Episode 40 | Resetting Your Workday

January can be a gloomy month. You can't focus, you're getting nothing done, and there's just a general lack of interest. Niamh, what are some ways we can reset and get ourselves back in the right mindset?

 

Hello, hello, and welcome back to The Better Workday Podcast. How are you doing?

 

It's the end of January, and I don't know about you, but to me, it always feels like the longest month of the year.

 

When you add to it that the days are still too short for my liking and the weather can often be gloomy, I often find that I need a bit of a reset as we head into February.

 

And honestly, it's throughout the year, there are oftentimes when I need to reset my working day or my working week.

 

There's usually one of two things going on. Either it's very busy or there's a lot to do, and I don't know how I'm going to get it all done, or sometimes it's a quiet week, and so there's no sense of healthy urgency and I have no reason to get up and go.

 

But look, whether it's the month of the year, a busy workload, or a quiet period, I think there's always moments where we need to reset. And so today, I want to share the three steps that I follow every single time to reset myself so that I don't spend too long in that unmotivated state.

 

Now, that's not to say that you can't have an unproductive or a slower day every now and again. Sure, everybody has those from time to time.

 

But if we allow that to continue, that can result in unnecessary stress and build-up later on, as the work still needs to get done eventually.

 

So I think it's always good to, yes, give yourself a little bit of grace, and then reset and get back into it. So here are my three steps. I hope you find them helpful. I'd love to know if you do the or if there are other things that work for you.

 

same So as always, please get in touch and let me know if you have any ideas or if you want to add anything to the conversation. Step one for me is to get away from the desk.

 

Step away from the desk. If I find that I am, like, spinning my wheels, working but going nowhere,

 

I know it's time to take a break. It might look like me doing the same task for ages, but not making any progress on it, clicking from tab to tab just for clicking's sake, or just picking up tasks and putting them back down again.

 

Whatever that looks like, I know that I'm not really doing any work, and so it's time for me to step back. I always say move your body, move your mind. And so if I need a reset, the first thing I'm going to do is move my body. And look, sometimes this means getting out for a walk with the dog, which is great if the weather is dry or relatively dry.

 

Other days, honestly, it could just be emptying the dishwasher and doing the washing and doing a few bits around so that I get moving the house and I'm away from work.

 

And look, I'm going to confess that when the kids were smaller, so I've got two kids and they're two years apart, when they were smaller and they weren't sleeping great, sometimes moving my body meant moving my body onto the couch or into a quiet space for 20 minutes so I could close my eyes and just rest.

 

But either way, I'm away from the desk, I'm doing something else, and that alone creates a shift in your mindset 'cause you're away from the work and you're doing something.

 

When I come back, and I never allow it to be too long, it's usually only a 30-minute break, because otherwise the day could go away from you, and usually we have meetings and other things to do anyway.

 

So when I come back, the second thing I always do is I look to see if I can improve my environment. When I'm working from home, that could be looking at whether I can put on some music, whether I need to change the lighting, or even change what

 

I'm wearing. So there are some clothes in my wardrobe that I would say are more worky clothes and some that are less worky clothes. I'm sure you know what I mean, right? There's a few things that I definitely feel like I'm working in.

 

And so if I'm having a day where I need to reset, maybe after walking the dog, I'll come back and I'll put on one of my work jumpers or my work tops, put on a good playlist, anything at all to help me get back in the zone.

 

And sometimes what I might even do is move to a different location, so bring my laptop, um, out of the home office and maybe set up in the kitchen or something like that.

 

If I'm not at home, so if I'm on site at a client site or if I'm somewhere else, the environment might really just be limited to maybe the playlist, maybe changing my screensaver, changing where I'm sitting.

 

Is there anything at all I can do in order to make my environment more conducive to getting back into work, okay? And that can include also even, you know, getting a drink, one of your favorite drinks, and having that next to you. Anything at all.

 

And so at least now I feel like I have the right space to do the work. And here's where step three, the biggest step, really comes in, because if you don't do step three, one and two are just gonna lead you back to spinning your wheels again.

 

And that's to decide if you're working on the right things. So quite often, if I get stuck and if I need a reset, it's because I haven't been working on the right tasks.

 

So maybe the work has been quite draining or maybe I'm stuck in a process somewhere and I need to get a little bit of space from it, and so I find that sometimes taking a look at the work I'm doing and saying, "Should I be working on something else at the moment?" is a good step to take.

 

And that might look like me changing, let's say, for example, from recording podcasts to reaching out to my connections and having conversations with people. I might be switching from... Whatever it is, if I feel that the task hasn't been moving, then I switch to a different task.

 

And I'm fully aware that I have the luxury of doing that when it comes to stuff that doesn't have deadlines. So for example,

 

I have often recorded a podcast episode.... 10, 11 times and realized, "Ugh, this topic is going nowhere," and I change topic. Now, nobody knows or cares about that but me.

 

I know that in your work, you might have other people relying on you, and you might have deadlines. So what do you do if the task is causing you to stay stuck in a rut and you're trying to change it?

 

In this scenario, I think it's great to get a bit of help, and what that could look like would be you asking a colleague to come in and take a look at what you're working on, say, "Look, you're, you're getting stuck in that area and you can't move it forward."

 

Getting a pair of fresh eyes on it, getting another perspective is really good. Or even... They don't even have to actually look at your work. Sometimes just saying to somebody, "I need an hour of power, will you do it with me?" because having that company and having somebody else in close proximity to you, whether that's digitally or physically, helps, doing work and, you know, moving forward will give you the motivation to move forward. On these days, on these reset days, I usually work in either 25 or 45-minute blocks and take plenty of breaks, and that's to create momentum but also, um, to pace myself throughout the day so it's a lot more manageable.

 

And by the end of doing those three things, I usually feel like I've got a handle on my energy again, or I've got a handle on the day again.

 

And of course, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to ebb and flow over the weeks and months after. It's going to come back around. But it does mean that for that day and for that week, I'm back on track.

 

So just to recap, my three very simple steps to reset your working day or your working week, number one, step away from the desk.

 

Move your body and move your mind. Number two, when you get back to the desk, optimize the environment in whatever way you can, including potentially putting on more worky clothes, uh, playing a worky playlist, getting your worky drink, whatever it is that works for you.

 

And then number three, make sure that what you're working on is the right task for this time, okay? So if you're stalling on something, if you're spinning wheels, park it if you can and move on to something you can progress. If you can't park it, bring in the company of somebody else to help get you going again.

 

Okay, I hope you found this helpful. If you're in need of a reset, I hope it got you going, okay? If you're not in need of a reset, well, that's fantastic.

 

Keep this and save it for a day that you do need it. As always, I would love it if you could share this episode with a friend or a colleague who you think would find it helpful.

 

And until next time, stay well and have a better work day. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this episode. The Better Workday Podcast is about helping you have a better workday, so we'd love to hear your thoughts and questions.

 

You can find our social media details as well as any references from this episode in the show notes.