Plan your day the night before
carefully think about: what are the priorities for tomorrow? Who do I need to get in touch with? what meetings do you have? What projects do I need to work on? I also recommend visualizing the upcoming day so that your brain can process it already and it feels kind of familiar next morning.
Take a short break after 30min. of working**
your brain uses the available glucose and it is definitely useful to take regular breaks and refresh. Going for a walk, socializing with others or meditate. 5min are good enough. Studies have shown that the efficiency is way higher when taking regular breaks.
Follow the 80/20 rule.
it is well known that 20 % of what you do produces 80 % of your important results. Therefore it is useful to eliminate things that don’t matter during the workday as they have a minimal effect on your overall productivity. As mentioned, this is well known but common knowledge is not always common practice.
Develop a morning routine.
what you definitely should not do is starting your day by opening your email account. Because if you do the consequence is that you are right in the middle of someone else’s agenda. I recommend developing a morning routine which includes a healthy breakfast, physical exercise, meditation, and reading or listening to some positive content, e.g a podcast. If you do this for a while, your brain is wired to a more positive thinking pattern.
Stop multi-tasking
the human brain is simply not made for doing several things at the same time. Your brain is processing tasks one by one anyway The result when multi-tasking is often, that the quality level is not as high as it could be when focusing on a single task.
And of course limit all kind of distractions to the absolute minimum…