The Productivity Guide: Using the Mind to Make the Most Out of Your Workday
“Discipline equals freedom.”
-Jocko Willink
Time is our most important asset and it’s the only one we can’t save. Once we use it it’s gone. So since we have such a limited number of seconds left on this earth let’s maximize our time.
To do this it’s important to know exactly why you’re maximizing it. Yes, you’ve implemented a handful of productivity strategies to cut down your time on that project from four hours to two and a half hours but why? Productivity doesn’t equal happiness (and it might even contribute to less happiness). The service of productivity is to achieve the task which was in some way related to making your life better.
You finished the presentation because it’s part of your job and you have your job to provide for your family and you provide for your family to improve their quality of life. It’s important to zoom out every once in a while and realize that the reason you’re implementing Pomodoro breaks and wearing blue light-blocking glasses goes beyond just saving a few minutes on the task.
Know What You Want To Want
You need to know what you want to want. The problem with too much productivity is that it gives us more time and if we fill that time with just doing more stuff that we don’t want to do then we’re sacrificing time and happiness and we may not even be realizing it.
Productivity is a skill but the goal is not to get to 100% productivity. That’s what computers are for. You’re human and a good goal might be 60% or 70% productivity (however you measure that). If you’re continually striving for 100% then not only will you never achieve this but the path to this goal is highly stressful and will likely work against you.
Look at productivity as a skill like playing an instrument or cooking. When you first started doing these things it required a ton of focus to recall and do the basics (explicit memory). When you did them enough times they became subconscious (implicit memory) and you were able to build on them with more challenging songs or recipes with some of your personal preferences thrown in. Once the skill of productivity goes from a conscious task (explicit) to a subconscious one (implicit) then you can build on this foundation and focus on higher-level skills like management, relationships, leadership, and creativity. These are the skills that make us human.
This is the first post in a series on productivity. Each post will tackle a different area that can be modified to improve your efficiency. This one will focus on the mind. We’ll look at how you can harness the nature of neurology to identify strategies and get the most bang for your buck for any task.
Let’s dive in.
Productivity Tips For The Mind
The Pomodoro Technique
Franceso Cirillo was struggling to sit down to complete his school assignments in the late 1980’s so he forced himself to commit to 10 minutes at a time by setting a tomato-shaped timer (Pomodoro being Italian for tomato). Through tinkering with this ratio, he came up with the Pomodoro technique and wrote a 160-page book on it but it can be explained in just a few sentences.
How to do it: Have a task ready. Set a timer for 25 minutes, then take a rest for 5-10 minutes, then begin another 25-minute segment of work. After 4 bouts take a longer 15-30 minute break. If your goal is productivity and endurance throughout the day then I recommend making these breaks active and not doom scrolling. Go for a walk, or do a mini-workout of kettlebell swings, pullups, and pushups. Bonus: this reduces your risk of a repetitive stress injury.
How To Use It:
A list of 5 Pomodoro apps
A good, basic one for your browser
A physical, portable, and more versatile one that you can use if you’re avoiding your phone and laptop.
The Two Minute Rule
David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity has a simple rule. “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined.” Don’t put it on your to-do list and don’t have someone else do it. Sort through the mail, respond to the email, and make the appointment. Knock the small stuff out to make room for the big and to avoid thinking about this task more than you need to.
Monotask
Our brains are wired to do one task at a time. Yes, you can watch TV while texting someone while having a conversation but you can only truly engage in one of those activities at a time.
The reason is that neurons in our auditory and visual cortexes coordinate their firing pattern in a very specific way. Each time we do the task more myelin sheath (conductive coating around the neuron) is laid on the neurons involved in the process which makes the electric signals travel faster and the task more efficient. Neurons that fire together wire together. Novel tasks have minimal myelin sheath while tasks you perform all the time have an abundance. Think about the first time you tried to type on a keyboard compared to your typing skills now. If you were repeatedly learning how to type for the first time while watching TV and having a conversation you wouldn’t get much better because the neurons were firing on multiple paths and weren’t told which was the best place to lay the myelin sheath.
Once the task goes from new to routine it’s easier to multitask but we’re still not as efficient as if we monotasked. One study had 200 participants dual-task with a challenging auditory verbal memory task while driving. They found that only 2.5%, of the “supertaskers,” were able to perform both tasks without any decrease in performance. When the other 97.5% of us attempt to perform multitasking we end up not only doing each task worse but taking longer to do each task.
Another interesting study on dual tasking found that dividing the brain’s attention can help identify liars. During an interrogation, researchers had 164 participants lie about the news or lie about the news while trying to recall a 7-digit car registration number. Those performing the secondary task were more likely to be caught lying.
The hidden costs of multitasking don’t matter much when you’re cooking and listening to a podcast but they will have an impact on more important tasks that need to get done. Focus on one task at a time.
Try Lion’s Mane
Lion’s mane mushrooms (a.k.a. hou tou gu or yamabushitake) are mostly found in Asia and they look like the mane of a lion as they grow. There are plenty of benefits of lion’s mane including managing depression and anxiety, reducing inflammation, and protecting against dementia, diabetes, and heart disease.
