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How to be more productive

It may seem counter intuitive, yet helping others can actually make you more motivated and productive at work.

According to Wharton Business School professor Adam Grant, the greatest untapped source of motivation at work is a sense of service to others. When you focus on how you can contribute rather than just thinking about ways to help yourself, you’ll feel good about your work, get more done, and have a fan club of appreciative people you’ve helped along the way. Ultimately you’ll be more productive, successful and happier.

Sounds great! Yet helping others can sometimes seem like a big, time-consuming task. So here are some simple approaches you can take to help others that won’t leave you overloaded, stressed out or needing to be a martyr.

1 Give 5 minute favours

Grant’s book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success suggests giving a few minutes to help someone in a way that’s a small commitment to you, but could be of large benefit to someone else. Stopping to help someone with directions, walking to the other end of the office to personally check in with a workmate or writing a thank you note all just take a few minutes of your time yet help others in exponentially positive ways.

What could you do for a workmate, a friend or even a stranger, that takes less than 5 minutes?

2 Dedicate 2 hours a week to helping

Research shows that if you volunteer or help others for two hours a week, your happiness, satisfaction and self-esteem all go up a year later. This magical number of 100 hours over a year helps you to balance out giving a lot of your time to others without feeling overloaded or drained from helping.

And it’s better to cluster those activities together than to spread them out. Choose a day of the week when you are most likely able to have the time to help others. Make a conscious effort to find ways to contribute in meaningful ways. This might be doing 3 meaningful acts of kindness that help your workmates, suppliers or clients get stuff done.

3 Help in ways that are meaningful to you too

Helping others feels good and gives you energy only when you enjoy doing it and it’s done by choice. If you help others out of duty and obligation you won’t get the psychological benefits. So look for ways to help because you want you. Do things that give you the satisfaction of helping others succeed like mentoring, coaching or even introducing helpful contacts across your network.

Use these simple tips to help someone today. It will make you happier and more productive!

Interested to know more? Read this New York Times article Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?
 

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