PRODUCTIVITY
How Your Work Productivity Affects Your Waistline
Work always wins over Working Out, as it pays the bills. So here’s how to get more done at work so you can still take care of yourself.
When work is crazy, workouts get cancelled.
You’ve neither the time nor energy required to put in the effort you feel you should. Work wins, and bills need to be paid. I get it.
Admirably, in these situations, we still know we should fit in some exercise, so we fall into a YouTube Vortex, searching out shorter workouts, quick home workouts, or whatever. We find these killer 15-minute workouts involving:
- jumping around then
- push-ups then
- wall squats then
- planks and then
- back to jumping around.
And listen, those workouts are great if you’re in a pinch, on a work trip, or something. But they can’t be the norm. Plus I hate jumping around ;-)
Instead of focusing on how to squeeze in workouts around your busy work schedule, I want to delicately suggest that, just maybe, you could just become more efficient at work?
You see, for some reason, as we get older, we start thinking that we can do no wrong at work.
“Things take as long as they take”
“Unexpected things come up all the time”
“Everything I do at work needs done”
But is that really true?
This was tough for me to admit, aged 47, but I really sucked at prioritizing tasks, managing my time, and avoiding procrastination. But I could improve.
So I want to take you through the 4 lessons around productivity that I’ve learned the hard way. Doing so has:
- helped me get more meaningful work done
- shortened my work day
- given me the sense of accomplishment that I needed to feel a buzz, smug, and motivated to keep working out.
This is SO much better than feeling stressed and overwhelmed about all the sh*t I still didn’t get done each day.
What Stopped Me Getting Things Done
If you’re anything like me, a few scenarios regularly pop up at work during the day:
- You started with a list of 5 things to get done. But you got ‘lost’ in 1 of them, and the day got away from you. Now you’ve 4 things to do tomorrow plus 5 new things that cropped up. Bah!
- Something unexpected came up at work, you had to stay late, so no workout, and dinner just ended up being something random and convenient.
- You felt super-busy at work, but at the end of the day, if someone had asked you to show them what you’d achieved, you’d have struggled. You did a lot of Busy Work.
If any of those sound familiar, join the club. But I hope these 4 simple productivity tips today, based on lessons I’ve learned in recognizing these are skills we can improve, will help…
#1: How & Why To Prioritize Tasks
Years ago, when I worked in a corporate job, I managed a team.
As I walked in each morning and was taking off my coat I would have people in my ear telling me stuff that had just come up that morning already. This put me in reactive mode straight away, so the more important proactive stuff had to wait.
Eventually, I learned to write on a post-it note each evening before I left the 2–3 things I needed to get done first thing each day. I told myself I had to do these before I
- listened to voicemails
- checked my emails or
- danced to anyone else’s tune.
Great system. Worked so well.
So, obviously, when I started working for myself, I inexplicably ditched that system.
Man, I would lose whole days doing random sh*t, busy work, tinkering with things.
So I recommend ending each day by making a prioritized list of what needs done the following day no matter what.
These should be the things that will have the biggest impact on your goals, moving the needle on what you’re trying to get done in life and work.
The sense of accomplishment at the end of the day is unmatched when you know you’ve done the hard but necessary work. You’ll have shorter work days, AND you’ll (hopefully) want to stay productive by doing the right things for your health and fitness, too.
#2 Procrastination Is A Pesky Time Thief
Putting off doing the hard things leaves you feeling overwhelmed and too frazzled to prep a healthy meal or work out after work.
You stress about doing The Thing so much that you don’t do it, which creates more stress. It’s a bummer, but we all procrastinate, so please don’t beat yourself up.
But I tell clients who struggle to start exercising to commit to starting and doing 5 minutes, which always leads to more than 5 minutes.
We can take a similar approach to getting more done at work.
If you’ve a big project or difficult conversation that you’re not looking forward to starting, break it down into manageable chunks. Turn it all into a list of mini-tasks you can do in 15–20 minutes. Chip away at it.
This approach, combined with the Pomodoro Technique, works well for me, using an actual timer for deep work for 20 minutes, then a 5-minute break for phone scrolling, getting a coffee, or whatever.
Just break big tasks down into such small chunks that even the Master Procrastinator in your head will struggle to come up with a reason to not do The Thing!
#3 Time Management 101
There’s that saying about the work expanding to fill the time available.
In the past:
- if I’d 5 minutes to prepare for a work call I’d somehow figure it out.
- if I’d 3 hours I’d probably find some elaborate way of drawing up checklists for it, researching stuff or whatever for 3 hours.
So what I’d encourage you to do with work tasks, is decide how long you’ll devote to something and stick with the deadline you’ve set yourself (even though you know you can keep giving yourself more time).
But also schedule in your workouts on your calendar, like you would a meeting.
If it’s not scheduled you’ll feel it’s OK to let your work expand to fill the time you could have spent taking care of your health and fitness.
It can be very easy to convince ourselves on a daily basis that our job-work HAS to get done, whereas the self-care-work is a NICE TO HAVE.
#4 You Can’t Switch Focus ON At Will
You can probably remember times at work it felt like you were in The Matrix, quality work just flowed out of you.
Afterward, you were amazed at what you’d achieved in a relatively short time just by being… focused.
The thing with focus is we can’t just switch it on and off when we need to. The environment needs to be right.
If you sit down at home in a noisy kitchen with your family coming in and out talking nonsense, asking you things while you’re trying to do some work, Good Luck staying focused even if you’re telling yourself, “Focus Focus…”.
So, to get this kind of deep work done, to be productive at work, and to be in the mood to work out afterward, you need a distraction-free environment. That means:
- turning off anything that will ping to notify you of stuff on your phone, which can lead to 5–10 mins of random scrolling if checked.
- sitting somewhere you won’t be disturbed.
- getting rid of other distractions.
Talking of distractions, I recently came across Binaural Beats playlists on Spotify when I searched for music to help me focus — have you heard of these?
It’s like white noise but, like, musical… yeah I’m not exactly all over the science behind it, but it works!
This kind of music helps me focus by blocking out the background noise of my wife on her work calls, traffic outside or whatever.
Because if you can find that environment that works for YOU to stay focused and get some deep work done, you can basically shorten your work day.
You’ll have been so productive, there’s no need to stay late. You don’t need to work on things from home after dinner either.
And this, coincidentally, leaves you enough time to do something for YOU like working out…
Managing Your I.A.
With all those productivity tips, the onus is on YOU to get ahead of what your I.A. (Inner *sshole) will try to convince you to focus on instead when work gets ‘busy’.
Because I want you to get in shape and thrive as you get a bit older.
That can only happen if you manage to fit in a couple of hours of working out each week.
And THAT can only happen if you improve your ability to be productive at work, getting the important stuff done.
You want to feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the working day, instead of feeling stressed, frazzled, like you still have SO MUCH to do. Because in the latter scenario you’re tempted to blow off the workout and console yourself with the sofa, Netflix & Doritos instead.
Over 40, fed up and out of shape — get free access to my Programs Vault (40+ friendly programs for diet, workouts and healthy lifestyle) and you’ll be subscribed to my weekly newsletter too!
