Have you come back from your holiday refreshed? Or are you feeling like you need another holiday?

Many people I’m hearing from right now still feel tired and exhausted even after their holiday. Is that you?

Maybe you didn’t get a chance to read that book or quietly sunbathe despite your best intentions.

Or perhaps you took some work away with you. You may not have literally taken your laptop but work nevertheless  invaded your space.  Maybe the odd email, phone call or conference call just had to be done.

So no time to really stop, unwind and relax.

Possibly you had reports to read, projects to plan or resources to juggle.

So have you really come back to work having caught up on sleep and with your batteries recharged?

Whatever is the reality for you, how is you battery level right now and is it enough to carry you through the next few months? If it’s not great, how are you going to get back on track and be ready for whatever comes?

Here are the top five tips and techniques I have gathered with my clients over the years.

1) Sleep.

If you want to increase your productivity, mood, creativity and well-being, the best thing you can do is get more sleep. Unless you’re getting from seven to nine hours of sleep a night, chances are you’re not getting enough. If you want to be a high-performer and get quality work done, research has shown that if you don’t get enough sleep you make more mistakes and things will take longer to do. An extra 30 minutes a night will make all the difference

2) Get ahead of your day.

Creating space and time to plan your day before it starts seems to be the crucial tactic for high-performers. Knowing what must get done today before looking at emails will help you stay on track. After all, emails are just a convenient way of organising other people’s agendas. If you mean business you need to be clear about your own agenda.

3) Agreements avoid disagreements.

How often have you found yourself working late into the night only to discover that what you’re working on wasn’t needed, or you did more than was necessary? Has that ever happened to you? Certainly it happened to me in my time at Goldman Sachs. You see, I never used to have the courage to seek clarification, particularly with more senior colleagues. As a consequence I often did more work than was necessary. But it doesn’t have to be so. Seek clarification before you get started.

4) Stop and take a break.

In today’s fast-paced world, which is continuously changing and bombarding us with distractions it’s easy to think that we need to keep going to get things done. However, the reality is that when you have information overload and decision fatigue it’s time to take a break. Even a short walk to the bathroom or to grab something to drink can be enough to allow your brain to recover and get back on track.

5) Choose who you hang out with.

If you want to hang on to that holiday feeling and don’t want to get dragged into office politics then choose your company wisely. Choose people who are going to motivate and energise and not those who will drag you down with their moans and groans. As my mum says, ‘hang out with radiators, not drains’.You are after all the average of the people you hang out with.

I hope you found these tips and techniques useful.

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