New Years Resolution #3: Eat Better at Work

Let’s face it. Most of us could eat better at work.

Packing a lunch takes time, but fast food restaurants are everywhere. So are vending machines and coffeeshops with muffins and donuts. Who wants to crunch into a carrot stick when everyone else is having slices of pizza?

If concerns about your long-term health aren’t enough to convince you to eat better in the here and now, think about this: you’ll start feeling better—right now, today—if you start eating better.

First, the obvious

Eat your peas and lay off the fast food.

There. We said it. We’re not your mother, so let’s move on.

Start with breakfast

Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. Unless you snacked last night, your stomach will have been empty for a solid 18 hours by lunchtime if you skip breakfast. Your energy will be low, your brain will be fogged up like a sauna and your blood sugar will be on the floor.

If you don’t want to fall asleep during your 11:00 meeting, eat something in the morning before you go to work, and don’t make it a bowl of cereal either. If you’re going to work instead of out for a run, your body needs protein, not carbs, first thing in the morning.

Fruit is good too, but you’ve been kidding yourself about that glass of orange juice. It’s just a straight shot of sugar. You’ll crash long before lunch if you don’t also consume something else. Really, it’s not much better for you than a can of soda.

Pack your own lunch

You’ll save money, of course, if you pack your own lunch, and you’ll eat healthier too if you plan what you’ll have in advance instead of letting your id take over when the waiter asks what you’ll be having.

They say you’re not supposed to go to the grocery store when you’re hungry because you’re more likely to stock up on junk food. The same applies to packing your lunch. Tend to your brown bag after you’ve already had breakfast.

Eat away from your desk

Research has shown that if you turn your desk into a dining room table, you’ll subconsciously label your desk as the place where you eat and you’ll be more likely to chow down all day.

So pack it up and go somewhere else on your lunch hour. Getting up and moving around is good for your body and mind anyway.

Snack smarter

If you like sugary treats but you also want to eat healthier, there’s no need to cut yourself off entirely. Just bring a small cupcake, three of four Hershey’s kisses or half a Snickers bar, then switch to something a little better like almonds or pistachios.

You’ll satisfy your cravings just as much as if you’d scarfed down a whole candy bar plus a slice of cheesecake, but your body will thank you and you’ll feel a lot better.

And bonus: no sugar crash.

Watch it with the coffee

Coffee may be okay in moderation, but too much of it, according to Positive Health Wellness, can be a detriment, and Health Ambition argues that it may even be bad for you.

According to the Mayo Clinic, there’s a 21 percent increase in all-cause mortality among those who drink more than four cups of coffee per day. So you might want to switch to another stimulant after your third.

Try this: a cup of tea made with yerba mate and ginseng. (Yes, that requires two separate tea bags.) The effects are similar to those of Adderall—a boost in energy and sharpened mental focus—and it works almost as well, but it’s not a controlled substance, it won’t make you jittery, it won’t make you crash and it’s certainly not going to kill you.

New Years Resolution #2: Be More Punctual

Our experience of time is drastically changing, but it’s changing so slowly that most of us don’t even notice.

In his mega-bestselling book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler explained how the industrial revolution transformed our experience of organization and time before explaining the new shifts heading our way as we transition into a post-industrial society.

“Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed,” he wrote. “The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.”

That’s why we grew up with school bells. Administrators placed there to prepare us for the factory whistle, when we’d have to be precisely on time—right down to the second—or industrial machinery would grind to a halt.

Most of us don’t work in factories anymore. Our time is no longer punctuated by school bells and factory whistles, but hardly any of us are regulated by the sun and the moon these days either. In our post-industrial era, most of us are living somewhere in between.

Punctuality is more important than it was before the industrial revolution, but for many of us it’s less important than it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a consequence, a lot of us are chronically late. It’s annoying and disrespectful and it hampers productivity, but terrible things rarely happen if we’re late all the time, so the problem festers.

Diana DeLonzor, author of Never Be Late Again, says “Most late people have been late all their life, and they are late for every type of activity — good or bad.”

She argues that the chronically late are often overly optimistic and unrealistic. They think they can stop for gas and coffee on the way to work in the morning, but fail to take into account the construction zone down the block and the traffic jam on the bridge.

If you recognize yourself here, just plan to be early and more often than not you’ll arrive bang on time.

The same applies to long deadlines. Try to finish big projects early instead of nosing in just under the wire.

Americans who stay late at the office often give the impression that they’re hard-workers, but Europeans who stay late at the office come across as incompetent. Their colleagues often wonder why on earth it’s taking so long when everyone is already finished.

That doesn’t mean you should be the first out the door every day if you work in the US, but if you’re wrapping up a project by 3:00 in the afternoon the day before it’s deliverable, you’ll project an image of competence as well as punctuality.

