What if I told you that you could increase your productivity doing something that you probably know you should be doing anyway. Maybe you already do it? If so, “Well done!”.
What is it then?
Simply this.
In the morning, make your bed!
That’s it, you ask? Making my bed. That will increase my productivity?
Yep.
Not only that but it will increase your happiness levels and help you stick to a budget!
Sounds too good to be true.
According to Charles Duhigg, who wrote The Power of Habit, making your bed correlates to an increase in productivity and also maintaining your budget.
And it’s something also re-affirmed in Gretchen Rubins’ book – The Happiness Project, who also says it’s something that plays into happiness levels.
Why?
Well, imagine that making your bed is considered a “task”. We humans, love (and loathe) doing tasks. When they’re done (imagine the rare day you tick off all your ‘to-do’ list), you want to celebrate and tell the world (at least if you’re me, that is!). When we don’t get them done, we feel guilty, perhaps that we’ve not accomplished enough and so on.
When you get a task completed so early on, it sets you up for the rest of the day.
It’s what’s called a ‘Keystone Habit’. In other words, a habit that can spill over into other parts of your life and have a positive effect.
This has been noticed in other areas. For example, when people start exercising regularly (think back to your own life), they tend to eat better. Even without consciously planning to. It spills over.
So, when you’ve made your bed – particularly if you work from home (remember those ‘working from home’ days when you’ve left the bed unmade, barely gotten out of your pyjamas or shaved/spruced up and not felt as ‘work-like’), every time you walk past the bed, you unconsciously feel a sense of accomplishment. Rather, if you don’t make the bed, you’ll notice it more the other way. A feeling of incompleteness.
So it’s that simple. If you’re not already (and perhaps I’m speaking more to the men out there! Why is that, I don’t know), then make your bed.
It will increase your happiness, productivity and maybe even your bank account balance!
What do you think? Let me know below.
