How to Increase Performance, without Increasing your Stress Levels?
How can you increase your performance at work without increasing your stress levels?
We as individuals tend to have different goals. Some people want to get fit, others want to live a healthier lifestyle or spend more time with family and friends. But some of us also want to be more productive.
Now, you might think that this goal isn’t really that hard to achieve, and maybe for most people, it’s not. But sometimes, to increase performance and get the output you want, you feel you must work harder, be more involved in your projects and tasks, and even put in some extra hours.
These things will definitely help you because after all, hard work always pays off right? However, trying to increase output can also bring a lot of stress, and we all know how damaging stress is to both the body and mind.
So the question remains: How do you increase performance while keeping stress at bay? Let’s find out:
Manage Your Time Better
Now, this might be a given, but time management is something you should pay close attention to. Most of the stress comes from not being able to perform your tasks on time.
Imagine you have a ton of work to do, and a friend asks to come over. Instead of staying for a few hours, he/she decides to stay the whole day. So instead of concentrating on your tasks, you end up chatting with friends or you waste some time on social media. Three days later you realize that you haven’t done much and you try to cram a week’s worth of work in just two days.
Okay, so maybe this might not be what happens in your case, but it’s easy to fall victim to procrastination. And once you do that, performance starts dropping and your stress levels increase.
The best thing to do then is to learn how to manage your time. Check how many tasks you have and try to fit them into time frames. This technique is called timeboxing and you basically give yourself a time period to finish a certain task. You time yourself and at the end of your activity, you assess how much you’ve done so that you can increase the accuracy of your future timeboxing predictions.
This may help, however sometimes procrastinating becomes a loop that we can not break. If this is the case for you, then maybe some meditation, NLP, or hypnosis could help you to break that cycle.
Say No Once in a While
You need to be aware of your limits. You can use timeboxing to figure out how many tasks you can handle in a day and stick to that number.
I know it’s hard to say no to your employers, but you have to put your physical and mental health first. And that means not taking more work than you can handle.
So, if your boss is trying to push you to take more tasks than you feel comfortable with, have an open discussion with them. Try telling them that working more would put too much pressure on you and the end result would be a poor performance on your part.
If you’re the one assigning tasks to yourself, then try being realistic with the amount of work you can get done. If you take too much work, then you’ll have to spend some extra time to complete your assignments, which essentially means that you can’t spend as much time on things you enjoy.
Learn Ways to Destress Yourself
No matter what we do, there will always be one or two things that stress us out. They might not be related to your work, but the stress caused will definitely affect your performance if you let it pile up. Experts say workplace stress accounts for nearly £200 billion in healthcare costs, as reported by Forbes.
This is why you need to let go of the stress and relax once you close your laptop. In order to do this, you need a very fine delimitation between your work life and your personal life and a clear work schedule.
Once your work schedule is over, no more going back to check on one or two emails or sign some reports.
So what can you do to destress yourself? There are quite a few things, and it pretty much depends on what your hobbies are, but here are some of the most popular de-stressing activities:
- Meditation
- Exercising
- Leisure Reading
- Educational Learning
Bottom Line
So you have your goals all planned out. It’s quite likely that everything will start off great. But as time passes, your motivation can drop and you end up going back to your old habits.
What if I were to tell you that there’s an easy way for you to figure out which goals you should concentrate on and stick to your objectives.
So how can you do that? The answer is quite simple: By working with a life coach!
No matter what your goal might be, a life coach can definitely help you stay on track. You can learn how to balance all the departments in your life while maintaining a healthy mind and body. So if you want to stick to your goals and reach your desired results, let me assist you and point you in the right direction. Let’s have a chat and get you started