What does it take to flourish at work? How to have a good day

Does having VP in your job title or taking home a large salary mean you will be happier during the work day? No. Of course everyone has good and bad days. The good news is no matter what your designation or pay grade, you can improve the quality of your daily work experiences, so that ‘good days’ are the norm rather than the exception.
So what is a good day?
Research suggests that when people are having a good day they feel productive and know that their efforts are contributing to something worthwhile. Imagine writing a report that no one will ever read! Now that would be demotivating. People also talked about feeling confident that they were doing a good job and they had the support they needed from their colleagues and manager. People also reported having more energy than feeling depleted at the end of the day.
How to have more good days?
According to Caroline Webb in her bestselling book How to Have a Good Day try the following techniques to guarantee having better days at work:
- Prioritize. Before your day starts, set intentional direction. Focus on the most important activities. Ask yourself, ‘what really needs to happen, if nothing else?’ Use the aim-attitude-attention checklist to help you focus. 1. Aim: what matters most in making this a success? For example, in a new customer meeting, what really matters to me is getting the team off to a good start by encouraging a collaborative tone and helping everyone feel good about working together. 2. Attitude: set aside your concerns and adopt a positive mindset. For example, I’m feeling tired and grumpy right now but I can decide to put this aside and focus on making the meeting a success. 3. Attention: direct your attention to your real aim and nothing else. For example, I will look for opportunities to help the team get along and to inject warmth into the meeting.
- Productivity. Make the hours go further by single-tasking instead of trying to multitask. Group together similar tasks like emails/calls/reading so you are not switching mental modes too often. Zone your day so that you can create uninterrupted time for important work. Remove distractions. Think about which alerts you can turn off, working in a private space away from the open plan office, etc. Plan deliberate down time to allow for breathing time, reflection & regeneration. This will help prevent you from becoming overloaded and tired. Get better at saying no, setting boundaries and automating small daily decisions (like what to wear, etc.) to save mental energy.
- Resilience. Get through setbacks and annoyances throughout the day by using the following ‘stay cool’ techniques. First ‘label it’. If you write down how you feel about the situation. Research on affect labelling suggests that if we can name the negative emotion we are experiencing and describe what is causing the feeling, we can reduce its hold on us. Second, get some distance by looking at yourself from 3rd person, ‘why is Ravi feeling this way?’ When we adopt a perspective that is different from our own it reduces cognitive pressure and allows us to think more clearly. Asking rewarding questions such as ‘how interesting, what can I learn from this’ to rise above the negative. Finally, remind yourself of your accumulated skills and experiences to better deal with a challenging situation. You can do this by thinking about when you have been able to overcome setbacks in the past. Ask yourself, ‘when have I handled a difficult situation well in the past?’ ‘what strengths enabled me to overcome that’ and ‘what does this tell me that I’m well equipped to deal with the current situation’.
So rather than leave it to chance, make a conscious effort to have a good day by prioritising your efforts and setting clear direction for what you want to achieve, increase your productivity by removing distractions and rebound quickly from setbacks by cultivating support and confidence. This way you’re sure to have a good day, every day.
