Does the thought of starting your workday bring stress and anxiety? Mornings can be rough for people who feel they have lost control over their day. Your calendar is packed so full of meetings there is hardly any time to complete your work much less improve your productivity. You also know the day will bring random interruptions and fire drills, which in turn will make you irritable. How can you be cherry and productive when you are pulled in too many different directions or faced with things you hate to do? ?
You can create simple habits at the end of your workday that will profoundly influence how successful you are tomorrow. Bad habits decrease productivity. Creating good habits helps improve your productivity. Even more, these easy tweaks will improve your overall mental well-being.
Ready to regain control over your day and increase your productivity? Do you want to create opportunities to be more successful in your career? If you want to increase productivity, improve your mood, and your happiness, adopt these five habits before ending your workday.
1. Review and refine tomorrows calendar
The first tip is the most important. By not controlling your calendar, you relinquish control over your day. Even more, those meetings can also mean you have action items due. Or worse, a presentation to present. So before closing your laptop and ending your day, open your calendar to review and refine your schedule. Refining your schedule is the easiest way to improve your productivity and increases your chances of becoming successful.
Review each meeting and ask yourself these four questions:
- Is my attendance really necessary at this meeting?
- What exactly is the reason I have been invited to attend this meeting?
- What am I expected to contribute or take away by attending this meeting?
- Could I contribute just the same through email or reviewing the meeting minutes?
Asking yourself these questions about each meeting on your calendar can help you click the decline button and free up time. If you still have doubts or concerns, send them along to the meeting organizer for a second opinion. Improve your productivity by removing meaningless meettings from your calendar.
Intentionally schedule your work on your calendar to improve your productivity
Purposefully block off time on your calendar to schedule your work. Often we feel as if there isn’t enough time in the day, and yet some days, we feel we have too much time. As a result, you either don’t get to do the things you want to do, or you procrastinate the things you need to do. Unsuccessful people hope they will get around to the things they need to do. However, successful people schedule those things in their calendars because they want to improve their productivity to be more successful.
- Block off time for creative thinking.
- Schedule time to work on the presentation you have to do.
- Need to prepare for a client meeting, schedule time on your calendar.
- Put several 15-minute breaks throughout your day to give yourself downtime.
- Create a big block of admin time for responding to emails.
Review and refine tomorrow’s calendar before ending your day. Doing so brings your full energy and attention to the things that matter, will improve your productivity, and help you be successful. You will feel good and well balanced between creative and administrative work, breaks, and socializing. More importantly, you will have control over your day.
2. Form your actionable plan for tomorrow
If you want to maintain feeling happy and relaxed throughout your day, you must develop an actionable plan. Planning your day and working your plan ensures you live up to the high expectations and productivity goals you want to achieve. Here are some techniques to create an actionable plan for tomorrow that will improve your productivity and set you up for success.
Get clear on why each item is necessary to improve your productivity
Add a sentence to each item that explains the value of completing the task. Another simple way to accomplish this is to bucketize the items into your main pillars.
Eliminate low/no value items
Knowing why an item is on your plan helps you identify the tasks that aren’t worth doing. If you can’t find what value an item brings, it won’t improve your productivity so delete it off your list. The best way to meet your actionable plan is to keep the list from becoming overwhelming. Removing low/no value items helps keep your plan manageable and, in doing so, gives you a better chance of completing it. Low or no value items are a distraction. They reduce your productivity and prevent you from becoming successful.
Break large items into smaller ones to improve productivity
The quickest way to avoid working on your plan is to have an enormous task that will take days or weeks to complete. Spend time breaking the large tasks into small ones to avoid procrastination. Focusing on smaller tasks helps you complete the larger project on time. It increases your productivity and improves your chances of success. As an added benefit, you will get pleasure, and a feeling of accomplishment seeing completed items on your plan.
Socialize your action plan
Create accountability by sharing your action plan with your boss. By sharing your actionable plan with your boss, they will follow up to see how you are progressing. Knowing your boss will hold you accountable will improve your productivity and success rate. Additionally, it helps check your priorities because your boss will speak up if they feel there are low/no value items you are working on completing.
With the proper techniques, you can build an actionable plan that maximizes your productivity thereby helping you meet your objectives and goals. As a result, ending your day by creating tomorrow’s actionable plan improves productivity and helps you be successful.
