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For busy professionals, the idea of sitting silently for ten or twenty minutes can feel pointless, frustrating, or just plain unrealistic. You’re checking emails on the way to a meeting, finishing paperwork as you eat lunch, and on a work call as you commute home. When are you going to fit in time to meditate? If that sounds at all familiar, meditation could be an incredibly powerful tool for you.

Slow the Pace

Demanding work can often encourage a frantic pace. We feel that we need to rush from one thing to the next, multitasking wherever possible, to get it all done. When we move this quickly though, we’re often not performing at our best. It makes it easy to forget things and let smaller tasks slip through the cracks. This usually ends up costing us more time in the long run. If we can slow the pace and move more intentionally through our day, we can often get the same amount done, without that intense busy feeling. We won’t need to backtrack as much because we’ll be able to give tasks our full attention, and we can stay on top of our game, not sacrificing quality so we can rush to something else. It might feel counterintuitive to slow down, and for many of us it’s difficult, but the benefits of doing so often make it more productive than working at a rushed pace all day.

Recharge Your Brain

Most of us have experienced an afternoon energy drop, a frustrating problem we can’t seem to solve, or the sense of being stuck in a fog. These are all often signs that our brains need a break. When we try to push through them, we’re moving forward on half power, dramatically limiting our productivity. Though you may be feeling the pressure in these situations, taking them as a cue to meditate can turn them into fuel for the rest of your day. Giving your brain time to pause lets it recharge. You’ll often come back to your work more energized, clear headed, and creative.

Manage Distractions

Though many people think meditation is about totally silencing the mind, it’s often more about watching the mind. It’s taking a birds-eye-view of your thinking and trying not to attach to any one thought. As you sit quietly, focused on the present, you’ll likely notice how easy it is to get carried away by a thought. One minute you’re present, the next you’re halfway down your grocery list. With practice, we become more aware of the way our mind distracts us, and we learn how to better manage those distractions. This is a skill we can directly apply in the workplace when we encounter distractions there.

Lower Stress

Stress can wreak havoc on our productivity. When our minds are full of worries and things to do, it’s difficult to work at our best. Stress limits our capacity to problem solve and it lowers our ability to focus. Daily meditation can have powerful effects on our stress levels overall, and it can be a great tool to use when we find ourselves in a particularly stressful situation.

Sitting quietly and letting your brain recharge can have a powerful impact on your productivity. Though it can feel illogical for ambitious professionals to slow down, it’s worth noting that many of today’s top leaders and thinkers meditate regularly. If you’ve never meditated, know that it doesn’t necessarily mean a silent hour of sitting cross-legged on the floor. It’s a flexible practice that you make work for you. Maybe you find five or ten minutes sitting in your chair at your desk. Or perhaps a quiet walk at lunch gives you the space to practice. There are even some great apps out there to guide you. If you haven’t given it a try or want to get back into a routine, don’t underestimate the value of meditation.

TED Talks are one of my favorite resources. They feature fascinating individuals speaking on an incredibly wide range of topics. If you’re looking to improve in a certain area or learn something new about a topic that interests you, there’s likely a talk (or several) that can offer new insights and information. The subject of productivity is no exception. There are many great TED Talks out there that can give professionals powerful tools and ideas to increase their productivity. Here are a few of my favorites:

Kelly McGonigal: How to make stress your friend

We all get stressed at work sometimes. Depending on your job, you may be in a chronic state of stress that seriously limits your productivity. No matter how frequently you feel it, chances are you don’t consider stress to be a positive. In this talk, psychologist Kelly McGonigal challenges that assumption. She explains that we don’t need to write stress off as a bad thing in every situation. Instead, she explores the idea that how we respond to stress is what determines its impact on our lives. In fact, she encourages you to see stress as a positive. She also shares an important strategy for responding to stress that involves reaching out to others.

Got a Meeting? Talk a Walk

In this short talk, Nilofer Merchant shares a single strategy that you can implement right away. The next time you have a meeting, step away from the desk, out of the office, and outside for a stroll. It’s one of the few times multitasking can be beneficial, and it can even help to give your creative thinking a boost.

