Available for Interviews: Dr. Travis Parry
Travis Parry, PhD, is a speaker, coach, and educator and has a passion for helping others in achieve a healthy work/life balance. Parry is also the author of the #1 bestseller, Achieving Balance: Make Time to Reach Your Business and Personal Goals in an Overworked World.
What Dr. Parry Can Say in an Interview:
Checking the news used to be a one-night affair with one’s favorite nightly newscasters and you were updated. Before TV, it was Radio or Newspaper over morning breakfast. Now we have a 24/7 news cycle that is in our face each day constantly streaming.
What can we do to stay productive during the media overload each day? Check out some basics with these 5 tips:
1) Save News Updates for Personal Time. Distractions keep us from focusing our time and energy throughout the workday, and news updates are the #1 source of distraction. When you are working in the digital world, news of the election, the pandemic, storms, etc., are constantly bombarding us. They show up in google searches, social media news feeds, commercials on the radio, in water cooler discussions at work. While working, news should be work-focused. If a news alert hits you about the latest on the new stimulus package and that will affect your clients or marketing, that is news you can use that can help them. Avoid the mindless water cooler conversations that don’t stimulate working productivity. Save it for lunchtime or after hours events.
2) Limit Distractions on Social Media. Avoid social media sites during working hours. Social media is code for newsfeed so avoid it while working unless using it as a tool to research, post, or find information. Social media sites are set up to scroll—sometimes aimlessly—and before we realize it, we are caught in the social media trap. If you do not have the self-control to stop during work hours consider website blockers or site timers that are easy to install. Go to your Browser’s Extension and search for one there.
3) Give Yourself Freedom to Indulge. During your personal time set time when you can check in on the news. Imagine it like your parents used to do: take off the slippers and read the nightly news or the morning broadcast once or twice per day max. This short window will put news where it belongs: to inform you of the basics. Don’t let it take over your productive time at work or the relational times of your personal life.
4) Be Intentional or Hire Someone Who Is. If you need to be posting to social media use services like Buffer or Agorapulse to help you post articles to your various social media for work. Consider outsourcing the posting of the content to add one more barrier. A social media service can save you hours of productivity! Instead of opening your social media on your phone open on a browser that is set to your page
5) Delete Phone Apps and Notifications. Phones at work should be a tool to help you be productive, not your personal toy that distracts you with constant updates. Turn all notifications on your social media apps off or consider deleting them all together if they are wasting your time at work. Imagine a plumber who uses a hammer for everything or while installing a porcelain tub had a metal saw in his hand. It will get in the way and if it’s not always needed. Your cell phone is not needed at every waking moment, and those notifications make it more difficult to put it down and put the proverbial tub in!
Exercising these 5 tips will enable us to work more efficiently, smarter, and in a shorter amount of time. Time is one of the most important resources we have. By not wasting it, we can be more productive and work and help us be ever present at home, too.
Interview: Dr. Travis Parry
Travis Parry, received his masters in psychology and his doctorate in family and human development. He is a speaker, coach, educator, and author of Achieving Balance: Make Time to Reach Your Business and Personal Goals in an Overworked World. Originally started out as a financial advisor twenty years ago, Parry now coaches and speaks in the personal development space, whose primary mission is to help financial professionals and business owners to make healthy relationship and career changes that can positively affect their lives so that they can live with true purpose.
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