What is energy?

Energy can be thought of as a resource needed for constant physical or mental activities. Like many other resources, energy is finite, meaning that it will deplete throughout your day.

Keep yourself nourished

At all times, you need to keep yourself fed because food is a direct source of energy. In most work places, we are given an hour for lunch to unwind and nourish our bodies.

But when times are hectic and deadlines are crucial, have you ever felt a sense of guilt when it’s time for lunch? Sometimes you just choose to skip it and dedicate that time to completing your work. The truth is that, in the long run, this type of behavior is not sustainable. You will eventually become tired and frustrated, and eventually lose the will to work.

So make sure you make the best of your break time. Eat, socialize and take your mind off work.

Get enough sleep

While sleeping is the most common way to recharge, some of us neglect it in order to get more done in a day. Sleep plays an important role by allowing your body to go into downtime while it repairs itself. Depriving yourself from quality sleep not only affects your energy but also your health. People with insufficient sleep are at a higher risk for high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes. Also, not getting enough quality sleep also leads to a decrease in attention span and an increase in risk of accidents and injuries.

That being said, too much sleep is also a bad thing. The side-effects are similar to the deprivation of sleep. When you wake up after having a good number of hours of sleep, try to get yourself up slowly and not fall into the trap of napping. Follow a fixed sleeping schedule and stick to it. Doing so will cement your biological clock making you feel sleepy just before your sleep time and getting up naturally after hours of rest.

Master your mood

We’ve all been there. Getting stuck in a traffic jam, having a minor disagreement with a loved one, or even just getting up on the wrong side of the bed. All of these happening before work even begins. Not the best way to start the day, but one that is fairly common time to time. While events and people can bring us down, the final decider of your mood is still your own self.

It’s convenient to get swept up by everything and getting down with all that has happened. You need to be self-aware that you can indeed control how your outlook is, even if it’s for a span of time. When you’re all bummed out, the likelihood of you wanting to do anything has severely plummeted. This kind of negative behavior affects your energy as dealing with these emotions will slowly sap it all away and nothing will get done.

We’ve all been there. Getting stuck in a traffic jam, having a minor disagreement with a loved one, or even just getting up on the wrong side of the bed.

What you can do is to always keep in mind that you are the master of your own emotions; your mood. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as each of us have our own thresholds for dealing with stress. Try to think positively and keep solving problems in your mind. Eventually, the tension from all those problems will feel insignificant and you can easily brush it aside.

Quality over quantity

It’s not all just about the amount of time we work though, as quality matters just as much. What it means is that our effectiveness matters even more, and is largely influenced by our energy levels. We need to create opportunities to create more energy throughout the day.

Instead of stacking more things to do in the free-ish slots in your day, it is better to use that time to accomplish what we’ve gone through so far; staying nourished, getting enough sleep and mastering your mood. Always remember that your energy is finite, and that you can only accomplish so many things in a day.

Always remember that your energy is finite, and that you can only accomplish so many things in a day.

Prioritize the tasks that are important, that are time-sensitive, that are creating a bottleneck for others. When you have done so, stack the less important items at the end of every day, spread out during the week. By doing so allows us to focus on quality productivity instead of burning more hours trying to complete everything.

The remote side of things

If you’re a reader of our blog (thanks!), then you probably know that the team at Stampede work from various locations around Malaysia and the rest of the world. The act of managing your energy when you don’t have a physical office can be tricky. ‘Our offices’ are always at our fingertips and this means that we can move in and out of work fairly quickly.

While having flexible hours is a great, it also means drawing the line between work and personal time can be a challenge. Sometimes we get called in out of our usual work hours to get certain tasks completed due to time-sensitivity and urgency.

Thankfully this doesn’t happen very often, and the times it does is when there is a major issue, like a website going down. If we worked in a physical office, we’d have to ask one of our developers to drive into the office and problem solve the issue there and then.

We hope this article sheds some light on why you should focus on managing your energy instead of just solely managing your time. If you have something to share with us, or just want to say hi, drop us a comment down below and we’ll be glad to respond.

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In our workplaces, we have habits that we are quite fond off. The good ones can visibly improve your productivity while the bad ones can seem like procrastination. Here’s a list of productive habits that you should know at your workplace.

Start work early, plan your day

Get into the office earlier than usual, give or take 15-30 minutes. Using this extra time, plan what you need to do just for that day.

For many of us, the first thing we do when we come into the office is to go about our morning ritual of settling in. This usually involves making a cup of coffee, having some small chit-chat with your fellow co-workers, all while waiting for the computer to start up. This whole ordeal can sometimes take about 30-45 minutes right at the start of the day. While it is not necessarily a bad thing, it just goes to show how much time we use just to actually get something moving.

Define a goal, then break it down

Before you start your work, identify what you need to get done. Keep it focused but not too general, something like reviewing a stack of documents in two days. Once that’s nailed down, sit down and figure out how you can break this goal down into smaller goals.

One method is to split the workload across multiple days within the time frame you have to complete your main goal. When your goal is broken down into smaller ones, it lessens the impact of tackling a large endeavor and provides you a state of momentum to work at a steady pace.

As an added bonus, attach rewards to some of these goals. For example, if you complete a sub-task then you can have your next cup of coffee. If you finish the next one, go for a 5 minute walking break. This will gives you extra motivation to continue your day.

Know the difference, identify important and urgent matters

This one can be a bit tricky because when it comes to work almost everything is urgent, but not everything is important.

Enter the Eisenhower Box, a time management principle which helps you define how you should act accordingly depending where the action is sorted in the box.

Image taken from James Clear

Strategized by the famed US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Box is a decision matrix which splits tasks into 4 possibilities:

• Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
• Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
• Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
• Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

The challenging part in using this principle is understanding what tasks are considered important or urgent.

