Step Away From The Task – 4 Ways To Get Work Done

The best ideas often come when you step away from your desk and do something else for a bit. Here are some fun ways for getting productivity or creativity going again when nothing else works.

Every good procrastinator knows a deadline is the best motivator, ensuring the task will be finished once there is finally no time left to muck about. This post is for everyone who’s ever handed in a project ten minutes after the final deadline, exhausted and shaking and promising themselves never to let that happen again. The next time you’re tempted to procrastinate, rather than getting things done in a reasonable time, try these productivity hacks.

This blog post was inspired by Coffitivity, a website that plays coffee house sounds in an effort to boost productivity. There are a whole host of productivity hacks out there which they claim will make you a better worker, and Coffitivity is one of the better ones. There’s something about stepping away from your desk for a while and taking work to a café, but sometimes there isn’t time for that and café just has to come to you.

Get distracted

The Coffitivity site isn’t just about pretending you’re in a café, it’s about replicating a noise level proven to be conducive to getting things done. “A moderate level of ambient noise is conducive to creative cognition,” a peer-reviewed study from the University of Chicago discovered. So having a little bit of noise around to distract you can actually make you more creative.

Get angry

If you’re getting bogged down in too much detail and can’t work out what to focus on, try getting angry. A study by the University of California in Santa Barbara found that worked-up people tended to base their decisions on the cues that “really matter”, rather than things that can be called irrelevant or a distraction. The study also found that the angry people were better able to differentiate between strong and weak arguments.

Relax And Have A Drink

Not to encourage alcohol, but if you feel like you need some cold pragmatism to make a hard decision, try relaxing and have a drink. A study from Georgetown University found that people who were moderately inebriated had less of a hard time making difficult ethical calls, such as whether you’d sacrifice one person to save the lives of many. “[The findings] really undermine the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation,” Aaron Duke, one of the researchers, told ‘The Atlantic‘. It could be that if you just take some relaxed time to make the decision, you’ll make the right one.

Distract yourself

Having a nap is the best way to feel refreshed after too many hours of work, and second to that is having a snack. But if sleeping isn’t an option, and that snack didn’t quite refresh you, there’s a third option: turn on the TV. A study from the University of Buffalo found that watching your favourite reruns can actually restore your mental energy. The reason is that self-control and willpower are finite resources, so watching something familiar on TV can actually refresh our minds because we find comfort in our surrogate relationships with our most loved characters.

If you find you or your workforce are still falling short of the top productivity levels needed to keep your business running smoothly, maybe a few changes to the office environment could be the key! Check out our guide to creating a productive environment in this blog post.