Brains and Productivity: What Business Owners Need to Know
The word productivity itself is overused, and can mean different things for different people. It covers both the work I do in helping business owners reclaim their time by working with their brains instead of against them.
It’s also used by the “broductivity” gurus who claim that everyone should rise at oh dark thirty and complete a 52-step morning ritual before racing to the office and trying to get 5,673,489 things done before lunch.
One of these methods is sustainable and actually helps prevent burnout for both business owners and their employees. Guess which one!
What is productivity for knowledge workers?
In a factory (or in a country), productivity is essentially measured as the number of widgets produced in a certain time frame. You can compare the number of widgets to previous similar timeframes to see if productivity has increased or decreased. In this measure of productivity, technology is almost always a performance enhancer.
But if you’re in a knowledge industry, the definition has to be different. These industries are where both business owner and staff have jobs that don’t involve manufacturing items or lifting or dealing with packages or other items, as you do in retail and hospitality as well as medicine and associated fields. You may not produce any tangible items, so counting things doesn’t work for measuring productivity.
If you’re a consultant like me, a coach, or you run a marketing agency, practice law or accounting or deal with finances or similar work, you’re in a knowledge field. What’s between your ears is more important than almost anything else for the success of your business.
Given that, for knowledge workers and business owners, productivity is located almost entirely in the brain. (Tech can both help and hurt.) A working definition for productivity for knowledge workers might look something like: accomplishing the tasks that move the business forward.
Note that’s not doing just any task, or making up tasks to cross off your list to get the little bit of momentary satisfaction of crossing off tasks. It’s critical that what you achieve actually helps you move the needle on your business somehow, or else you’re just busy.
Why knowing how the brain works improves productivity in the workplace
If the success of your business is mostly dependent on whether you’re making good decisions and getting the right things done, that means you’re dependent on your brain to be successful. So optimizing your brain is going to have a big impact on your success.
Easy, right? Just optimize your brain!
Well, how do you do that?
When you know how your brain works, you’ll be better able to optimize it. Most of the time. I don’t think anyone’s 100% productive all the time, not even productivity experts! Plus, what’s actually productive probably looks different from what you might think, especially if you get your productivity ideas from the media.
Because computers are the latest technology, people tend to think of human brains as being like computers. They’re not. This idea of “latest technology = human brain” is pretty common throughout history. When fluid mechanics were all the rage, everybody thought of the brain in fluid mechanic terms. Which weren’t 100% wrong, but not right either.
Same with computers. If you keep them charged, they can continue running programs 24/7 without making mistakes. A computer is a blank slate until you start loading it up with programs. They’re created manually from scratch each time.
Computers are based entirely on electrical power. They have no chemical signaling and no motivation to do anything until they’re commanded to do so. They also can be interrupted (by opening a new program, for example) without necessarily losing processing power.
Human brains, on the other hand, are hardwired with certain traits that came from evolution, so babies aren’t exactly blank slates when they’re born. They also use chemical signaling, sometimes to help motivate us to take action.
And of course, human brains require sleep each night. There are activities that keep both mind and body healthy which can only take place when we’re unconscious. Crucially, a human brain, when dealing with a cognitively demanding task, will lose processing power when it’s interrupted during the task, since multitasking is a vulture capitalist myth.
Human brains only get about four to four and a half hours each day for cognitively demanding tasks like working in spreadsheets, doing tax returns, creating a marketing strategy, etc. Why no longer than this?
First, remember that the eight-hour day is meaningless. It was a concession won by union workers mostly in factories to prevent the owners of capital from working them every hour they were awake. But it has no relation to knowledge work.
Secondly, consider what humans have been doing for most of the time that we’ve been a species. Depending on your reference point, it’s 50,000 to maybe 200,000 years of humanity on the planet. The current office, where companies rely on computers, is about 30-40 years old. The Industrial Revolution itself is only a few hundred years old.