How To Multiply Your Time

In this talk, Rory Vaden challenges all you think to be true about time management. He explores what’s wrong with our current beliefs and explains how and why they’re outdated. He then dives into what needs to change. Take, for example, the to-do list. Vaden argues that while many of us rely on this list to tell us what we need to do, we really need to be focused on the things we don’t need to do so that we can eliminate them. Give it a watch for some counter-intuitive suggestions that may help you better manage your time.

Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

This humorous talk delivers some powerful insights. Tim Urban starts with the example of his college thesis, a large project with a clear deadline. He shows a graph with time on the x-axis and amount of work on the y-axis. First, he shows how the average non-procrastinator’s workflow might look, with time put in throughout the duration of the project. Then he shows his, which is empty of data until the last possible point on that x-axis. The audience laughs, suggesting many of us are all too familiar with this workflow of putting something off until the last possible minute. This talk gives some great points for reflection and asks us to rethink why we procrastinate. If this habit interferes with your time management, this talk could help you kick it.

If you’re looking for some productivity inspiration, TED Talks deliver. While these are 4 of my favorite talks on the subject, there are countless others out there full of useful information. Do you have any TED Talks that have improved your time-management skills? Share them in the comments.

We all have different work styles, especially when it comes to time management. Whether you’ve been operating naturally, or you’ve been actively trying to improve your skills, having a framework for understanding how you relate to time can be highly useful. This week, I wanted to share six different styles of managing one’s time. Maybe you’ll fit one perfectly, or maybe you’ll have elements of several. The goal isn’t to fit into a box. It’s to better understand how we work so that we can pinpoint opportunities to improve. Let’s dive into the different styles:

Hopper

This style of time management goes hand in hand with feeling busy. Hoppers tend to work on multiple things at once and switch between tasks before finishing one. This lets them get involved with many different things, but it isn’t usually conducive to productivity. As those different tasks start to pile up, it can become difficult to stay organized, meet deadlines, and follow through. For those with a hopper time-management style, getting organized and minimizing distractions is key.

Hyper Focus

This style is the opposite of the hopper. Instead of constantly moving between tasks, people in this work style are consumed by the task at hand. This can produce high-quality work, but it can also increase stress and allow other important things to fall through the cracks. These people often feel like they can’t make it through their daily to-do list. Time-blocking can be really useful here. If you tend towards this style, you may need to set an alarm to remind you it’s time to switch tasks.

Big Picture

Big-picture thinkers are great at looking at overarching strategies and general plans. They can be highly creative and quick to spot smart solutions to challenges. The downside is that these thinkers often have trouble when it comes to details. They spend the majority of their time focusing on vision and strategy and not enough on the smaller details necessary to execute. For big-picture thinkers, routines and collaborating with more detail-focused individuals can help them achieve a balance.

Perfectionist

For perfectionists, it’s all in the details — usually too much in the details. Unlike big-picture thinkers, perfectionists spend the majority of their time focused on the small things, sometimes at the expense of the larger vision. They may miss a deadline, for example, because they stall their progress seeking perfection on a single step. They also tend to have very high standards for themselves and rarely say no when someone asks them to take on a project. Prioritizing and saying no when necessary are two important strategies for perfectionists.

Impulsive

This style of time management often means operating without a plan. They enjoy the feeling of acting spontaneously and dread the idea of a rigidly fixed schedule. These people tend to operate well in the face of unexpected challenges, but they often struggle with deadlines and organization in their day-to-day work. Incorporating some routines into their lives and working to design a schedule that is clear but flexible can help them to succeed.

Cliff Hanger

These people will often say, ‘I work really well under pressure’. And while that can be a great skill to have, you don’t want it to become your norm. People with this time-management style depend on that pressure for motivation to complete a task. This can lead to rushing to finish a project, producing lower-quality work, and elevating your stress levels. Cliff-hangers can often benefit from working to get an accurate sense of how long certain tasks take them and scheduling windows in their calendar to work on longer-term projects in advance.