Your colleagues, friends and family will all respect you more if you’re reliably on-time. You’ll respect yourself more, too. Your status will be greater, and that really does matter.

Humans are hard-wired to fret about status because those of us with higher status have always gotten a larger share of scarce resources. We aren’t scrounging like hunter-gatherers anymore, but the best jobs and the best salaries are finite. Don’t kneecap yourself with your tardiness.

Perhaps best of all, though, you’ll be more relaxed. Being late, and the fear of being late, adds stress to our lives, but with just a small bit of effort it’s one of the easiest stressors to banish.

New Years Resolution #1: Be More Productive

Most of us would like to be more productive, but it’s hard to resolve to be more productive if we think it means living with a cattle prod in our backs. There’s more to life than just work, after all, and most of us are already working hard enough as it is.

We don’t have to work harder, though, to be more productive. We need to work smarter, and it’s not as tough as it sounds.

Get up an hour earlier

Successful people tend to wake up earlier than everyone else. So do what they do. Get up earlier.

You don’t necessarily have to start work an hour earlier. You certainly can, but it isn’t required. Just get out of bed.

Take an extra hour for yourself to do whatever it is you’d be doing if you had the day off. Take a walk. Read a book. Go out for breakfast. Write another page or two in your novel.

When it’s time to start working, you’ll be fully awake, fed and relaxed while everyone else is rushing into the office with nothing but a to-go cup of coffee in their stomachs and sleep inertia clouding their minds. You’ll be that chipper morning person that everyone hates, but you’ll get more done and you’ll feel better.

Create your own deadlines

Deadlines are great motivators. They keep us on schedule. They force us to be disciplined.

They can also be sources of stress. Not once in the history of deadlines has anything good happened because somebody missed one.

So create your own advance deadlines. If a project is due in two weeks, quietly impose your own deadline in ten days.

Chances are, you’ll get your work done early. And you’ll be less stressed because if you miss the artificial deadline, no biggie.

Say no to optional meetings and other distractions

If you sit through an entire meeting at work without saying a word or writing anything down on your notepad, perhaps you did not need to be there.

If you work from home and find yourself making a grilled cheese sandwich during a phone conference, you’re either goofing around on the job or you could have better spent your time on something else.

We feel like we’ve accomplished something at the end of a meeting, though, even if we just sat there taking up space.

An hour-long meeting burns up more than just an hour of time. Chances are you won’t be doing anything productive for at least fifteen minutes ahead of time and for at least fifteen minutes afterward.

So if a meeting is optional, just say no and stick to what matters.

Stop pretending you can multitask

If you think you can multitask, think again.

“Humans don’t really multitask – we task switch,” says Eyal Ophir, the primary researcher on the pioneering Stanford Multitasking study.

“Our brains are serial machines, so we just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we’re multitasking. So when we found that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a classic test of task-switching, it was like finding out that these heavy media multitaskers were worse at multitasking.”

That’s a bit counterintuitive, to be sure, but keep reading.

Recent research suggests that the cost of task switching is rooted in cognitive interference from the irrelevant task set: interference from all those thoughts about the task you’re NOT doing. Every task you do competes for your mental resources, even once you think it’s no longer relevant.

The more you do, the more you increase this competition. So that momentary interruption is still fighting for some of your mental resources even when you’d like to focus back on your main task. The more competing tasks you take on, the more interference you must overcome to fully dedicate yourself to what’s really important.

What may be worse is that over time you may be training yourself NOT to focus. You teach yourself that something more exciting might be just around the corner – behind that notification, or the app on your mobile phone, or the email you haven’t checked.

Take plenty of breaks

Seriously.

A long work day isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s longer than a marathon, actually.

The median time to finish running a marathon (26.2) miles, is a little longer than four hours for men and a little less than five hours for women.

The average workday, meanwhile, is eight hours long. Nine if you count the lunch break.

So don’t try to sprint through it. Even the best athletes in the world can only sprint for a couple of minutes before flaming out.

The human body can only run for so long before losing energy, and the human brain can only focus for so long before it’s running on empty.

“Our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks (such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes), it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself,” says Psychology Professor Alejandro Lleras at the University of Illinois. “Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!”

Turn off the Internet

When it is time to focus, however, you do need to actually focus. Checking your email or Facebook or your favorite blogs every five minutes is not the kind of break your mind needs at work.

Some of us have a hard time restraining ourselves, but there’s an app for that. It’s called Freedom. It will block any and all web sites on your computer for whatever amount of time you specify.

You can turn the Internet off for eight hours if you really want to go for it, but it’s probably best to use Freedom in 30 or 60 minute intervals. It will all but force you to stay focused during that time.

A pop-up window will tell you when the time has elapsed and you have web access again. That’s your cue to take the break your mind needs. Go for short walk. Refill your coffee mug. Chat up your friends in the break room.

Then get back to work!