Top 5 Ways to Use Mindfulness to Get More Done at Work

No matter how productive you are, if you aren’t focusing on the most useful parts of your job that produce the results you’re after, then getting more done won’t make a huge difference to your success. So before you get down to work you need to identify which activities in your job are actually worth doing (there are so many classic business books written about this, so I’m not going to go into that! Here’s a cool summary of the classic, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, as a great start.).

What mindfulness can do is help you get a ‘view from the balcony’ of your job or your business (if you’re the boss). Steven Covey’s Seven Habits all require mindfulness to be really good at them. And I’ve shown in my articles about forming new habits that mindfulness is key.

So here are my top 5 tips for using mindfulness to be more effective at work;

1. Take time out to view how you do your job ‘from the balcony’

How do you spend your time? What activities are actually helping you to succeed and what activities are less important or even total time wasters? Spend a few days or a week being mindful of how you spend your working hours. Keep a log of what you have spent time on each day and review it at the end of the day. Reflect on what was productive and do more of that, while ruthlessly dropping the tasks that are not producing real outcomes in your job.

2. Identify three priority tasks each day

Once you work out what are the most valuable tasks you can do, start every day by writing down the Top 3 most important tasks you want to do that day. Make sure you do these tasks before going on to the less important things or especially the time wasters (Facebook?!). Keep coming back to the list throughout the day to remind you.

3. Focus on one thing at a time – do not multi-task

Just focus on completing one thing at a time. Start the day by focusing on your most important task and do not try to do other things at the same time. Switch off all distractions – email program, phones, shut the door – while you do your main task. Research shows that each time you switch between tasks, it takes around 30 seconds of dead time before you are fully focused on the next task and can be effective. So if you switch tasks a lot, you could be wasting an hour or more each day on dead time while your brain tries to refocus! Multi-tasking is also shown to result in 3-4 times as many errors than focusing on one task.

4. Schedule times of the day for the less important things

Block out times of the day when you will respond to emails, calls and people and when you have meetings. Doing all these things in blocks of time can let you multi-task for a while, and then go off and focus on important work in an uninterrupted block of time.

5. Minimise the overload of information – emails, news, social media etc.

We receive an avalanche of information in this hyper-connected world and the mind just can’t process or retain it all. It’s difficult to be mindful when you are being bombarded with stimulation. So it’s really important to minimise the information we try to take in and just read what’s useful and important. It’s also a real time waster sifting through endless social media posts!

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