As a retailer, you have a lot on your mind. Follow these 3 tips to improve concentration and productivity:

During the workday, distractions run rampant—phone calls, emails, interactions with vendors, employees and shoppers. To counteract these productivity speed bumps, try these three tips, offered by David Rock and reported by Nadia Goodman in Entrepreneur.com. Rock is co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of “Your Brain at Work.”

• Do creative work first. Typically, people begin their days with mindless work and build up to tougher tasks. It actually should be the opposite, Rock says. “Every decision we make tires the brain,” he says. “An hour into doing your work, you’ve got a lot less capacity than (at the beginning).” Tackle tasks that require creativity or concentration first thing. 
• Allocate your time deliberately. In his research, Rock has found that people truly focus for only about six hours a week. “You want to be really diligent with what you put into those hours,” he says. Know when you do your best work—whether in the morning or late at night—and work on more difficult tasks during those times. (By the way, Rock’s studies show that 90% of people do their best thinking outside the office.)
• Train your mind like a muscle. With all the digital distractions at our fingertips and people and tasks clamoring for our attention, we have developed the habit of multitasking. In other words, “We’ve trained our brains to be unfocused,” Rock says. Learning to focus takes practice. Start small by turning off all distractions and committing your attention to a single task for five minutes a day and build up from there. If you find your mind wandering, just return to the task at hand. “It’s just like getting fit,” Rock says. “You have to build the muscle to be focused.”