Have a Good Day at Work
Relax and do your job despite the disturbance & other stuff that would easily make you lose your concentration. Once you have lost your concentration, things start to fall apart, leading to a bad day.
Contents
Steps
- Get up early - for many people, the first 20 minutes of their day is the most stressful, reducing their energy for the rest of the day. You will get up just one hour early, allowing you to take things slow. Aim to leave the house half an hour early.
- Don't skip breakfast. Have a nice cereal and some milk, or soy or almond milk. Skipping breakfast (or any other meals) does not lead to weight loss but some assume that to be true. Don't eat a slimming cereal though - have oats with real raspberries, or perhaps slices of banana.
- Start your day well dressed, well groomed & most of all, with a big smile. Prepare, e.g. iron, your clothes the night before. Shave, or get your make up right. Days are better if people treat you better, and people treat you better if you look attractive, that you take good care of yourself.
- Arrive for work half an hour early. You left half an hour early, so you have time to get there without feeling rushed. Your boss will probably be happy to see this, and cut you some slack for the rest of the day.
- Use that half hour. It's not your bosses time after all. Plan your day. Read company procedure for what is expected of you (your job description), or learn a new skill. If you are a software project manager, you might want to read about accounting. If you work in retail, learn about how to fix the barcode computer when it goes wrong.
- When someone asks you to do something, take a moment and listen. Keep a little A5 notepad, and make a note of it so you won't forget. Check about 4 times through the day to make sure you haven't missed something urgent.
- Don't get angry or stressed, even over small things, it only makes your day unpleasant. Unexpected and unwanted things happen, that's life, and the people around you understand that. The most important thing to do is manage failure. Make sure the relevant supervisor knows about the risk before it happens, and take a step back to come up with a rescue plan. Own the solution.
- Be assertive, but avoid conflict. By understanding peoples motives, and thinking about the reasons why they are causing conflict, you can find mutually acceptable solutions. Their reasons may seem selfish to you - they don't want a time consuming task because they want to leave early for a date say. But conflict is likely to simply entrench their position or cause resentment. Find some advantage in the situation, e.g. "Sure, I'll do that today, and I hope it goes really well. By the way, I need to get away early on Friday, so could you help me with my stuff that day".
- Plan on going home on time. Make sure everything is done with half an hour to spare, so your last half hour is just finishing up. If you always end up staying late because there is too much work, then often you will never finish everything of an evening. That means it can wait till tomorrow. Leave on time, and don't worry about the backlog. It just means that a 2nd person is needed, and when that becomes clear, maybe you will be promoted in charge of them.
Tips
- Form the right attitude towards your job. How does it help people? Does your accounting work keep a medical cooperation together? Do the newspapers your delivering give some elderly people their only link to the community? Alternatively, perhaps you think in more competitive terms. Who are you going to outwit today? How are you going to make your organisation better than than the competition?
- Mental attitude is more important than many people think. There is nothing fundamentally more fun about say playing the guitar, compared to cleaning your teeth. They are both fine motor activities. It is our mental attitude to the prior that makes us want to do it (as any child forced to learn against their will will attest).
- Always have a smile on your face when your entering the workplace, it helps brighten the day and shows your peers that you have a good attitude.
- Now you have reasons to want to be doing what you do, its time to make your idealism a reality. Make this your mission all day, and revel in every success.
- Figure out what aspects of your work you really like, and try to spend as much time as possible doing those things. Soon enough, people will start to see them as "your job".
- Realize that you spend most of your life at work, so it's important that you enjoy it.
Warnings
- If an incident happens in the morning, don't let that overcome you because its the starting of the day, it will definitely collapse your work spirit.