Understanding how you work can give you some great insights into where you excel and where you may need to improve. With the awareness you gain, you can tweak your time-management practices to improve productivity. Which style or styles resonate with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For busy professionals, schedules often guide our days. If we don’t take control, this means that external demands can leave us running around without clear structure. On the other hand, if we harness the power of a good schedule, we can use it as a tool to drive our success. One of the best scheduling methods out there for me is time blocking. This strategy entails breaking your workday down into blocks of time attached to a specific task or type of work. Rather than only scheduling in meetings and other commitments with clear timeframes and relying on a to-do list for everything else, time blocking helps you maximize every minute of your day. Here are a few ways I make this strategy work for me:

Make It Visual

Time blocking is especially great for visual learners. It allows you to get a big-picture view of your day and the work you’ll be completing. Whether you do this by hand in a notebook or digitally on a device, actually marking out the timeframes and writing in the specific work focus for that block is key. Even color coding can be a great visual tool in this system. Rather than looking at a lengthy black-and-white to-do list, you’ll be looking at a clear, segmented day.

Batch Tasks

Often, administrative tasks like making phone calls and sending emails can intrude on our focus throughout the day. Even things like managing a social-media business page can disrupt our workflow if we don’t plan them properly. When you don’t use time blocking, these types of tasks often fit in whenever you think of them. You may be in the middle of a project when you remember you wanted to send an email to a client, or perhaps you’re preparing for a meeting when you realize you didn’t share your blog post on Facebook. These interruptions undermine productivity. Consider batching these tasks instead of letting them grab your attention every few minutes throughout your day. For example, create a specific window for email correspondence where you tackle your inbox. You may even put a few of these in your schedule. By checking emails in a batch like this, you’re protecting your concentration and productivity in other parts of your day.

Know Yourself

Time blocking lets you craft your schedule around what works for you. Are you a morning person who works best in their first few hours at the office? If so, then block off those hours for your most important and challenging tasks. If your burst of energy and inspiration tends to come later in the day, use mornings for more routine tasks that don’t require as much creativity and problem solving, and block of your afternoons for more important work. It’s also important to observe how much time you should give yourself. Not every block needs to be the same size, and they’ll likely fluctuate depending on the task. Most people are most efficient with blocks between 30 and 90 minutes. Even if you need to give one project four hours of your day, it’s probably best to break that up, even if it’s just with a few shorter pauses.

Include Breaks

Time blocking emphasizes the importance of breaks. If you’ve blocked off every part of your day with work, you’re not going to be at your most productive. Time blocking allows you to draw breaks into your day and reminds you to stick to them. I’d recommend including short 5-minute pauses where you step away from your desk and give your brain a chance to recharge, in addition to longer breaks like your lunch hour.

Stay Flexible

I also leave space in my time-blocked schedule for the unexpected. I’ll leave buffer room around a meeting in case it starts late or runs long, and I’ll leave myself some additional time in case a client needs an unexpected call, or I need more time to finish up a project. Leaving enough space in your schedule to be flexible is key to it being realistic.

Time blocking is one of the best scheduling strategies out there if you know how to use it to your advantage. When we visually break up our days and concentrate our attention in this way, we’re able to maximize productivity. Do you use time blocking to stay on track? Let me know what you think.

Positivity and productivity are closely linked. Those with a positive mindset tend to have more energy, less stress, stronger problem-solving skills, and better connections with those around them — all things that support productivity. It’s understandable that we can’t be positive 100% of the time, but it’s important to regularly check in with your mindset and see where you’re at, especially if you want to work efficiently. Here are a few strategies that can help to cultivate a more positive mindset, and in turn, give your productivity a boost:

Gratitude

Regularly reminding yourself of the things you’re grateful for is a smart strategy to cultivate positivity. You’ve likely heard of a gratitude practice where you take a moment each day to write down a few things that you’re thankful for. This is a great habit to adopt, and it’s especially beneficial when done in the mornings. It will help you show up to the office with your mind on things that make you happy. In addition to keeping your own log of thing things you appreciate, it’s equally important to express that gratitude. Check in with how you engage in the office. It’s easy to get complacent and take things for granted from time to time, but when we notice the helpful actions of our coworkers or patient assistance from a manager, taking just a couple seconds to say thank you can really change the dynamic.

