Here’s a list of practical things I do to keep productive.
- Reset your mind every evening (especially before a work-day): go read a book an hour before you usually go to bed. Read it in your living room or somewhere where you can’t go to bed and can’t get to a computer. I like to do this at 11pm with a nice cup of tea.
- Have a healthy eating rhythm. By this I do not explicitly mean eat healthy food! Just have breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. Snacks are fine too, as long as you keep your 3-meals a day rhythm. I force to have breakfast the last few weeks and I’m feeling better already. If you’re like me and you hate having breakfast try something light like some fruit, cornflakes or yesterdays leftovers.
- Schedule your off-time. Don’t see relaxation as a reward for getting things done. Plan your relaxation so you know you will get things done after relaxing. If you don’t plan time to unstress, you never will. Also, it will make sure you don’t worry about relaxing because you know you can because you scheduled it.
- Don’t worry about finances. Make sure you have a system for keeping track of your finances so you won’t have to worry about them. This doesn’t stop you worrying from not having money to pay your bills but knowing you can’t pay them and finding out when you can pay them relieves stress about finances.
- Keep your inbox clean and actions organized. Just like with finances. You can relieve mental stress if you know what to do and when you’ve answered to all your running projects and tasks. It might be possible you can’t do every task you have but it helps knowing having actions you can’t do, rather than not knowing what to do with them. I just Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done system for this. Read his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
about this.
