The beginning of the week can be very tough. After a long (not so long, to be honest) break, it’s like you are back into resetting your body into work mode again. And Imagine saying good morning to the same people every day, doing the same job, and it's really frustrating, you’ll get tired just by thinking about it. So what can you do to avoid wishing for Friday when you’ve just literally started your week? How do you make sure you won’t have a hard time starting off your week?

We have 7 tips for you to be energized for the work week!

Disconnect

Do this before, in between, and after your workweek. Spend a short time to disconnect from work for a while. Spend one hour reading a book, napping, walking around, or drinking coffee. You need time to totally cut out work and just enjoy the moment. Once you’ve done this, you get more and more ready to go back to work more energized. Some workplaces allow their employees to take a short power nap in the office. A short nap is powerful enough to put back your concentration and to rest your mind. If you allow it, you are lucky. If not, take a moment a nap for a short while during your break especially when you are feeling sleepy and tired. Just make sure to wake up in time to resume work!

Knowing and seeing how organized you can get things done in your coming work week makes you feel motivated. It gives you an idea of how you can accomplish tasks without really rummaging for time or chasing after deadlines. This also helps a lot in making sure that you don’t get stressed for the entire week (especially on Mondays) because you already have everything sorted out in your schedule. Allocate a reasonable amount of time to accomplish a task. Remember that it doesn’t just end there. Once you are done with planning your week, make sure you stick to it, unless there are emergencies that are inevitable. If you stick to your planned schedule, you will most like to finish your week still energized and ready for a more active activity for yourself during your off days.

Set daily priorities

After planning your weekly schedule, plot your daily activities. You can go as detailed as possible depending on where you are writing it. The daily priorities are a set of tasks that can be accomplished within the day. This works really well especially when you have a lot to do in a single day. You don’t want to get overwhelmed by your workload and get lost in choosing where to start. Start with the ones that you think are important, finish them, then proceed as you go. Again, the goal here is to be able to stick to your daily schedule, otherwise, the whole planning is useless.

Do not procrastinate. When you have time to do stuff today, do it and do not delay it any further to another day. You never know how much load will be added to you in the coming weeks so you better finish everything. The danger in postponing tasks that can be done today is it makes other days more stressful while other days no stress at all. The stress level and the workload are not evenly distributed throughout the week, which is why you feel more stressed, tired, and burned out. To avoid this, convince yourself to do not just what need to be done today, but also what can be done today. If you set your daily priorities and you finished all of them early, you can start on the daily priorities you set on other days if you aren’t too tired yet. The other days will be much more comfortable, and it is more likely for you to finish your work week in a less stressful manner. You will be entering your day-off schedules without much fatigue, so you get more time to spend it for yourself, instead of just napping and recharging all the energy you lost from the last-minute Friday cramming.

Stay motivated

When you do things in a forced and stressed way, you get tired doing it immediately even after just doing it for a short while. You don’t want this to happen because you want to be more productive instead. Find purpose in the project you are doing. What things can you learn from the task? Who is it for? Finding even the smallest reason to get motivated or say something cute to motivate yourself, is enough to get you by. If it’s difficult t find motivation in what you do, maybe think of the coming off days as your motivation! Anything will do, really. Whenever you feel like losing motivation, think of the reason while you are working hard in the first place.

Give yourself a break

During your off days, make sure that you really take a break from work. No work-related things will be done because your day off is for yourself and for spending time with the people you don’t get to bond with during your workweek. This helps you get energized and ready for the work week ahead of you. A break from work also helps you maintain your enthusiasm at work by not being exposed to it too much. When you are always working and exposed to work, you get easily tired of what you are doing, so a decent amount of break from it is good. It’s really difficult if we get tired of something. The tendency is we toss things we think are no longer beneficial to us.

Sleep is the most important energizer to prepare you for your workweek, and I mean it—biologically-speaking. Anyone needs sleep to replenish the energy that has been consumed for the past days of work. If you don’t sleep enough, you are not as focused and energized when working. Your brain lacks the oxygen it needs to clearly and fully function and concentrate. But remember also that oversleeping is not god, too! When you oversleep, you wake up feeling groggy and tired as well. Make sure that you sleep a decent number of hours within the healthy and prescribed range.

A day becomes really tough when we are too busy at work. It gets especially challenging if we are not fully rested for it. Above anything else, we should not overwork ourselves because it might even lead to serious problems that could further delay other people at work and can even result in the accumulation of missed works. Whatever your preferred ways of being energized for your workday, do it consistently and well so that it would work to your benefit!

Scott Zhou is the owner of Ponwell.com. He is an entrepreneur by spirit. Scott likes to share his insights on an array of topics related to relationship, self-improvement, lifestyle, and motivation. His recent collection of powerful quotes will showcase the importance of relationships to achieve the goals of living in harmony.