You have your daily "routine", right? Get up, get ready, rush to work, and silently berate yourself as you step into the meeting that you completely forgot about today.
Now, you have to go in unprepared with a million things going through your mind. This may have happened to you more than once, but it's you don't have to keep doing this. Ping-ponging from email to email, from meeting to meeting, isn't serving your purpose. If you feel like you're in need of a boost to your productivity and creativity in your workplace, adopting some daily mindfulness might be right for so. So, let's find out what is mindfulness in the workplace and does mindfulness increase productivity.
Mindfulness is something that most adults building businesses and running teams take for granted. We work, work, work, and run our 9-5 on autopilot, sometimes right into the ween hours. What if you could take a deep breath, walk into that meeting with a focused mindset, and kill your presentation?
Keep reading for steps to get you into a daily routine of mindfulness and purpose, ensuring a much better lifestyle.
Why mindful productivity is important
Mindfulness and productivity at work are important. Being mindful is a productive way to focus on your entire day, one step at a time. It may sound like an oxymoron but it's true. Applying the steps below and creating a daily routine with a purpose can change your life and your workplace mindfulness productivity.
Mindfulness helps you focus, organize, and prioritize your life at work and home. It breaks down everything you need to accomplish in 24 hours into manageable steps.
What you get out of applying daily mindfulness
Let me count the benefits
Incorporating a daily mindfulness routine in your personal life can improve how well you sleep at night and reduces stress, physical pain, anxiety, and depression.
The most consequential benefits? Happiness, a sense of satisfaction, increased endorphins, and healthier relationships in and out of the office. Almost every mindfulness productivity podcast talks about it.
When you do the same at work, you become more focused on the task at hand, leading to increased production, improved communication with your team, and respect from your team and upper management. Those benefits can lead to promotions, raises, and even the opening of additional locations as your team grows to know how you run your business. Most of all, when you commit to a period of time each day for mindfulness, you create a sense of direction and control.
How your business benefits from mindful productivity
By following the steps below and practicing mindfulness, you empower yourself to serve others as a leader who knows how to prioritize a busy schedule. The steps help you keep others motivated and see the big picture, and grab those off-the-rim shots that bounce into and disrupt what you thought was a typical work day.
Establishing and executing on a mindfulness routine doesn't create a nonnegotiable to-do list. What it does is establish a daily routine of singular mental clarity where you outline your absolute top priorities to be done and, set aside the time to do it. If something jumps in the way of that list of key things to get done, then the mindfulness session you committed helps you prioritize how and when you'll handle the surprise thing that landed on your plate.
When you ground your inner thinking in a mindfulness routine your team and even your clients will identify you as someone who knows how to prioritize and delegate appropriately. Your boss will notice your confidence under pressure, and your business can move from “survive” to “thrive” from the positive energy you emit at the hands of being more in control of your day-to-day doings.
How your core team benefits from a more mindful you
The people in your life, both professional and private feed off the energy you put out into your immediate surroundings around them. If you are stressed, your dog, cat, spouse, and best friend will notice. They can feel it in the air.
When you establish your mindfulness routine, those in your immediate atmosphere will respond to that calm confidence you exude. Happy, confident people attract happy people. As a leader, when you project calm and confidence, your team can take the emotions you exude, internalize them, and follow in your wake with a similar mentality. Confident people attract other confident people. Resilient people set an example for those who need help feeling mental strength.
So follow these steps and see how you and everyone around you can benefit from a daily mindfulness session.
Steps to get you from "aghh!" to "ahhhhhh."
How to execute your mindful productivity
Step 1: Use a dedicated notebook and write down your thoughts
Be an avid mindful productivity planner. Make a list. Use a Journal. Do a morning brain dump. Get it all out of your mind and physically write it down on paper. No digital journaling! A small journal that can almost fit into the back pants pocket works great. Put your mobile device away, ideally in a place that you can’t reach from a sitting position. The goal is to have complete focus for a short period of time. Doing this is the first step to prioritizing what is most important to you and what you can forget about until tomorrow. The importance of using a physical journal and pen cannot be overstated. There is enough information to manage in the digital world. The point of this entire exercise is to draw a direct tie from your brain down to a single piece of paper in front of you.
Step 2: Lead with a positive attitude
Your first impression is a lasting impression; make it a positive one. Even if you are having a bad day, ALWAYS start an interaction in a positive tone. No matter how tough things may seem in the moment, try and focus on the most basic positive. If it’s a sunny day, this can suffice in the moment. If you’re in perfect health, this is another small but important item to draw strength from.
Step 3: Make your actions count with mindful productivity
Take a deep breath. Feel that? It counts—every time. So, do the same with your actions and boost mindful productivity at work. Be intentional. When you make your list in step 1, ask yourself if those tasks today will provide meaning to what you need to do. And if your list gets to 10, or 12 things, remind yourself to be realistic. What are the 3-4 absolute most important things that must get accomplished today?
If it's not in your top 3-4 things, cross it off your list and get it out of your mind. Don't waste your time on tasks that don't serve your purpose. Taking time to focus on YOUR priorities for the day will help you stay focused on achieving them. When the inevitable distractions come through, they can be prioritized in context with everything else you’ve set your mind to accomplish for the day. Now you’re in control of what you have to do, instead of ping-ponging to and from the requests that come in from others. Do not forget, mindfulness increases productivity.
Step 4: Give it LIFE
Whether at home or in the office, if there is a RED HOT task that needs to be completed first, GIVE IT LIFE. Make it physical. Putting a box, yoga mat, or briefcase in your path will stop you from ignoring it and getting it done.
Conclusion
Now, repeat these steps every day. Pick a time, preferably in the morning, and focus on what you need to accomplish that day or week. If you know a big event is coming up, break the TO-DO list down to daily manageable tasks. Your mind and body will reap the benefits of less stress, increased endorphins for a happy, healthy lifestyle that includes better sleep, relationships, and productivity at work/home.
Give it a try today. Set aside 25 minutes to focus on how easy setting up your daily mindfulness session is for you.