Wealth and Focus: 5 Ways to Be More Productive and Maintain Focus

By by Kerrie Beene, CFP®

Are you trying to create healthy habits this year that will increase both your wealth and your focus? We'll, here are my top five suggestions to help you with those goals.

1. Plan Ahead

   • Find time in your week to see what all is ahead of you.  If your work week starts on Monday, look at your calendar on Sunday and start planning. Include everything; meetings, appointments, child events, personal obligations, doctor appointments, etc. 

   • Utilize a planner (online or paper) and choose to be organized with your time. 

   • For events with a time and date, put them in your calendar.  For things that just need to get done, write them down or use an app like google tasks.  I have gone paperless this year and am loving my google calendar and google tasks add on. Google tasks also allows you to put dates on tasks, which helps when things need done by a certain time.  Here is a quick video on google tasks.   

2. Prioritize

   • After your weekly review, go through everything and set priorities. This is to respect yourself, your time, and other people you have an appointment scheduled 

   • This is where calendars and task management comes in handy. 

3. Time Block

   • Here is a quick video on time blocking

   • This takes some time getting used to but once you get the hang of it you will get more down

   • Another helpful tool is using an app to track your time.  This is very helpful because sometimes things do not take the amount of time we thought.  We use an app called clockify on our laptops and phones.  This allows you to manually track things or just log them as you go.  

4. Exercise

   • There are so many studies that have proven over and over that we need to exercise.   This is for our overall health and helps keep our mind clear and focused at work. Just schedule it and get it done!  And if you need 10 reasons to do it, here is an article. 

5. Say “No” Sometimes

   • This comes back to priorities.  As busy adults, with jobs and families, these meetings and tasks can get overwhelming.  Just decided what is most important to you and stick to it! We no longer want to be superman or wonder woman.  It is not worth the sacrifice required to be everything for everyone. Do what you can and say “no” to some things!

Food, Mood, and Finance

The older I get, the more I realize a lot can affect our mood and bring our spirits down.  Once our spirits our down, our decision making is affected. This can affect our emotions which then affects our a lot of our daily decisions, including our financial decisions.  We may spend money on something we normally wouldn’t have simply because we want to feel better in the moment. But one simple way to keep our spirits high is to control what we eat.  When we lack nutrients from foods that are good for us, it affects our brain. When we are in a bad mood, it can affect so many areas in our lives. Below are 5 vitamins needed to improve our mood and some of the foods that contain them.  

1. Foods with Omega 3’s

   1. Fish - Salmon, Mackerel, Anchovies, Herring, Oysters, Sardines, etc.

   2. Flaxseed

   3. Chia Seed

   4. Walnuts

2. Vitamin B9 (folate)

   1. Asparagus

   2. Eggs

   3. Leafy Greens

   4. Citrus Fruits

   5. Broccoli

   6. Brussel Sprouts

   7. Nuts and Seeds

3. Vitamin B12

   1. Salmon

   2. Eggs

   3. Tuna

   4. Beef

4. Tryptophan (used to make serotonin)

   1. Salmon

   2. Eggs

   3. Spinach

   4. Seeds

   5. Poultry

5. Magnesium

   1. Dark Chocolate

   2. Avocados

   3. Nuts

   4. Seeds

   5. Bananas

6. Probiotics - Increasing probiotics in your diet can be tricky, here are a few common ones

   1. Yogurt (make sure it has active or live cultures and is not filled with added sugar)

   2. Sauerkraut

   3. Pickles

   4. Traditional Buttermilk

7. Zinc

   1. Nuts

   2. Eggs

   3. Legumes

   4. Meat

   5. Shellfish