3. Follow-up on items due to you to improve your productivity
Whether waiting on a past-due piece of a project from a co-worker or a necessary answer for your boss, not getting what you need when you need it is frustrating. Waiting for others reduces your productivity. Use these tips to follow up on items due to you so you can improve your productivity, meet your deadlines, and consequently be successful.
Be persistent and smart about following up
You don’t have to follow up every day because doing so might cause people to avoid your calls and pings. Periodically ask for a status update by phone, email, or chat. I use Outlook to help me by setting a reminder on emails I send that require someone to complete a task. I usually set those reminders out 1-2 days with the reminder time set to my end of the day. When the reminder pops us, and they haven’t responded, I reply all asking for another update and also set another reminder. Leveraging technology to help you follow up with people improves your productivity because you aren’t having to manually track who owes you what and by when.
Don’t apologize
Resist the urge to apologize for persisting when you are eagerly awaiting a response. You deserve a reply before so you can move forward with your work. Other people don’t have the right to cause you to lose productivity. Following up is not something you need to be sorry for.
Describe next steps
When all else fails, you have to describe how you’ll move forward so you can stay productive and avoid missing your deadline. When you are sending that final email, you will know so end the message by detailing what will happen next if you don’t get what you need. It is important to make it clear to the other person what the result would be due to their lack of response.
Say please and thank you to improve your productivity
Manners make all the difference. Always say please when requesting items from someone. They will be more inclined to deliver what is needed when you ask politely. When they deliver it, respond with thank you because if they know you appreciate their effort, they are more inclined to do so again in the future. Manners influence other people to be more attentive to your requests and demonstrating good manners makes it hard for them to avoid you.
4. Journal your day to improve your productivity and success
Journaling is a powerful performance habit because it helps you gain clarity, become more focused, and improves your productivity. When you reflect on your actions and progress, you become happier and can reduce stress.
Leverage journaling to improve your productivity and accelerate your success but make sure to incorporate these elements. Doing so will maximize the effectiveness of journaling your day.
Journal your daily wins
Toot your own horn with this element of your daily journal. Celebrating your wins is important because it motivates you to take more action. It increases your productivity. Taking a few minutes to write down your successes helps you see progress, boosts your confidence and helps you know the value you bring. Even more, when review time comes, you won’t struggle to identify all the great work you did over the year.
Journal your low-lights of the day
It is as important to journal about things that didn’t go well. Understanding the opportunities for improvement improves your productivity because you can apply the lessons learned tomorrow. What valuable insights did you uncover? How can you carry those lessons over to tomorrow? Taking a birds-eye view of your actions, experience, and learnings increases your productivity and equip you to reach your goals tomorrow.
If you don’t take the time to reflect on what you can do better, you end up stuck. You get the same results and end up wondering why you aren’t more successful. Take a few minutes to write down what went wrong and why to avoid repeating it.
Journal your thoughts and ideas to improve your productivity
Thoughts and ideas pop into your head frequently throughout the day. Writing them down helps you gain clarity because you are taking time to process the ideas. You never know when those thoughts or ideas could become the next big win for you and your organization.
Journaling your thoughts and ideas help create new opportunities, solve problems, and, more importantly, reflect on your behavior. As a result, you will improve your productivity and accelerate your success.
Journal your gratitude
Write down the things or people that brought you joy. Journaling your gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to be happier and reduce stress and negativity. When you have a positive outlook, you improve your productivity and accelerate your success.
Write down at least three things or people you are grateful for and focus on those feelings for as long as you need to. You could write down how someone helped you with a task, character traits you are proud of, or recent achievements. It could even be something as small as the sunrise or flowers blooming in your garden. The best part of journaling gratitude is training your brain to see the positive and actively look for things to be happy about rather than negativity.
5. Show appreciation and radiate kindness
I would argue this is the most important thing you should do before ending your day. Appreciation improves productivity, increases morale, and keeps people engaged. Above all, showing appreciation increases loyalty, and that directly impacts your ability to be successful. Send an email, leave a voicemail, or randomly send a chat message to someone to thank them for what they did for you today. Be specific and always stay genuine.
- Be openly thankful.
- Establish yourself as a positive force.
- Demonstrate hope and confidence in the future.
- Express your gratitude equitably without showing favorites.
- Keep away from platitudes.
Showing appreciation and radiating kindness improves your productivity and accelerates your success. Be present, and be genuine, with everything you say.
