Establishing Great Work Routines

Fall is a great time to get back to routines. After the chaotic fun of summer, full of impromptu road trips, weekends up north, and evenings with friends, cooler evenings and longer shadows seem to call for a more orderly pace. Routines help us in many ways, from improving mental health benefits to boosting productivity, a routine can be of great service to you. In this post, we’d like to highlight the way routines can help you at work and how you can form better routines to enjoy all the benefits.

Reducing Stress

Solid routines can go a long way toward reducing the amount of stress you feel at work. You know that feeling when you’ve reached the end of the day, but feel like you haven’t accomplished anything but instead just have a pile of half-finished tasks? What about that feeling that you can’t decide what to do first because it all seems like it should be your first priority? The stress of constant decision-making and keeping up with a never-ending to-do list is very real.

Fortunately, having a routine can help alleviate a lot of that stress. What if you decided that you simply won’t answer phone calls or read new emails until lunch? Or that you always start or end your day by creating a to-do list? Or that you always do your writing first thing in the morning? By creating routines, your daily tasks can become almost automated, which requires much less mental effort, taking a lot of stress off your plate.

Saving Time

Routines can also help you save time. A lot of time. When you turn a task into a daily, weekly, or monthly ritual, it becomes more streamlined. That’s because as we repeat a task, we naturally find ways to do it faster and more efficiently. We notice the little opportunities for optimization and our minds find ways to prepare us for the next step on autopilot instead of having to re-think it all the way through. Think about your monthly invoicing or weekly data analytics review or your daily task sorting. The more you reinforce great routines, the faster you can accomplish your tasks, leaving you room to expand and find more business or work a few less hours.

Identify Opportunities for Work Routines

If you’re psyched about setting up some new routines to help you reduce your stress level and save time, you might start wondering how to get started. We have a few tips. A great first step is to identify your opportunities for routine and habit building. Tasks at the beginning or end of day are a great place to start. Refocusing after lunch is another major opportunity. But don’t limit yourself to just daily routines. End of week routines are great because they set you up for success at the beginning of the next week and help clear your mind to enjoy the weekend.

Establish a Consistent Workplace

Having a consistent, reliable workplace can go a long way to helping reinforce routines. When you’re in the same chair, at the same desk, with the same level of background noise, it’s much easier to setting into the tasks at hand. Have you ever gotten up to do something in another room, only to forget what it was by the time you get there? That’s a real phenomenon called the Doorway Effect and it’s a manifestation of an overloaded brain. By choosing a consistent workplace, you can help remove some of that brain burden so that you can more consistently and reliably complete your projects.

If you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer, finding a consistent workplace can be challenging. Coffee and sandwich shops are full of ever-fluctuating noise and movement. Home can be awash with kid noise, piles of personal stuff, and reminders about chores like laundry and dishes. Hunt Street Station offers a consistent, convenient, affordable workplace solution for professionals of all kinds. If you don’t work in a corporate office but are looking for a way to establish better work routines, signing up for a coworking space like Hunt Street will help you take a huge step toward your goals.