1. A good day starts before you even get to work. Take care to get enough sleep and make sure to give your body healthy food as fuel. Get yourself ready the night before so you aren’t rushed and flustered when you arrive at work.
2. Studies prove that short breaks improve concentration and productivity. Movement also relieves stress and stress reduces productivity. Take a walk; listen to a song, and don’t eat lunch at your desk.
3. Plan and prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Stop overestimating what you can get done each day—pick the most important two tasks to complete every day (not including urgent quick tasks.) Spend an hour on Friday afternoon getting ready for the next week.
4. Make “appointments” with your work. Block out time on your calendar daily to work on projects, and set a time every week to stay on top of your documents’ organization, to clean out files and emails before your storage gets unmanageable.
5. When you have a big project to do, don’t let the planning paralyze you. If getting started is the hardest part, make yourself take 30 minutes every day to work on things that you’ve been avoiding. Soon you’ll find that you have momentum. Break the project down into manageable tasks and focus on one at a time.
6. Resist opening your email first thing in the morning. Plan your day first and use that first hour of the day, when everyone else is on email, to get things done.
7. Do not stay online all of the time or think that emails need to be answered as they come in. When you have time blocked off to work—send the phone to voice mail, turn off your cell phone, and do not check email during that time. In fact, experiment with having set times that you answer email and voice messages, etc.
8. Minimize interruptions. If you have a door, close it when you are working on something. If you don’t have a door, use headphones to bring quiet and signal people not to interrupt. If you are interrupted, stand and move away from your desk as though you are going somewhere.
9. Get your boss on board. Does he or she expect instant answers on email? That you won’t take a lunch? Let them know what you are doing and why. Be an advocate and educator in the workplace about the value of rest, breaks, uninterrupted time, time offline, etc.
10. Don’t let “getting these small things out of the way” distract you and reduce your productivity. Keep a list of ten-minute tasks and do them when you have dead time or are waiting for something else. You’ll be surprised at how much you can get done in ten minutes. Do go ahead and take care of urgent small tasks that must be done.