Stop What You’re Doing!—Nina Godiwalla
For all you professional multitaskers with short attention spans! Here are three easy ways you can slow down to speed-up.1. Minimize distractions. NEWSFLASH! Your Type-A brain is underperforming by trying to overperform. Too many of the business professionals feel they need to be doing at least three things at once—eating lunch and checking email while on a conference call—to feel productive. Don’t be a sucker for distractions. Staying focused on one task makes you more productive. So shut your instant messaging and Facebook. You are just making your workday longer than needed. Check them a few times a day. Same goes for email. Don’t stop what you’re doing every 43 seconds to see if you’ve got a new message.
2. Control Your Day. Most of us have a list of more than 20 things we need to get done. Instead of looking at the daunting list every day and feeling overwhelmed, write down three things you will realistically accomplish in a day and stick to accomplishing those three. Creating realistic goals makes you more productive overall. Being overly ambitious just leaves you feeling defeated.
3. Find 10 minutes. Even in your busiest day, taking ten minutes to relax will actually help you be more productive for the rest of the day. By actively choosing to take a break, you will feel more in control. Stress is often caused by the overwhelming feeling of incompletion, and our thoughts tend to be fear-based: “I won’t be able to finish this” or “My manager will find out I don’t know what I’m doing.” Take 10 minutes to step outside, listen to music or eat your lunch. Another option, you can download this 10-minute body-scan mediation to your mp3 player for a short mental break. http://www.mindworkscorp.com/resources.html
So remember, just like a marathon runner, you need to pace yourself to win!
2011 Texas Conference for Women speaker Nina Godiwalla is CEO of MindWorks and the bestselling author of “Suits: A Woman on Wall Street.” MindWorks provides stress management and meditation training to corporations and other professional organizations. Invite MindWorks to host your next corporate training! www.mindworkscorp.com