10 Ways To Get More Energy at Work
Don’t you hate it when you have a lot to do at work, but you feel drained when you get back to your desk — say after lunch or after a long meeting where you had to force yourself to stay awake and pay attention?
Here are ten things I do to help me get the energy and motivation I need to push through the afternoon slump:
1. Afternoon tea
Although I’ve experimented with coffee, I find tea to be better because, depending on the tea, it has less caffeine, and I find the aroma and scent of tea help to perk my awareness. As a side benefit, I find I’m not up late at night because of having too much caffeine in my system.
2. Break up work with an exercise session at lunch
One of the best tricks to boost energy levels is to work out during lunch. You come back to work pumped and ready to go and exercise is never a bad thing either. It is also the secret for when you have a bad day: a good workout will always turn around a bad day at work.
3. Work on things you are passionate about
I know sometimes you don’t always have the choice of what to work on. Deadlines are around the corner and bosses loom around your shoulder so sometimes you have to push through. But if you do have the choice of what to work on, work on something you’re excited to work on. It doesn’t have to be something you’re passionate about — it can be a new skill you’re trying to develop or a new technology you’re experimenting with. It’s about focusing on the right aspect of work.
4. Focus on what you learn rather than the work or outcomes
This is related to focusing on what you are passionate about as sometimes you can’t find any passion in your work task (think copying data from one document to another or formatting a document without providing any input).
On one project I worked on, I had to transfer information from multiple spreadsheets into an application — and let me tell you it was mind-numbing work. But even on that project, I looked up a keyboard…
