Optimise Your Productivity and Focus: 11 Sterling Strategies to GSD

Improve Productivity and Focus, especially when working from home.

After consulting with the experts and reading countless books, we have collated 11 of our Favourite Strategies to Optimise your Productivity

During this challenging time, many of you will now be working from home. Without being fully connected to your colleagues and management team, how can you stay on top of your agenda?

Differentiate between ‘Busy’ and ‘Effective’

1. Are you aware of the difference between being ‘busy’ and being ‘effective’? Think about the tasks that you do during the day. Which ones make you look and feel busy and which ones contribute to you actually achieving a goal? Far too much time is spent on paperwork, e-mails and random internet browsing. Focus on the important, but not urgent tasks, rather than the urgent, non-important tasks.

Define the Non-Negotiable Tasks

2. Prioritise: Each day aim to work on one priority large task, even if it is just one thing, let it be the focus of at least 1-2hrs of your time. This should be non-negotiable, so that by the end of the day you have at least developed or completed the one most important task.

Break Down your Day into Time Blocks

3. Apply Time Blocking to improve your productivity when working from home. This involves scheduling and planning your tasks the evening before so that the following day you know exactly on what—and when—you need to be working. Break the day into 15-30 minute slots and be disciplined about sticking to your schedule. You will be amazed by how much more you can achieve!

Track your Social Media Usage!

4. Spending too long on social media? Use the activity tracking app on your phone so that you are aware of how much time you are wasting on social media…then limit your time browsing other people’s feeds.

Create a Working Environment

5. Create an environment conducive for working. Set up your workspace in a tidy, organised ‘working’ environment. Get dressed properly-this helps to get into the ‘working’ mindset. Definitely avoid working from bed!

Try the Pomodoro Technique

6. Use the pomodoro technique. This involves setting a timer for 25 minutes, working solidly on a task for this time—no distractions—and then taking 5 minute breaks. In this way you are interval working—like interval training so that you can put all your energy and focus into one task at a time and then take a break to refresh and restart. Here, at LIV NRG, we use the Tomato Timer religiously!

A New Kind of Diet…

7. Take a Media Diet: Set your phone on airplane mode and block all notifications on your laptop. This way can you work, distraction free. This is particularly effective when implemented in the morning. Keep your phone on Airplane mode until 11am and focus on your agenda…before allowing anyone else’s agenda to disrupt yours!

Train your Brain

8. Practice Meditation: Give yourself 5 minutes to focus on your inhalation and exhalation. Each time the mind wanders, take it back to the breath. The more you practise placing your attention on one thing, the easier it becomes to focus. You are literally training your brain. Mind management is one of the keys for focus and relaxation.

Add Butter to your Coffee

9. Heard of Fat Tea or Bulletproof Coffee? Blending coffee or tea with butter, ghee or coconut oil slows down the release of caffeine into your system—giving you a steady a source of caffeine and ketone energy for the brain. What are Ketones? Ketones are an alternative fuel source to glucose which the brain prefers. Without the sugar—from milk—your blood sugar levels stay stable enabling you to focus for longer.

Heard of the Endocannabinoid System?

10. Activate your Endocannabinoid System, AKA Relax: Try CBD oil with your coffee. The CBD combined with the caffeine will help you to simultaneously relax and feel stimulated, resulting in a calm focus. Learn about CBD supplementation here.

Get Blood Flow to your Brain

11. Take Movement Snacks: Inspired by Darryl Edwards, incorporate regular movement breaks throughout your working day. Get up, walk past that vending machine, do some jumping jacks or standing lunges. Being active stimulates blood flow around your whole body…activating your brain and improving your ability to stay focussed. Watch this video in which Darryl Edwards demonstrates ‘movement snacks’.

Resources to take your productivity and focus even further…

Want to optimise your productivity and focus like a ninja? We recommend these brilliant books: Mindlift: Mental Fitness for the Modern Mind by Kasper van der Meulen, Animal Moves by Darryl Edwards and learn how to easily stay active all day. Learn even more about productivity and generating results by reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown.

Check out our LIV NRG video in which Martin Tobias, CEO of Upgrade Labs recommends the Keto Diet as the diet for focus! Watch the video clip here.

The Brain ON Guide

Have you signed up for the LIV NRG Brain ON guide? This is a 12 week series of recommendations from international experts on how to optimise your cognitive performance and focus, through quality sleep, movement, diet and mindset.

Follow the above ways to Improve your Productivity and Focus and you will be amazed at how much you can achieve!

Share with us your tops tactics and ways to improve your productivity and focus in the comments section below. Follow us on instagram to keep up to date with latest optimisation tricks and hacks.