Anyone who has eaten a big lunch during a working day will know what you eat DOES affect your performance at work. You settle back at your desk feeling sluggish and sleepy, with a burning desire to just sit and let your lunch settle down and with your desire to be productive somewhere between low and non-existent.
The foods you need
When it comes to increasing your productivity and ensuring you’re alert, you want to ensure you’re adding the following foods to your diet:
- Fish
- Dark chocolate
- Nuts and seeds
- Whole grains
- Avocado
- Fresh vegetables
- Fresh fruit especially Blueberries
But food isn’t the only thing that can affect us at work. Our health and lifestyle choices can all affect our productivity at work and our time management.
Taking regular breaks
This is something we can easily forget to do, especially when we’re focused on an end result or deadline. We worry that we’ll lose the flow or focus, if we stop. However in reality, the opposite is actually true. Taking regular breaks (taking ten minutes after every 50 minutes of work) leads to an increase in productivity.
Taking a break away from your desk allows your muscles and joints time to recover from being in the same position for long periods of time. It also relieves tiredness and increases alertness leading to an increase in mental activity too. But taking a step away also gives you a change of scenery and time for your subconscious to work on problems and issues you may be experiencing often providing solutions that would have otherwise evaded you.
Get adequate sleep
Getting inadequate sleep can leave you feeling moody, irritable and unable to focus on the tasks at hand. Your creativity and memory both suffer the effects of inadequate sleep, meaning your productivity will therefore suffer, but so will your time management, as you’ll find yourself struggling with tasks that include logical reasoning, complex thoughts and mathematical processes.
Ideally you need to have between 7 and 8 hours sleep each night, in order to recharge your batteries and keep stress and illness at bay.
Exercise regularly
We all know that we need to exercise regularly (30 minutes, 4-5 times a week), in order to stay fit, healthy and to help keep our weight down. But exercise also plays an important part in your work productivity too. When you exercise the flow of blood (and therefore, oxygen) to your brain increases leading to a sharpened awareness and increase in energy.
Exercising regularly doesn’t have to just mean going to the gym. Adding exercise into your daily routine can mean using the stairs instead of the lift or going for a walk every lunch break. This can help improve your cardiovascular health meaning you’ll have more stamina to meet the physical demands of your job and keep anxiety and depression at bay.
Your health and lifestyle inevitably affect your productivity and time management, both at work and at home so why not make sure they’re improving them, as opposed to hindering them?
How much does your health and lifestyle affect your working day? What simple things can you implement, to change this for the better? Why not share your intentions in the comments box below?
Image Joshua Resnick/Dollar Photo Club