Community

The people you spend time with play a large role in your mindset. This can be both in and out of work. For those spending 40 hours a week with coworkers in an office though, it’s important to consider the energy at play in that community. If there are those coworkers who always seem consumed with something negative, be cautious of how much time you spend interacting with them. Consider how you spend your lunch breaks and the types of conversations you’re having in the workplace. Strive to connect with those coworkers who are generally happy in the office, who are motivated to do their best work, and who care about the work culture they’re a part of. The community you have outside of the office can contribute to your success there as well. Focus on the mindsets of the people you spend your time with, and set yourself up for success by surrounding yourself with positivity.

Notice

It’s little things like complaining, criticizing, and judging that can rapidly erode positivity. While, of course, when directed outward, these can create a negative environment, they can also do a great deal of harm just going on inside our minds. We may be thinking them about a coworker, or even more often, about ourselves. The best thing you can do to combat this is to cultivate some awareness. Just by tuning in to your thoughts more closely and being on the lookout for the negative ones that may creep in, you can help maintain a more positive mindset.

Boundaries

Another strategy many professionals can benefit from is setting and maintaining boundaries around their work and personal lives. It can be tough to stay positive when you bring your work home with you every day. Many people will begin to resent their jobs, feeling like their personal lives are suffering as a result of their work. When you put yourself in this type of situation, you make it difficult to maintain that positive outlook. Give yourself some clear boundaries like, for example, not checking work emails after a certain time. These can preserve your positivity both in and out of work.

Goals

Finally, stay in touch with your goals. If you slip into that place where you’re just going through the motions, positivity, and, in turn, productivity, will likely decline. On the flip side, when you give yourself new challenges to tackle and achievements to strive towards, you bring a different level of energy to your work. The rewarding feeling of accomplishment fuels a positive mindset that makes us feel more fulfilled by the work we’re doing.

Though it may seem like a simple connection, when you tune into the relationship between positivity and productivity, you can really change the way you work. Cultivating and maintaining a positive mindset can take work at times, but it’s always worth the effort. Do you have any strategies for staying positive in the workplace? Share them with us.

Though we don’t always consider our sonic environment when looking for ways to improve our workflow, studies suggest that music can have an impact on our productivity levels. Interestingly, it’s not as simple as music being good or bad for productivity. Instead, it depends on the type of work you’re doing and the type of music you’re listening to. Here are some key things to keep in mind if you want to use music to your benefit.

Why Listen

There are many reasons to reach for your headphones during the workday. Tuning into some music can help you tune out distractions, it can make repetitive tasks more pleasant, it can increase focus, and it can provide some added motivation. The key to finding productivity success here is being intentional with the type of work and music you pair.

When to Listen

In general, music can boost our productivity in many types of work. Whether we’re writing a blog post, crunching some numbers, or creating a new marketing campaign, the right tunes can help us work more efficiently. There is one exception to this. When you’re trying to learn new information, studies show that listening to music will work against you. So, before you throw on your headphones, think about the type of task at hand, and if learning is required, maybe go for silence; otherwise, go ahead a hit play.

What to Listen to

They type of music that will best support your productivity is going to depend on the type of task you’re working on and your current state of mind. If your energy levels are low, an upbeat tune can help you from fading. If you’re doing more mindless tasks, lyrics can be fine, however, if you need more focus, instrumental tracks or ambient noise are your best bets. Another thing to keep in mind if you really need to focus — playing something familiar is often more beneficial than choosing something you’ve never heard before. Classical music is a great choice for a variety of tasks, electronic music can help you maintain focus without disturbing your thought process, and even video game music can help you work more efficiently.

