A “Secret” Productivity Weapon Every Part-time Blogger Should Use

December 12, 2013 by Daniel Sharkov|

The following is a guest post by Timo Kiander. Feel free to get in touchif you would also like to contribute a guest post!

I remember this one day vividly: I was very tired at work and my productivity levels were just plain zero. I also had some headaches and doing anything which required focusing was out of the question.

Needless to say, I didn’t have the energy to do anything meaningful and I just wanted to end this awkward feeling. All I wanted to do was go home and find a way to feel better…

The Power of 20 Minutes

As soon as I came home, I immediately headed my bedroom. 20 minutes later, after I woke up, a miracle had happened – I felt like a new person! My tiredness was gone and so was my headache.

In addition to taking a quick nap, I also exercised a bit, took a shower, and then grabbed a bite to eat. I felt totally awesome – the complete opposite from what I had felt a couple of hours earlier.

Thanks to this, the rest of the day became very productive and I was ready to jump back into my regular schedule.

So Why Aren’t You Napping?

As you can now see, I have demonstrated to you the power of napping. To be more specific, I was talking about a very special version of napping – the power nap.

It’s a very quick nap – 15-20 minutes – in which you fall asleep, but you wake up refreshed. Even with this short amount of time, you can “reset” your day and become productive again.

Now, I can understand why you are not power napping at all. You may feel that:

You feel groggy when you wake up. You think it’s just a waste of time. You think that you cannot fall asleep for such a short time.

Fair enough … but what if I told you about the benefits?

It can help you to focus better. You can think more clearly. It helps you to get stuff done. You will feel good after a refreshing nap.

You can have your doubts, but I also encourage you to test this first so that you can see the benefits.

In fact, you may even experience what I did. If I go to take a nap at 2pm and set the alarm to go off at 2:20 pm, I may actually wake up before the alarm.

Since it takes just a few minutes to get into sleep, the actual sleeping time could sometimes be less than 15 minutes!

Do you think you have about 15-20 minutes a day of time for yourself, especially if it helped you to feel better and be more productive? I sure do, and I think you have that time too!

Don’t just take it from me, but from researchers too!

To back up the proof that power napping is indeed beneficial for you, there are plenty of researches that have been done in this field.

For instance, one studyby the University of Dusseldorf found that napping increased the way the test participants performed in a memory test. Another researchin University of California found that an afternoon nap can boost the brain’s learning capacity as well.

There is also information found about the duration of napping times, how they affect your productivity and your overall feelings:

10-20 minutes:
Improved alertness and motor learning skills 30-60 minutes:
Improved decision making skills 90 minutes:
Improvements in creativity

As you can see, napping has some great benefits and fitting it into your everyday schedule can have many positive consequences – whether it’s regarding how you feel or how productive you become.

So How Does this Help You to Build Your Online Business?

Let’s face it: if you have a day job and you’re building an online business on the side, you have very limited time on your hands. When you have a day job that you don’t like, quitting your job is probably your top goal at the moment.

That’s why you really have to take advantage of every minute you get if you want to move forward with your business and escape your day job at some point.

That’s where power napping comes in. It helps you to focus on your work and actually get it done in a productive manner. We all know that the more productive you are, the more progress you make.

For instance, if your goal is to write the ultimate guide about getting traffic to your website, doing it tired and unfocused is just not going to cut it.

Or, let’s say that you’re creating a video course about affiliate marketing for bloggers. It’s a whole different story to do it when your mind is sharp and clear rather than feeling tired and unfocused.

The fact is that the more tired you are, the more time you spend on trivial things, thus the more frustrated you become if you are not able to solve even the smallest of the problems that you encounter.

That’s why power napping is so good – it helps you to “reset” your day and start over again.

Don’t let your valuable hours and minutes go down the drain. You are going to need them to turn your online business into a success.

How to get started with power napping

With these simple steps, you can get started with power napping easily.

1. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Use your mobile phone or other type of alarm and set it 20 minutes away from the current moment. If you feel that 20 minutes is not enough, set it 30 minutes away instead (but no longer).

2. Sleep in a dark, quiet room. The darker the room you sleep in, the better. If it’s not possible to make your room dark, buy an eye mask. This helps you to filter out the light, even if it’s otherwise bright.

3. Be warm. Make sure to stay warm by sleeping inside the blanket. This makes your sleeping experience more comfortable and helps you to fall asleep faster.

4. Be early enough. Don’t take power naps too late; it’s very easy to mix up your night sleep by doing that. Try to do it anywhere between 1pm and 4pm.  Although I have power napped as late as 5pm, you have to test this yourself and see what timing is optimal for you.

5. Get up as soon as the alarm goes off. Once you feel warm and cozy inside your blanket, it’s tempting to stay there and just say to yourself, “I’ll get up in just a couple of minutes.”

Unfortunately, if you are not careful enough, you may fall asleep again, feeling groggy when you wake up. And besides, if your goal was just to improve your productivity by spending as little time in bed as possible, sleeping more than necessary turns into unproductive activity.

There is one final thing related to waking up: It’s very possible that you’ll wake up before your alarm goes off. I have experienced this many times, making my sleeping time around 10-15 minutes total.

Yet, I have felt refreshed every time and I’m able to start working on my blogging related tasks right after waking up.

6. Know when to stop. Sometimes, you just can’t get into sleep, no matter what. You just keep turning around in your bed and waiting for the Sandman to arrive.

Since 20 minutes is such a short amount of time, you’ll eventually realize whether your napping is going to be successful or not. If this situation occurs to me, I get up from the bed right away – instead of staying there until 20 minutes have passed.

7. Bonus tip for part-timers: I power napped even when I had a day job! All I did was ask my boss if it was OK to do so. I told him the benefits of napping and he agreed to it.

In fact, he gave our whole team permission to take a nap after lunch once the productivity benefits were obvious.

The side-benefit of this was that I didn’t have to power nap at home anymore. This helped me to save 20-30 minutes of my time.

Conclusion

As you can now see, power napping is a simple, yet very effective way of “resetting” your day and making it productive again. All it takes is 20 minutes (3o minutes maximum) of your time on a daily basis. The benefits are obvious and they can help you to make giant steps when building your online business.

Now let me hear what you think!

Have you tried power napping? What other ways can you suggest on how to improve blogging productivity?

Timo Kiander, a.k.a. Productive Superdad, helps entrepreneurs improve their online business productivity. With 18 co-authors (like Pat Flynn and Corbett Barr), he wrotea book about how to build an online business and get stuff done – even when working from 9-5 (available as a freedownload or through Amazon).

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