Three Tips for Maintaining Productivity
1. Move
Go for a walk around your workspace. Jump up and down. Dance. Any type of movement or physical exercise helps stimulate blood flow in the body and helps oxygenate the brain. This helps to improve engagement and focus and allows you to reap the benefits of a longer break more quickly. Dancing, jumping or any kind of movement that is associated with emotion can be especially effective, similar to success posturing. By briefly acting in a way that you have previously associated with excitement or energy, you can put yourself into that state. You could dance or do jumping jacks for 30 seconds and improve your next hour.
2. Change Your Location If You Can
Face the other way. Move to a different room. Go to Starbucks. Our brains thrive on novelty. We are constantly taking in tons of information about our surroundings, and that information has an effect on how we think. When you change your location, especially to somewhere with any new stimuli, your brain becomes more malleable for a moment to accommodate that change. That flexibility allows us to view problems from a new perspective than before, which can be highly valuable to productivity. Plus you get the benefits from movement mentioned above.
3. Break Your Work Down and Build Yourself Up
Humans respond best to clear tasks and rewards. That’s just how our brains work. Break up any big project into smaller sets of tasks that need to get done, and give yourself a small reward to look forward to at the end of a task, like a cup of hot cocoa. These small rewards will help you focus on the current task, and not let the other things on your to-do list prevent you from being productive at the moment. The rewards don’t have to be physical, the important part is to celebrate somehow the completion of small tasks to bolster future motivation.
Sources:
https://thecusp.com.au/productive-according-neuroscience-productivity-hacks/17702
https://blog.trello.com/coffee-shop-effect-boosts-productivity