When you thinking of relaxing, you probably don’t think of your workplace. In fact, most corporate work environments are far from relaxing, instead being a mass of negativity, stress, hurriedness, and self-inflicted time management.
However, just because everyone in your workplace is running around like their hair is on fire, doesn’t mean that you have to do the same.
Want to stay one step ahead at work?
Today we have 20 tips to make your work life a little less stressful and just a little more relaxing.
20 Ways to Relax at Work:
- Prepare for your day by doing your homework the night before.
- Take the stairs while everyone else is waiting on the elevator.
- Cut back on collateral duties if they are keeping you from getting your real job done.
- Decline meetings that you do not need to attend.
- Arrive 30 minutes before your team, you will get more done in that time than all day. (Try an hour early!)
- Have a positive attitude even when those around you do not.
- Do not respond to that email until tomorrow.
- Park a little further from the door instead of desperately seeking a spot.
- Finish that project 5 days before its deadline.
- Be early to meetings by 10 minutes.
- Review your calendar for the next week to avoid any surprises.
- Keep your phone on silent and turn off your email notifications.
- Don’t do what everyone else is doing.
- Go for a walk if you need a productivity boost.
- Once a week, skip lunch and do something that is important to advancing your goals.
- Don’t schedule back-to-back meetings.
- Turn off your phone when you are doing creative work.
- Shut your door when you are uninterruptible.
- Go see people in person when possible, a conversation is worth 20 emails.
- Go out of your way to praise people for their hard work.
What’s on your list of ways to reduce stress in the workplace? Please share below.
Post a sign to the door that says “This door is closed to keep me in, and not to keep you out.”
Set the iPad up to make ocean noises or rolling thunder, and don’t use earbuds. Tell people in the neighbouring offices that you’re experimenting with white noise.
Leave the children at home. Seriously, as a single mom and busy manager, a closed door office alone has been my salvation on many a zany day.
@Bliss Good stuff!
Love the white noise. I use that on my iPhone from time-to-time when needed to “cover” up noisy work colleagues.
@TMNinja I’m going to give you one more of my secrets. I’m not a make-my-lunch-the-night-before person, but… I do fill my electric kettle, and grind my fair-trade coffee beans before I go to bed. The ground beans sleep in the grinder, and I quietly move them into the reusable filter basket in the morning, and hand-brew my coffee by pouring the hot water in small batches over the filter which sits on a glass carafe on my counter. I fill the carafe to top level, and then skim off enough to fill my stainless steel thermos. The thermos comes with me to the office – morning is my most productive time, and I don’t want to spend it chit-chatting in the lunch room at the office. Enjoy the day. Moving the noisier parts of the process to the evening buys me few extra minutes of quiet time in the morning – the children don’t wake up from tap sounds or bean grinding.
I think that you are forgetting something which is more and more important: use the service of an at-work massage comany once a week or once a month: it will lower the stress of all the employees, including you, lowered the tension between them, lowered sickness day and boost productivity, mood and moral of all those doing it.
Carl from http://www.boost-your-life.com
i can recommend going for a walk even it its just a quick lap around the car park then come back to a project with fresh eyes . Unfortunately i don’t have a door i can close, a phone i can turn off or volume control for colleagues so sometimes there’s nothing else for it but a good old fashioned stress ball to squeeze!
i can recommend going for a walk even it its just a quick lap around the car park then come back to a project with fresh eyes . Unfortunately i don’t have a door i can close, a phone i can turn off or volume control for colleagues so sometimes there’s nothing else for it but a good old fashioned stress ball to squeeze!
Great suggestions right here! I think what also works very well is to simply arrive 15 minutes earlier at work than you normally do (compared to the 30-60 mins you suggested). You do not only have more time then, but it also does a mental trick somehow. Got this idea from http://brightplaces.com/blog/feeling-more-relaxed-at-work-4-tips/
So true