On the flipside, if you choose healthy snacks that give you sustainable energy, you will be more productive over time and be a greater asset to your company. Here are a few healthy snacks you can choose to keep your body and your productivity on track.

1. Fruits. Fresh fruit contains a lot of natural sugars that are excellent sources of energy. For this reason, fruits make great mid-morning snacks or supplements to your breakfast. Because they are sweet, fruits can also squelch your craving for candy in the afternoon and offer a healthy alternative to empty calories.
2. Vegetables. What these snacks lack in sweetness they make up for in nutrition. Carrots, celery, broccoli and cauliflower are packed with vitamins to help you stay healthy. By choosing these snacks, you will prevent both short- and long-term illnesses (and, by extension, unnecessary absences from work). Supplementing vegetables with peanut butter or low-fat salad dressing can make them taste better and add more nutrients, like protein, to your diet.
3. Whole-grain foods. Grains with complex carbohydrates provide you with a lot of energy without the empty calories. Foods like brown rice and whole wheat breads provide you with these types of carbohydrates, and some also contain fiber to help keep your digestive system healthy.
4. Water. Drinking plenty of water is essential to maintaining a healthy diet. Your body needs plenty of fluids to replenish your blood supply, aid in digestion, remove toxins and even keep your body temperature consistent. But aside from those benefits, drinking plenty of water keeps your stomach full and helps you resist the urge to snack.

Many people think that a full schedule is the same thing as productivity, but that’s rarely the case. Too often business owners and employees alike spend several busy hours putting out fires and responding to e-mails before ever getting to the first task on their to-do lists.

Even worse, many people don’t realize they are doing it. They assume that because they are busy they are being productive. They often go home feeling like they haven’t accomplished anything but can’t identify what they’re doing wrong. Here are a few tips for combating busy-ness and staying productive.

Let the e-mails pile up. Busy people answer e-mails immediately; productive people answer them consistently. Keeping up on e-mail is an essential part of the work day, and you should definitely be prompt in your responses, but you don’t have to be a slave to your inbox. Let the e-mails roll in while you’re working on your tasks, then take time for e-mails every day at the same time. This will prevent e-mails from distracting you as you work on long-term tasks.

Eliminate distractions. This is more easily said than done, but distractions can cost you hours of productivity. If you find yourself falling behind on your tasks, take some interruption-free time. Your co-workers will respect your wishes if you close your office door and put off conversation for a few hours to get caught up, and it will feel good to have lingering tasks completed.

Simplify. Busy people complicate tasks until they spend hours on something with little to show for it. Productive workers put the necessary effort into projects but make ideas simpler and concepts easier to implement. While a busy person might spend several hours working on the intricate details of a project, productive people focus on perfecting core concepts. Focusing on the essential and letting other things go will help you stop being busy and start being productive.

“A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.” ~Irv Blitzer (played by John Candy) in Cool Runnings

Setting realistic goals is an important part of life; doing so gives us direction, drive, and allows us to measure our progress. But more often than not, it’s the journey toward trying to attain the goal that ends up being more valuable than achieving the actual goal.

Earning a gold medal, for instance, is a worthy goal to have. The training and dedication necessary to even compete for an Olympic medal helps to build various positive qualities in an individual and in a team. But once that goal is achieved, what added value does the formal recognition of a medal bring?

None, really. In an alternate universe where there are no Olympics, yet you still went through the same training and competition, those with the gold medal – this arbitrary public recognition of success – would really be no better off than you would.

If we couch our success in public praise or social recognition, then we’re being deceived. We achieve the gold medal because we’re already good enough to achieve it; achieving the medal doesn’t make us any better.

In business it’s no different. If your business is good enough, strong enough, agile enough, and smart enough, it’s going to succeed. It’s going to be the best in the market. It’s going to be an industry leader. Earning awards or receiving praise doesn’t make your company better at all; it simply represents the good work you’ve already done. And since awards are almost always based on past accomplishments, there’s no reason to stop trying to adapt and improve once you’ve been recognized with success.

You may have been the best, and you may currently be the best, but you’ll only continue to be the best by continuing to work hard. So set goals and strive to be the best in the world, regardless of any awards or recognition you receive because of it.

The first part of personal responsibility is moving away from the “them” and “they” culture. This doesn’t mean that everything is your fault – other people do, in fact, make mistakes – but by focusing on “I” and “we,” and analyzing how you can remedy a situation, promotes that value of accountability. This will also help your employees adopt the same mantra.

As employees exercise that personal responsibility, they will be able to approach tasks and assignments knowing they are ultimately responsible for that projects success. They too can focus inward, knowing it’s up to them to make it happen. Then you, as the manager, need to reinforce that positive action with appropriate recognition and praise.

This also means that, as a manager, you need to hold people responsible for failure. This doesn’t mean finding blame, pointing fingers, or reprimanding mistakes; it means taking the time to assess what’s happened and understand what the individual could have done differently and should do differently in the future. Encourage them to look inward as opposed to giving the reason for failure as other people. This same mindset applies to you when you’re trying to discover what you could have done differently; focus on yourself, not others.

Perhaps the best way to encourage personal accountability is to set personal goals. While the company will have overall goals, each individual needs to also have personal goals. These personal goals should not be dependent on anyone else’s success or failure, but on their own ambition and abilities.

Embracing personal accountability and encouraging it in others will build a foundation upon which a bigger business can grow.

• Share Your Mistakes A great way to come to terms with a mistake you may have made is to share it with others. This may be friends or family, but it will likely be most effective if you share it with employees, management, or other coworkers. This will help create an open and honest work environment.
• Don’t Judge Yourself Not to be too cliché, but everyone makes mistakes. You doing something wrong doesn’t automatically make you a bad person or mean you have nothing to contribute.
• One Bad Doesn’t Outweigh the Good Just because you made a mistake, it doesn’t negate all the good and correct things you’ve done in the past. Focus on the positive contributions you have made and will continue to make.
• Take Responsibility for Your Choices Shifting the blame to someone else won’t do anyone any good. Deceiving yourself and others won’t help you, your coworkers, or the business.
• Things Probably Aren’t As Bad As They Seem It’s easy to get really frustrated and worried and distraught about a current crisis. In reality, it’s likely not a crisis, but just a rough patch. Keep that in mind.
• Encourage Yourself to Move On There comes a point where you just have to move on. What’s past is past; move forward when it’s time.
• Worrying Doesn’t Change Anything Things are how they are; complaining and worrying doesn’t help.
• Most Importantly, Learn From Your Mistakes If you need to, write down the decisions you’ve made that you’ve considered “mistakes.” Next to it, write down what you might have done differently. Use it for future reference in case similar situations arise.

Mistakes happen, but if we forgive ourselves and learn from them, then we’re better off than when we started.