The most obvious benefit, however, is focus. I started experimenting with a blend of this in my coffee for periods of time when I knew I would be sleep deprived (e.g. newborn nights or long weekends with friends) and the effects were very apparent. I have a relatively long-lasting period of focus that doesn’t impact my sleep or make me jittery like too much coffee would.
I use the Four Sigmatic “Focus” mix to blend with my coffee in the morning.
Minimize Choice
We make about 35,000 decisions a day. Some have a low cognitive load like deciding what to wear to work while others have a high cognitive load like going deep work on a work project. Each one of these decisions though uses some degree of energy which results in some degree of fatigue and cumulatively the effects explain why it feels so good to put your head on that pillow even if you barely moved from the home office.
This decision fatigue, also known as ego depletion, seems benign but the consequences can include a poor ability to compromise, increased impulsive or irrational choices, and preferring to be passive in decisions. Jeff Bezos said that he makes “three good decisions a day, that's enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them.” If you’re on your 34,000th decision of the day, your ability to make a high-quality one will suffer.
Do this: The most obvious way to conserve your energy through choices is to limit them. Limit the options of your wardrobe, the types of food in your meals, and the tasks you will do when you have a bit of free time (see below). The other way to minimize choice is to have consistent routines. Plan your days and weeks out well ahead of time. Use this routine to avoid decision friction.
Know What’s Next
You just finished your project, your meeting, or your documentation time. The default mode is to immediately either reach for your phone to get a dopamine hit of some notifications you didn’t block or to “surf the web” (do people still say that?). This becomes even more common when you’re tired, distracted, or have low blood sugar. These time fillers might be your biggest productivity blunder.
Once you finish that original task, you should give yourself two options. Option one is to move. You can use this as an impromptu Pomodoro break and walk, do some pushups, or climb the stairs (ideally all without your phone). The other option is to immediately transition to the next scheduled task.
This latter choice, task-to-task transitioning, reduces friction and improves productivity but it requires front-end work Some like to plan out their week on a Sunday night, others do it on a daily basis. Whenever you choose to do it, keep the list simple. You can break it up into a list of things you can do quickly or things that take time, you can have one long list and just scan through it, or for the detail-oriented, you can use the Eisenhower Box (2x2 box of urgent, not urgent and important, not important). This will also help mitigate Parkinson’s law (work will expand to fill the time it’s allotted). Use a whiteboard or paper and keep it outside of an electronic device that’s like a slip-and-slide for your brain into zombie land.
I use this strategy at work on a daily basis with a notepad that’s always with me. I print out my schedule weeks ahead of time and have an ongoing list of what to do and when. Routine things are at the top left, higher priority items are at the bottom left, and personal ones are at the bottom right.
Put it into action. Your big task of the morning is finished. Continue the proactive time by immediately looking to your list for the next task. Reap the satisfaction of crossing off that task and then move on to the next. Make this your new habit. This list is also great for when you have short periods of time between things out of your control (phone calls, meetings, etc.).
Do this: Chris Bailey, author of Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction, suggests using the Rule of Three. Write down three things you want to accomplish today. Pick three things that, if nothing else was accomplished except these three things, you’d feel satisfied in just checking them off.
Be Consistent
Consistency is a productivity enhancer. It forces the brain to create and utilize those myelin sheaths mentioned above. About 40% of our day is not conscious thought, but rather, habit. This puts your brain in auto-pilot mode which is helpful in two ways. First, it saves energy by limiting the use of the executive functioning skills of the brain by having to think “what’s next?” This simple question taps into your energy- and time-hungry frontal lobe. By being consistent, your brain is programmed to do the next thing which reduces the cognitive load.
The other benefit of consistency is that it creates momentum to keep you going to the next thing. The best part of this is that it puts the guard rails up so that you don’t veer off and have to take those 25 minutes to get back on track.
Do this: Start by being overly concrete. Block out your day in 15-minute increments (based on the strategies above) and depend on the clock. Do this consistently for 66 days (the average time it takes to create a habit) and your new routine is formed. You can always change your plan but only if you have one.
Take a Nap
It sounds counterintuitive to take a nap and use up valuable time in the day to be more productive but that’s what a NASA study found. Taking a nap of just 26 minutes can improve performance by as much as 34%.
Do this: Squeeze in a post-lunch nap before you jump back into any deep work. By this point the peak of the caffeine will have passed, the need for a parasympathetic nervous system will be in full swing to digest food, and it’s early enough that it shouldn’t interfere with your nighttime sleep. See my post on sleep tactics for more strategies.
Eat The Frog
Mark Twain once said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Eating that frog, or getting the hardest stuff done first, works in two ways. It avoids the anxiety tax we pay by constantly thinking about it and stressing over it for the amount of time we did not do it. It also gives us an immediate sense of satisfaction.
Brian Tracy ran with this quote and wrote a book called Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. In it, he expands on Twain’s suggestion and says “And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.”
Do this: Tackle the toughest thing first. Avoid putting it off any longer for better productivity and peace of mind. “The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule but to schedule what's your priority.” -Stephen Covey
What’s your best productivity tip?