1) Sleep
This is a rather controversial one, since many hardcore 'workaholics' will argue it is a luxury more than a need. How many comments have I read saying "Sleep is for losers" and "You can sleep when you're dead", etc. Or just looking at the way the financial services impose a 100-hour week lifestyle on their employees, effectively leaving them with hardly any time to sleep or recover from the work day. While I applaud the desire to be more productive - I am a big fan of maximizing your time - there is something deeply irrational and foolish about this thought movement. Sleep is a remarkably poor understood aspect of human biology. The fact that I had to learn about sleep through a Psychology class, and not a Biology one, illustrates quite well how the science of sleep has been relegated to a second-order priority. But what we do understand well, from numerous studies, is that sleep deprivation leads a depreciation in cognitive ability. Among the mental effects are (but not limited to) a reduction in working memory (which is crucial, if you have read some of Kevin's earlier posts on N-back training), logical reasoning, decision-making (so called 'executive function') and mood (depression/anxiety). Now I don't need to tell you why this has an adverse effect on productivity. What these anti-sleep advocates don't understand can be explained with simple economics: those extra hours spent working when you could be sleeping or meditating come at a great marginal cost. If you work 90 hours a week at 60%, you are in fact getting less done AND in lesser quality than if you worked 70 hours a week at 90% alertness.
The most vicious aspect of sleep deprivation is that your brain adjusts to your new steady state of chronic fatigue and fools you into thinking you are just as productive as before, when in fact, you are not. Just try a simple experiment: give yourself an adequate night of sleep every day for a week (~ 7 hours), and then observe how you perform comparatively after returning to a sleep deprived schedule. Perhaps that will help you see with your own eyes the impact of chronic fatigue on productivity.
2) Exercise
This is probably the most obvious and discussed one. Almost everyone has experienced the refreshing sense of calm and focus that one gets after a good workout. The best is to get it done early in the day, before going to the office, so you can reap the mental benefits fully while at work. My personal favorite is swimming, as it offers a unique combination of vigorous exercise and relaxation.
3) 'Focus booster' or Pomodoros
This is an interesting approach. The theory is, rather than trying to power through your work day and let your stream of thought be broken by the non-stop distractions of the workplace, give yourself stretches of time without any outside (or inside) interference to focus on a specific task.
Again, I feel the need to debunk another thought movement based on superficial understanding of science and how the brain works: multitasking. Cognitive research shows that, for the great majority of individuals, attempting to tackle multiple tasks at the same time results in a loss of quality in each of those individual tasks, and can even prolong the amount of time required to accomplish them. The brain is fundamentally a SERIAL processor, meaning that we are only designed to focus our attention on one object at a time, whether this be a conversation, an email or a block of code. The notion of multitasking is a misleading one because in reality your brain is shifting its attention from one object to another in quick succession, disrupting your focus every time, rather than actually processing all streams of information in parallel.
With that said, I find the approach of setting periods of time aside for dedicated attention on a single task quite useful. Some will argue they do not need the structure of dedicated time and can sustain attention on a single task at hand effortlessly. Good for them. But for the majority of us, we do not have the capacity or the luxury (due to the amount of responsibilities to keep track of or physical distractions) to operate in such fashion. For these people, I recommend setting up a timer similar to that advocated by the 'Pomodoro' movement, or just simply blocking out time for a task and abiding to it. Once the allotted time is up, you can give yourself a short break (~5 mins) to relax and internalize that you have been working on. Then onto the next block, either on the same task or a different one!
The only question left is how long should one dedicate to a single session, or in other words, how long can the brain focus on a single task before experiencing diminishing returns? While there is no clear answer, the magic number seems to lie somewhere between 25 to 45 minutes. I think this number can vary depending on the individual, his mental state (hungry, tired, etc.) and the type of task at hand (very challenging or not). If I were to draw an approximate graph depicting productivity vs. time spent, it would look as follows:
The point being, obviously, to maximize the area under the curve.
To conclude, I will say that these are subjective and by no means scientifically exact methods, but they are empirically based and in my opinion quite useful approaches to tackling the ongoing challenge of productivity.
- Nathanael
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