Whether you’re working from home or are back in an office, there’s a critical productivity element you may be overlooking: the lighting. In prior installments of this series, I talked about how exposure to lifestyle or environmental factors such as mental health resources, music, indoor plants, exercise, and natural caffeine can elevate your performance.
You’re sitting at your desk. The phone rings and breaks your concentration. When you pick it up, you notice it’s nearly lunchtime, and you’ve been working for a few hours, without distractions. While getting up from the chair, your legs feel completely numb. You take stock of the project on your screen and realize you’re almost done. At a quick glance, you also realize that it’s done well 😀 Congratulations, you’ve just experienced the flow state!
It’s time to get out of the productivity box once again in a search for surprising new elements that can make our days at work better. In the past months, we discovered how coffee influences work efficiency, exercised our way into the flow, and learned to break the mental health paradigm at the workplace. Now, let’s take a deep dive into what nature has to offer.
You’ve heard the phrase being in the flow. It’s commonly used when you work, exercise or even when reading a good book. It turns out, it’s not just a saying, but an actual state of being. And for those who want to better focus and succeed at work, the flow state is the ideal mindset.
Moving your body regularly helps you fight off chronic disease, while improving your overall mood and keeping your waistline small, but staying fit is about more than looking good. Plus, the promise of a better body is likely not enough of a motivator to get you to the gym anyway.
Research from the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO), however, may have discovered the motivation you need to start working out once and for all. According to HERO, employees who ate healthy meals and exercised on a regular basis had better job performance and lower absenteeism. In fact, employees who ate healthy all day long were 25 percent more likely to have higher job performance.
Most entrepreneurs are quick to experience fatigue. It’s only natural. There are simply so many decisions to make. Anything can go wrong, anytime. And some days are plain awful. Some days you might want to shut everything down. And move somewhere and fish for a living. Or fix fishing nets.
It is the work. Being an entrepreneur is a lot of work. And everything about that work is special. You deal with countless items every day. Product, strategy, development, marketing. New markets, optimizing. Or too much optimizing.
Productivity hacks are not a cheat. Instead, think of them as an enhancement to your productivity. A regular working experience has certain limitations. Entrepreneurship does not.
Productivity is a key issue for entrepreneurs. It has grown as an issue along with the number of startups. And the knowledge base on productivity is growing. Along with it, so is confusion. There are claims that the 6-hour workday is optimal. Others put in 60 hours of work every week and go on city breaks in weekends.
The world is crazy for enhancing productivity. Why? Maybe it’s because we’re so far from where we started. And we cannot reconcile our current success. Or maybe it is standard greed. We want more. And when you want more, you know what to do. Increase productivity. Or maybe we’re scared that in the future 80% of jobs will be lost to AI. It’s still productivity that we’ll be concerned with then.