4 tricks to help you stay focused on your work

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

As they say, all ingenious is simple. It doesn't take much to feel good and do better at work: you need to worry about your physical and mental comfort.

1. Chemists know how to be happier

Morning. Flowers bloom, chicks pierce the shell with their beaks, spikelets stretch upward, all living things walk, crawl and drag out of their holes, young deer beat with their hooves, move their horns and begin to compete. And you - yes, yes, it is you - who have been lying in bed for half a day and still feel tired. And do you think that circadian rhythms (or internal clocks), which affect all living things, do not apply to you in any way? C'mon.

Your internal chronometer is controlled by a small group of neurons - the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It is located in front of the hypothalamus. This part of the brain regulates the chemical reactions that determine when you are alert and when you are sluggish. The diagram shows how to synchronize your activity with hormone levels.

2. Love what you do

Studs Terkel American writer and radio journalist, master of the interview genre Work is the search for the meaning of life and daily bread, recognition and money, interest, not indifference, in short, the search for life, not gradual, from Monday to Friday, dying.

So what makes one job thrilling and another devastating? Scientists recently decided to study this issue and conducted laboratory experiments involving research and work with large amounts of data. Based on the information collected, five important conclusions can be drawn that will come in handy during the work week and not only.

Get results

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Stephen Kramer collected nearly 12,000 daily entries from 238 employees at seven large companies, trying to understand what their ideal work day involves. What did they find out? The biggest motivator was “making progress in meaningful work”. On a day when employees were successful at something - whether they repaired a Buick or sewed a hole in their clothes - their motivation and activity skyrocketed.

Conclusion: how you evaluate your performance depends on whether you move forward and enjoy your achievements.

Do it yourself

Think about your job responsibilities. Forget about them now. Their fulfillment often depends on the ability to go beyond commitments. Amy Rezneski calls the management of the Yale School of Management handicraft. While training staff for hospitals, salespeople, and other professionals, she and her colleagues found that the happiest people often do the job without direction from management, just to show their strengths and desires.

Make friends

The Gallup Institute, which regularly conducts surveys of America's working population, asked workers to answer 12 questions, including the following: "Do you have a best friend at work?" Employees who answered in the affirmative enjoyed being involved seven times more often than ordinary hard workers. Work is a duty. But it's also communication. So if you can, surround yourself with a couple of people you really like and trust. Thanks to them, you will be able to get more pleasure from your work.

Change

Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University, spent several years interviewing thousands of people 65 and older. The main conclusion of the study was this: if you hate doing something, don't do it.

Spending years in a job that you don't like is a tragic mistake and a direct path to subsequent regrets.

Understand the importance of work

Last year, Yale's Rezneski, co-authored with Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College, published a paper on the results of a decade-long study of Military Academy cadets. More than 10 thousand men and women took part in it, who entered the academy for a variety of reasons. Some - with "instrumental" ones, in order to subsequently move up the career ladder. Others - with "spiritual" motives: they came to study in order to defend their country and become effective managers.

Years later, it turned out that those who had predominantly "instrumental" motives reached lower professional heights. Those who wanted to move up the career ladder and, at the same time, had "spiritual" motives, in terms of their careers lagged behind those who adhered to one specific attitude. This is a paradox: the best way to be successful at something is to have selfless motives. In other words, you need to ask yourself not what the job can give you, but what you can give to your job.

3. Sleep at work

Do yourself a favor: get some sleep. Moreover, do it now. What for? After sleep, you will better understand and remember this article.

It will also boost creativity and improve motor skills (according to Sarah Mednick, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside who has studied the benefits of sleep). An afternoon nap will give you strength, even if you get enough sleep at night.

Of course, sleeping at work can be a problem - it can seem like you're not working hard enough, and generally lazy. And yes, a few cans of energy will help create the appearance that you are in the ranks (if you do not put your own health into anything). But just a few minutes of sleep will help you get back active much faster. “If a short nap helps people to be more productive, but it is not allowed in the office, it is quite possible that they will simply change jobs,” Mednik says.

And Jamie Zeitzer of Stanford University recommends drinking a cup of coffee before taking a nap. The caffeine takes about 45 minutes to take effect - quite enough to quickly fall asleep in a quiet room or, for example, in a car. But then you wake up cheerful and happy, and not like a hangover. “But if you have a choice: have a coffee or go for a nap, go to bed,” says Zeitzer.

4. Happy eyes, happy brains

If you feel that everything is blurring in front of your eyes and your head starts to hurt due to the continuous hypnotizing of the monitor, try it. This free program will gradually adjust the display of colors and light on your monitor.