How to Listen

Lucky for us, there are countless ways to listen to music. From free options like YouTube and Pandora to subscriptions services like Spotify, it’s often just a matter of clicking a few buttons. Many platforms like these even offer playlist specifically geared towards focus and productivity. If you really want to immerse yourself in the full benefits of music on your productivity, check out the app Focus@Will that boats a 4x increase in productivity. With some interesting scientific research behind it, this app helps users find their perfect focus sounds.

Working to achieve greater productivity doesn’t need to be a daunting chore. When you embrace strategies like listening to the right tunes, improving your productivity can be enjoyable. Do you have any go-to genres or artists that help you get through the workday? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

While it’s often useful to look into strategies that can boost overall productivity, these usually require some time to build into your schedule. Even then, sometimes we still need an extra boost to get through a challenging project or a busy afternoon. For those times when you need to supercharge your productivity, it’s great to have a few ideas in your pocket that can help right away. Here are 5 strategies to help increase productivity on demand:

Set a Timer

Especially on busy days, it can be tough to focus on a single task. Unfortunately, multi-tasking often brings down productivity, even though we intend for it to do the opposite. If you catch yourself losing steam and notice your focus on five different things at once, setting a timer can help. Assign yourself a single task — for those really distracted days, you can even write it on a post-it to keep nearby. Then, assign yourself a window of time to work on that task and that task only. This shouldn’t be a three-hour chunk of your day. Instead, it should be a more focused burst. If you have a handful of tasks you’re going to use this method for, half-hour windows are often perfect. If it’s one major project, you can give yourself a bit more time, but try to keep it at or below 90 minutes. You can always return to it in another window, but you should pause at the end of each window to take a short break or work on something else.

Move

Sometimes a drop in productivity is the result of a drop in energy. Many of us are familiar with that afternoon slump that can start to sink in around 3pm. Those are valuable hours of the workday, though, and we need to keep ourselves on track. To combat that low-energy, something as simple as moving your body can often do the trick. While a longer-term strategy may also include looking at your diet and sleep habits, when you’re in a pinch, getting your heart pumping can revive your productivity. Not everyone can head to the gym whenever they feel a bit tired, but most of us can at least take a brisk walk or climb some stairs. These simple activities, done for even just five or ten minutes, can be the quick recharge you need to productively power through your afternoon.

Organize Your Space

Often, we’re asking our brain to work in a similar way throughout the day. There are probably two or three things that you do most often in any given workday. It might be computer work, talking with clients, and filling out paperwork, for example. Sometimes, our brains just need to work in a different way. Organizing your space is a great way to keep yourself engaged and present while giving your mind a different type of task. This low-pressure physical organization can help your brain recharge and the neat and organized result can leave you feeling inspired to get back to work.

Remove Distractions

Distractions are one of the biggest threats to productivity. In many lines of work, they’re inevitable. We can’t just turn off our phones and email notifications for the entire day, and may professionals pride themselves for being on-call. If you feel your productivity starting to decline though, it’s time to take a look at where your attention is going and where you need it to go. While you don’t need to shut off your phone for the day, you might give yourself an hour of undisturbed time to take your focus back. Closing an office door, exiting out of unnecessary internet tabs, and getting clutter out of sight can all help you avoid common distractions. While you might not be able to keep these things up all day every day, they’re good strategies when you really need a boost.

Take a Break

I often come back to this suggestion because I find it’s one of the more difficult ones for busy professionals to try — and also one of the most beneficial. When you’re worried about low productivity, the last thing you probably feel like doing is stepping away from your work, but sometimes that’s the best thing you can do. Work is demanding for many of us, and giving your mind and body a chance to relax during the day is key for protecting productivity. Many of us say we’re taking a break but bring our phones along, check social media, or talk about work with a coworker. While these things might not be getting work done, they aren’t a true break. If you want to really feel the benefits, take just ten minutes to disconnect. Put all your devices down, take some deep breaths, and get your mind off work. When you return to work-mode, you’ll likely find you’re feeling more productive.

While making larger life changes to support greater productivity is a powerful strategy, sometimes you need an instant boost. These 5 things help me to quickly stop a decline in productivity and get me back to working at full capacity. Do you have any strategies you use to boost productivity in a pinch? Share them in the comments.