When you’re in the office and a phone call comes in for you, the first reaction you’ll do is pick up the call regardless of whether it is important or otherwise; this is what we label as urgent, tasks that you feel you need to react to.

Create behavior chains, turn it into a routine

Line up all your tasks that need to be completed within a given day and chain it all together. By doing so, you’ll create a progressive tempo that will help you focus on your work and will curb other non-productive behaviors from cutting into your work flow.

Behavior chains are a series of tasks that are completed one after the other. If you are doing A, you need to complete it before moving on to B, it’s as simple as that. The difficult part is keeping it going without getting distracted. Behavior chains are not limited only to the office. You can even apply the same idea to routines you have outside of work.

Be organized at all times, carry a notebook with you

If you work at a desk, sort out the clutter (if any) on your workspace and arrange the items by its relation. For example, pens, markers, staplers and other stationery should be placed in one area. Documents and papers can be placed in another area, but ultimately the goal is to be able to access whatever you need, whenever you need it.

Carry a small notebook with you wherever you go. Whenever you have a meeting, take it out and start taking points. This is to ensure that you don’t have to ponder too long on what was said during that session. Using your notebook as well, list down your tasks for the day and refer to it often as this will keep you on track.

You’ll discover that staying organized and taking notes will vastly improve your productivity.

Get enough sleep, keep your mind ready

Don’t be this guy.

This goes without saying, if you don’t get enough sleep your brain won’t be running at maximum efficiency.

Sleep deficiency can impair your cognitive functions and negatively affect your behavior, you won’t be able to get anything done. The inability to make rational decisions and muddled body activity can be seen by others which may cause others to speak of your indifferently.

Make it a habit by setting a fixed sleeping time that gives you a minimum of 7 hours of sleep (recommended 8 by some sources).

Putting it all together

Creating a good habit is difficult, I myself deal with this on a daily basis. The only time we fail at this is when we give up, so don’t. Keep at it and eventually you’ll feel that it’ll become second-nature to you.

Do you have productive habit that you follow as part of your office routine? Drop us a comment, we’d love to hear about it!

The post Productive Workplace Habits That You Should Know appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Managing your time right?

So much work, so little time. Within a day we have twenty-four hours to work with and we’re pretty much occupied two-thirds of it

What is Time Management?

Time management is what I am referring to and it is the process of applying methods to consciously control the duration spent doing specific tasks all within a set time boundary. Its goal is to efficiently use the limited hours we have in a day for accomplishing tasks in projects.

Why should I manage my time?

The following are some reasons why time management is more important than you think. It can also be applied to routines that are out of the workplace too.

Time is limited — So much work, so little time. Within a day we have twenty-four hours to work with and we’re pretty much occupied two-thirds of it. By managing it, you can accomplish relevant tasks on the dot and have enough time to go for that yoga class of yours.

Accomplish more with less effort — When you know what to do from the get-go, you can efficiently complete your tasks quickly and with less effort. The reasoning behind this is because the minutes you allocated to complete the task has been set and you’re not going to be redundant by doing non-related tasks. When you’re in ‘the zone’, you can efficiently get your job done without getting distracted.

Become a better decision maker — Because time management requires yourself to analyze and decide how you’re going to plan your tasks throughout the day, you realize that you’ll become better and more confident at deciding how much time you’ll need to complete certain tasks.

Free time is not optional — As much as you’d like to complete your work as soon as possible, some tasks are just way to big to finish up within a day. Pulling consistent long hours on it can make you lose confidence and make your goal seem further away. This is why you need to pace yourself by creating pockets of free time throughout your day. You’ll be able to give yourself that much needed breather to refresh yourself before you go on to completing that daunting task.

Develop self-discipline —  Time management requires the creation of a schedule and sticking to it. To be able to follow a schedule requires discipline and determination. It’s very easy to bail on something but harder to keep to it.

How do I manage my time?

You may be asking yourself on what you need to do exactly. Here are some suggestions that you can follow to keep your time managed.

Prioritize your tasks for the day — Before your day begins, list down all your tasks both important and less critical. Highlight the important tasks and move those items above the list. Focus on the tasks that need to be completed for that day while pushing the less important items for the next day. If you complete your tasks earlier than expected, feel free to work on one of the smaller tasks from the following day.

Assign weights to the tasks — Now with the list prepared, we can now move on to assigning weights to the tasks. By weights I mean the amount of time you think you’ll need to complete specific tasks. Make sure the time allocated is reasonable and realistic while giving yourself some minor buffers for short breathers.

Allocate time for R&R — Burnout is something that is very common in the workplace. Proper recreational time is important to prevent it from happening. Within your day, set certain pockets of time that you can use to recharge yourself. Having a proper lunch without any work distractions can help you maintain your confidence to plow through the rest of the day.

Create a schedule — By now you have your list with the assigned weights to create your schedule. Having a schedule creates a sort of pseudo end goal that we can look forward by the end of the day. Equip yourself with a small planner or notebook to draw a simple schedule that you can refer to throughout the day. For the slightly more techie readers, Google Keep is a great mobile app for creating tasks which you can tick off when you’ve done and completed it.

Stick to it — It goes without saying, if you’ve already come this far in preparing your scheduled routine you need to inject some (maybe a lot of) self-discipline in making sure you can accomplish it. In a way keeping to your schedule is also a task but one that is the predecessor in helping you complete the others efficiently.

Freedom of time

Ultimately, your time is governed by your own actions and decisions. Whatever you decide to do with it just make sure you’re doing it with wholeheartedness and with few regrets. While you can probably reference this guide as a way to maximize your productivity, make sure you spend some time doing the things you love.

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