You’re a brilliant copywriter, but when it’s time to buckle down and get some work done, your mind hops from kittens to tacos, then new shoes to turtles.
Perhaps it has to do with your new at-home office due to COVID-19 restrictions. Maybe it’s because your office workspace is too noisy or features an uncomfortable chair.
Whatever is holding your productivity back, here are five tips to get back on track and take your copywriting career to new heights.
1. Invest in a standing desk
It’s time to get down to business. But is your comfy office chair bringing down your productivity? Recent studies say yes. The survey studied more than 140 people who changed from a sit down working arrangement to an office with an adjustable height standing desk workspace.
More than 52 percent said they felt more focused on their work, and 43 percent reported a sizable uptick in performance. The study was done over a full year at a single office and decreased average sitting time by one hour per person throughout the course of the study.
In addition to boosting productivity, standing desks can improve mood, your focus, your brainpower, and your ability to problem-solve. These benefits will allow copywriters to spark more creativity and efficiency when it comes to pumping out copy.
Human beings were not meant to sit around all the time. We were made to move. Get on your feet!
2. Buy a pair of noise-cancelling headphones
Noise is a contributing factor to a myriad of distractions during your copywriting career. But did you know that jamming out to a specific playlist that soothes and comforts you can double as a productivity booster while eliminating other noisy distractions?
Are you a hippie at heart? Try some chill folk music. Have a deadline coming up? Maybe it’s reggae music for the next few hours. Are you pitching a content strategy for a new client? Perhaps it’s time for some hip hop or metal.
Whatever kind of music you like, the mood you are in, or the task at hand, combining work and music is like peanut butter and jelly.
With noise-cancelling headphones, you can get lost in your own copywriting and allow everything else to fade away into the distance. Your brain even will enable you to associate different tasks with different music, so get busy making some different playlists for different clients today.
3. Download the Momentum extension
Distractions are everywhere, especially if you have recently moved into a home office working arrangement. On top of the distractions you would typically get at the office, such as high noise levels, sleepiness, and hunger pains, you now have domestic distractions like your playful dog, the growing pile of dishes, and the remote control.
Don’t let online distractions break the camel’s back.
Copywriters spend much time online. One of the most challenging aspects of everyday life as a copywriter is learning how to avoid social media scrolling and video watching.
Enter Momentum, a browser extension that displays a personal dashboard every time you open a new tab in your browser. The tab shows a beautiful photograph with your daily list of to-dos, complete with a motivational quote.
Momentum is a constant reminder of what you should be doing (writing copy) and what you shouldn’t be doing (watching cat videos).
4. Disable your phone
If you want to boost your productivity during your copywriter career, you need to do something about one of your biggest addictions: your phone.
You have a few options. You can turn it off entirely and promise yourself you won’t look at it for the next eight hours (unlikely), you can leave your phone at home, or you can turn off your notifications.
Think for a moment about how many times during the day you get a push notification. Your phone yells out to you with a chirp, a beep, a song, or a buzz, and you unconsciously extend your arm out to greet your phone, like a puppet adhering to its master through a string.
You get a notification every time your connection accepts your LinkedIn request, when your Aunt Martha posts a picture of baby Peter, or when you get an email from that news service you signed up for five years ago.
Depending on how many apps you have notifications enabled for, you should expect approximately over 80 push notifications per day. Let’s estimate that you spend two minutes on each notification, which means you’re losing up to three hours of your day away from your task.
Talk about the opposite of productivity.
To add insult to injury, a recent study suggests it takes an astonishing 23 minutes to fully get back to the task at hand once looking at a push notification. Do some simple arithmetic, and you’ll soon realize you’re quite literally losing days at a time by enabling all notifications on your phone.
Try this tip for a few days and watch the number of words you pump out double.
5. Take regular breaks
We are human beings, not pitch-creating, copy-spitting, word-editing robots from the planet Copywriter. When faced with an eight-hour workday, it is unrealistic to expect that we are doing some of our best work when stuck at our office workspace for 480 straight minutes.
To boost your copywriting effectiveness and to boost overall productivity and output, you need to take breaks.
Mental, physical, and emotional breakdown can occur when living your life for work five (or even six or seven) days a week.
Combat this fatigue with scheduled breaks. Studies have found that 52 minutes of intense focus on your work, followed by a 17-minute break, is the ideal amount of time to maximize productivity. Employees who did this in comparison to their non-break-taking colleagues performed better over time.
Maybe you are 2,500 words into a 3,000-word article when your break time comes. You want to finish so bad and push through the last 500 words.
Take a break. This article is not going to save the world. Your copywriting career doesn’t revolve around this single article.
Work can sometimes feel monotonous, draining, stressful, or frustrating. Don’t make work the only thing in your life.
Take a break. Your boss will thank you.
