It doesn’t matter if you’re a high-earning executive, self-employed, or someone who lives pay check to pay check – the work you’re meant to do needs doing, and your job is to get it to the stage of being complete. Yet over the course of months, or years, in your role, your productivity level can drop decidedly below your potential. You know that feeling

When you first began your job you were bursting with enthusiasm. Now, you’re kind of half-heartedly tapping away at a task on your to-do list, and gradually getting it done, but in such an unfulfilling way that you feel like you might as well be chewing on cardboard after a week without water. The daily details of getting the work done – even when it’s work you care about deeply on a larger scale – can be mundane to the point of making banging your head on a wall seem enticing. We all feel that way sometimes.

Yet loss of productivity – and its commensurate loss of enthusiasm – doesn’t have to be an inevitable part of working life. It may come as a surprise to learn that yoga can have a dramatically positive effect on productivity at work – and beyond. Here’s why.

1. Clearing the clutter. Too many demands on your attention drain productivity faster than anything else. It’s like trying to sweep leaves into a corner whilst simultaneously pointing a leaf blower into the same corner. Basically, nothing much happens except a lot of leaves being scattered everywhere. In order to experience greater productivity, we need to be able to clarify the mind. Yoga provides a way of focusing through breath and movement, which gradually allows all that scattered attention to rest in a single place. As this settling happens, something remarkably useful for productivity emerges – clarity.

2. Becoming more present. While it may sound like a new age adage, becoming more present is a very smart thing to do if you’re interested in increasing your productivity. Any project that reaches completion – from the menial to the mammoth – happens in the present moment. If you’re busily obsessing over what you’re doing later, or what happened earlier, then you’re not able to give your full attention to the task at hand – hence the lowered productivity. Through yoga practice, repetitively returning your attention to the breath literally rewires the brain to become more capable of sustained attention over time. Useful indeed.

3. Incubation to Inspiration. We all have moments of absolute insight or inspiration when the solution to a problem comes to light in a way that seems laughably clear and obvious, where only moments before it baffled us. Often these moments happen when we’re least focused on the problem itself. Maybe you’re drifting off to sleep, in the shower, taking a long walk….or in a yoga class.

Yoga can directly stimulate this power of 'doing nothing' in which incubation leads to inspiration, because it gives your mind a break from all the strategising, logical, linear thinking, and pragmatism of daily life, that limit our capacity for finding lateral solutions. As you practice yoga, your mind rests in the present moment, and as your mind is given a break, your creative juices start flowing again which increases your enthusiasm for the work you’re doing, which makes you actually enjoy being more productive. Voila!

Did we mention that yoga also makes you fit and strong, which increases your confidence at work, which has a roll-on effect of naturally upping your productivity levels? With all this in mind, yoga sounds like a very productive way to spend your time. Wouldn’t you agree? Find the right teacher for you in the YogaHive search.