and much of this information that reaches us is usually negative, of deaths, accidents, sad and full of insecurities.
And since we want to find out everything, be entertained and not miss anything, we jump from one piece of information to another, becoming great consumers of information. And this causes a high degree of distraction.
Most of the day we operate on autopilot . We carry out many habits that are learned and automated, reacting to the stimuli that we perceive with our 5 senses and to the thousands of thoughts that go through our minds.
“Instead of being aware of every action we take and being proactive, we react to perceived reality on autopilot.”
This causes the mind to be constantly thinking and creating its own history, remembering the past and projecting itself into the future. That is, jumping like a monkey from branch to branch according to the mechanisms that we have learned.
It is exhausting. Just exhausting.
How to avoid mental dispersion to be productive?
To improve your productivity, the first thing I propose, before going into the 7 keys to be more productive, is to meditate . Meditating will help you control your thoughts and reduce the volume of your mental radio , and, therefore, you will stop living on autopilot to enjoy a more proactive mind.
By training the mind with meditation , we feel in a greater state of well-being , because we are activating areas of the neocortex involved in learning, stimulating the limbic brain to generate new emotional states related to relaxation, and activating the basal ganglia of the cerebellum to create the habit of focus, productivity and a clear mind.
If you want to know the effects of meditation on the brain and delve into the neuroscience of meditation, go through this post I wrote a few weeks ago.
First tip. Rest actively and take breaks during the day.
To minimize physical and mental exhaustion it is advisable to sleep the recommended hours, perhaps even take a nap and take adequate breaks during the day. This will help you reduce stress and nervousness, feel more energetic, more focused, and therefore more productive.
But what do the experts say about it?
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommend that adults should get 7 or more hours of sleep per night on a regular basis to promote optimal health.
Furthermore, the article “The perfect nap” published in Advances in Management suggests that taking a 20-30 minute afternoon nap has been scientifically proven to improve concentration, increase productivity and creativity.
Various studies have evaluated how often you should take a break to avoid errors at work and lack of concentration. According to these studies, it is recommended to take a 10-minute break every 60 minutes of work.
You have to know that your brain alternates cycles of concentration time with moments of rest . For this reason, our attention span can decrease if we spend more than an hour doing the same task. And if this task involves learning, this time may be reduced. It is important to know your rest needs and take breaks to relax your mind during the day, so when you return to homework you can concentrate better and be more productive.
I propose you to do this daily micropause when you need to rest in the middle of your day, it won’t take you more than 1 minute.
Second tip. Manage your time well
A good daily habit is to have an agenda where you can plan your day, both professional and personal tasks.
It is important that you can classify the tasks between important, urgent. Also, this classification will help you delegate.
If you want to learn how to manage your time consciously, assertively and following slow productivity, go through this article I wrote a few weeks ago.
Third tip. Beware of procrastination
There are tasks that are more lazy than others, and we are postponing them. However, if you have your precious schedule organized, you will be more aware of the time you need to invest in what you are procrastinating, and to do it sooner rather than later.
The truth is that when we don’t feel motivated with the objectives that we have written in our agenda, we postpone them. An alternative that you can consider if this is happening to you is to reconsider your goals, even reformulate them so that they are more realistic and adapted to your life. As I always ask you, be loving to yourself.
Fourth tip. Avoid multitasking
Multitasking generates mental dispersion. Simple as that.
Imagine a computer with 20 browser windows open, 10 programs running at once, and 10 documents open. Unless you have a super computer, your computer will start to slow down and even crash and hang.
Well, the same thing can happen to you as to the best computer if you want to do 20 things at the same time. That is to say, you are going to dedicate less energy to each thing, less concentration, less focus and then, the result may not be what you expected. In the end, you will feel saturated and in need of a reset.
If you feel saturated, with a scattered mind, and it is difficult for you to concentrate on one thing, meditation helps you to reset yourself and restore your vital energy.
But remember, multitasking will lower your vital energy. Be loving to yourself, and take care of your mental, physical, and emotional hygiene by focusing on one thing at a time.
Fifth tip. Promote mental well-being with meditation techniques
Meditation can increase your productivity by up to 20%.
When the mind is constantly jumping between what happened in the past and what it wants or fears in the future, it is not living in the present moment. This type of wandering thoughts causes us to not be fully focused on what we are doing and our productivity plummets. Therefore, we are not in control of our mind. Having will over our mind can be acquired through mental training, for example, through meditation.
As I told you before, by training the mind with meditation we feel in a greater state of well-being, we learn to create the habit of focus, productivity and a clear mind.
Sixth tip. Avoid “the thieves of time
Time thieves are all those distractions that interrupt your concentration.
For example: continuously looking at social networks, WhatsApp, phone calls, etc.
To avoid time thieves, you have to learn to set healthy limits on them. That is, learn to say no and respect yourself.
When you are doing a task that deserves your full attention, focus on it and avoid all those distractions that are unnecessary and that disturb your moment of productivity. In this way, you are respecting yourself.
Seventh tip. Reward yourself for achievements
How many times do we “forget” to reward ourselves when we achieve a goal, an achievement, an objective? Every day you meet goals, even if they are small.
Remember to reward yourself daily. A relaxing self-massage, a little while alone with you, a guided meditation, reading an inspiring book that connects you with a good mood. Serve everything that nourishes your soul and makes you happy.
Exercise to improve your productivity
Meditation is a multipurpose tool, because it will help us:
- Focus our mind on the present moment, without jumping to the past and the future.
- Regulate our emotions.
- Delve into the recesses of your personality to get to know yourself more deeply and undo knots and beliefs that may be blocking you at this time.
Meditation can be applied to many facets of life:
- To start the day with a clear mind.
- To give you moments of mental oasis during the day.
- To combat insomnia, rest better at night and feel more energetic the next day.
Meditating does not require any age, physical condition or special gifts, just the desire to engage in the practice on a regular basis to have effective results.
I share with you in the following video a guided meditation to help you overcome mental dispersion.
With this exercise I invite you to relax before going to sleep, so that you rest better and wake up with a more rested and clear mind.
In this way, you give yourself the opportunity to relax your mind, emotions and also abandon stressful and non-beneficial habits that you may have accumulated during the day.
I hope this article on how to improve your productivity inspires you to put into practice those tips that can work best for you.
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