Here are a few strategies:. Write down your two to three most important tasks and any smaller ones you would like to check off your to-do list. You have to be more deliberate about planning than you would during a busy period. For example, by 11 AM I want to finish my first most important task.
Break for lunch. This granular plan can help you turn a potentially boring day into a series of mini-sprints. Slower times at work present an opportunity to enhance your entire life, if you take advantage of them. These might include attending an industry conference, meeting up with a former boss, brushing up your CV and LinkedIn profile or taking an online class. You are making an investment of time that will either help you in your current job or open up future doors.
Off-peak times also offer a chance to get home and office administrative work done before emergencies arise. Or schedule your annual wellness visit and a trip to get your driving license renewed at a time when taking a personal day is no big deal. Being proactive keeps you from having to squeeze in these life maintenance activities at other times when you feel exceptionally tight on time. Building rapport in this way paves the way for effective collaboration down the road and give you some relationship capital for times when work is more stressful.
Finally, off-peak times open up space to invest in life outside of work. But Tuesdays, as bad as they may often be, are nothing like hurtling toward hard ground. They are dull and unemotional. We need a different hypothesis to explain Tuesdays. Perhaps this phenomenon has something to do with the contrast of workdays and weekends, and how the brain uses contextual clues to assign time stamps to events. Evidence suggests memories of similar events or those that happen in the same context get registered as having occurred close to each other in time.
For example, things that happened in a party would be packed together in your memory, standing apart from things that happened in the cab afterward. I asked Davachi whether a similar mechanism could be behind the Tuesday effect. Does the sudden change of schedule and place on Monday disrupt our sense of time, pushing the memories of Sunday hopefully spent in nature outside an officelike environment further back in the mental timeline and away from Monday memories, leaving us with a vague sensation of a time gap in between?
The short answer is a tentative yes. Coincidentally, Davachi is conducting an experiment to investigate almost exactly that — whether our estimates of durations get distorted by introducing a change in an otherwise-steady sequence of events, and how brain activity in the hippocampus tracks this.
Sundays are typically spent resting, socializing, watching TV — predictable activities. Start an unfamiliar task preferably work-related, because you're still in the office , so you'll have something to concentrate on. While you're at it, take a scroll through Instagram or Facebook. How else are you supposed to keep up with the lives of people you haven't seen in five years? Prep your next throwback Thursday post; Instagram lets you save drafts now.
Start figuring out how you can make the dream vacation reality within the next 12 months. Don't discount the possibility until you've made a budget and looked at the numbers.
Plan a more reasonable getaway. A long weekend at the beach with your significant other? Renting a cabin with your lady friends? There are dozens of affordable options. Learn how to read palms or some other party trick. What's the point of the Internet if you're not going to learn from it?
0コメント