Over the course of even the most successful person’s career, there will come at least one point where they feel like they’re spinning their wheels. It’s not hard to see how this could happen. Waiting for matters outside of your control, trying to stay patient while finding the right formula, or engaging in trial and error can often lead us to think a lack of progress is being made. Sometimes it isn’t, but it certainly feels like it is. Sometimes we actually aren’t making progress, and we can feel this twice as deeply.
Not only can spinning your wheels help you lose valuable time in active development and productivity, but it can feel deadening. It can make you question your skillset despite being competent until now. It can also drain your motivation in every single manner. For this reason, when you feel this encroaching feeling start to envelop you, it’s essential to know where you can resolve it.
Thankfully, that’s exactly what we intend to help you with. After all, if you develop an excellent strategy to deal with this issue, just think of how much more productive you could be. The mind boggles to imagine. But we’re going to do just that:
Defend Your Time
We can often find that precious minutes and even hours of our day start to slip by if we don’t make the strong choice to defend them with everything we have. It might be that someone at the water cooler in the office wishes to talk to us about their skiing trip when we should really be working on that report. It might be that you’re being called for a social bar visit by your colleagues when really, you want to fit the pieces together of your own business life. Of course, being professional doesn’t necessarily mean you have to shut everything social out of your life, quite the contrary. But being more protective over your time could help you free up time you might not have been making use of.
Consider how your morning routine might look. You might walk into work, hang up your coat, and then immediately head to the coffee machine to grab something to perk up. Most others are arriving at this time too, and so a protracted ten minute conversation takes place before you sit at your desk. You sit down with one minute to spare, and you have to hit the ground running. This is hardly a terrible scenario, and it’s not as if you’re somehow professionally condemned if this sounds normal to you. But let us consider the opposite.
Perhaps after you’ve grabbed your coffee, you could sit down, turn on your computer, and read over the daily brief. There’s ten minutes you’ve just gained. Now it’s 9.00am rather than 9.10am and you can start work. This means over the course of the day, you’ll have to rush 10 minutes less in order to complete your work. You won’t have to eat into your lunch time, which can be a nice change of pace for some people.
Now, of course, a ten minute gain doesn’t really matter that much. You’re likely not going to lose your job or get promoted over it. But we’ve chosen this small example primarily because of how it can effect your mental state, and how it can start building a sense of time-prioritization that effectively becomes second nature to you. To us, that sounds like a great superpower to build.
Consider Your Connections
It can sometimes be that you have to don your professional hat in order to prevent social scenarios from harming you, or having an impact on your professional life. For that reason, it can be essential to view your home life and what it might be causing you to behave like at work. Might it be that arguments and difficulties in your relationship are causing you to enter work with a bad mood? Might that be something you could change?
We are all human before the roles we have graciously accepted for a career, and sometimes, we need to stamp out the issues that are causing us unnecessary difficulty when working. The same could be said for office relationships. It might be that in an effort to please your employer, you are accepting extra work they dump on you with absolutely no question. The only thing is, you’re having to catch up those two hours the next day, and then the work is pushed forward. Defending yourself socially through whatever means you can and are most appropriate will have a profound effect, even if it’s avoiding that aforementioned coffee-talk when you really can’t spare the time.
Stay At The Cutting Edge
If you’re simply waiting for your firm, boss or employees to tell you what’s going on in your sector of business, then you’re missing out on staying in the loop with everything notable. It’s important to ensure that you set up measures of digesting the news, relevant trends, statistics and passing legislature you need to know about. In other words, treating yourself as an entrepreneur no matter if you own a business or any startup yet can help you remain sharp, and staying sharp is worth its weight is gold.
However, it’s also essential that you don’t waste hours of your day simply trying to keep ahead of everything going on, as this can eat into how your daily responsibilities play out. Consider your morning and how you might gain the brunt of essential knowledge there. For example, using SEO Agency by Teknicks https://www.amazon.com/Teknicks-SEO-Agency/dp/B07NS1S348 can help your home assistant such as your Amazon Alexa provide you with essential news, trends and relevant information to your business life. This is especially convenient if you work in any online capacity, as it can often seem like the rules to success are always changing in that malleable field.
Consider Your Appearance
Of course, a heading like that can sound quite critical, so let us emphasize what we mean. We all have an idea of what a professional might look like, but those boundaries are wearing more and more thin, day after day. For example, thirty years ago, someone sporting tattoos head to toe may not have been looked at as ‘professional.’ Now? It’s often a sign of creativity, ambition, and dedication. Many tattooed professionals work in all levels of business, as, funnily enough, having ink in your skin in no way contributes to the content of your character, as it’s just a form of expression.
However, just because the goal posts have rightfully been moved in terms of what you can look like, it doesn’t mean you should try to keep some professional candor to you. It’s important to dress well. You needn’t buy the most expensive threads, but comforting and smart casual clothes can often work best, regardless of your gender. Blazers, straight trousers or chinos, a comfortable watch, perhaps a tie or slightly open shirt depending on your workplace are all good. A waistcoat can add a little pizazz if you’re feeling it.
What matters is they’re pressed, clean, the colors work together, and you keep accessorizing modest. This way you can show a real self-discipline and humility in how you dress, and that can help you present the best of yourself. But appearance is much more than clothes. It’s how you feel in them. It’s also how you wear them, as keeping good posture is essential. Consider how you talk, and try to make use of brevity to respect the time of those you’re conversing with. Try to remain cool, calm and collected, and hold your tounge despite disliking someone in the office. Learn how to give a firm but fair handshake, and how to look people in the eye. Learn how to make use of gestures to emphasize your point, as this can come across as assertive yet engaging.
Of course, you might make use of all these pointers, or none of them. What matters is how you view your appearance, in all its forms, and how it might positively paint the best picture of you from head to toe. You might just be surprised as to the result.
Stay Organized
You may realize that you haven’t been as organized as you could have been, and this continually leaves you looking for notes, trying to find contact information you haven’t saved or struggling to complete the next piece of a project you’re working on. No matter who you are, this can all feel relatively unhappy as you try to vy for the next professional step.
We would recommend making use of digital notes, and keeping your digital calendar up to scratch. We would recommend making use of punctuality always, and reading around your professional subject. Most of all, learning how to collaborate with a team, how to note-take and how to convert everything such as PDF’s and emails to one location can help you index all the relevant matters of your business life.
With this advice, you’re sure to be double the professional you once were.