For most of the time humans have been on the earth, we hung out with our tribe most of the day, did a little dance, sang a little song, and got down tonight. We weren’t using spreadsheets or even sitting. We’d hunt and gather some food when we needed to. No need for hours and hours of cognitively demanding brain time until recently, so our brains didn’t develop that capability.
What does all this mean for the owner of a knowledge work business? To optimize your brain, you need to squeeze out as much as you can during the four hours you’ve got for complex thinking. And you need to do it in a way that’s sustainable and allows your brain to “recharge” for the next day’s bout of productivity.
How to work with your brain to have a more productive day
OK, so the brain is important. But how do you work with it?
There are some brain “rules” to follow. The main thing to remember is that it is not a computer or other machine, so you have to avoid treating it like one. (Although even machines also require down-time and maintenance.)
Brains have a time of day when they’re best able to handle cognitively demanding tasks (those four hours of productivity.)
Brains can focus intensely for about 45 minutes to an hour.
Brains (and bodies) need seven to eight hours of sleep a night. Don’t kid yourself.
Switching between tasks takes a huge toll on your brain.
Many of the same things that are good for your body like nutrition and exercise are good for your brain.
Human connection is also necessary, though the intensity can vary depending on how much of a people person you are.
Given these brain rules, it follows that in order to optimize your brain you need to:
Block time for specific tasks, making sure your cognitively demanding tasks are scheduled for the time your brain is best able to handle them
Email, meetings, and administrative tasks should be saved for the rest of the day outside your focus time. Also, making sales calls isn't as cognitively demanding so those can also be reserved for different times of the day.
Don’t go from one task to a completely different one and back. For example, schedule a time or a day to batch your content for your blog, social media posts, etc. Avoid working on a piece of content, then checking email, then doing another piece, then making a call. That just tires your brain out.
Do not allow interruptions, particularly tech ones, especially during your focus time
Turn off your notifications. If you can’t handle turning them all off all the time (which will make you the most productive), at least shut them all off during your focus time. No Slack conversations either. Nothing but the important tasks that you’re working on during that time.
Make sure you go to bed early enough to give yourself the sleep you need
This is one of the reasons why telling everyone to wake up at 3:30 am is ridiculous. You still need 7-8 hours of sleep, so you’ll need to go to bed no later than 8:30 pm. You don’t get more day, you just shift it earlier. And the problem is that if you’re not an early morning person you’re still not going to be productive until later in the day.
When you’re feeling like you can’t get everything done? Number one, no one can. That’s where the skill of prioritization comes in. Number two, trying to cram in more work when you don’t have any more focus time and you’re tired anyway isn’t going to help. Don’t sacrifice sleep because your brain and body need it for health and productivity.
If you’re tight on time, don’t allow nutrition or exercise to be sacrificed
Same thing here. No, eating good food and moving your butt are not tasks that move your business forward. But without them, you can’t do the tasks to the best of your ability. Your brain needs good quality fuel (from nutritious food) and it needs oxygenated blood flow (from moving your butt around.)
Cut back on something else. Get a cleaning service. Or get prepped food from the internet or your grocery store so you’re not chopping your vegetables but you can easily cook them. That kind of thing.
Also, your spouse (if you have one) and older kids (if you have those) are not only capable of helping out in the home department, but SHOULD.
Spend time nurturing your connections
You may have a lot of friends or only a few close ones, but we survived as a species by banding together, and so human brains need connection. You can invite friends to lunch or dinner and enjoy a nice meal and connection.
No, social media doesn’t help with connection. You need to be face to face or even talking on the phone (texting doesn’t count.)
Studies show digital communication actually makes people MORE stressed.
Recap (tl;dr)
For knowledge workers, the key to productivity lies in the brain. Optimizing your brain for productivity means that you need to learn how to work with it instead of against it.
Are you a knowledge business owner and struggling with a profit plateau? Productivity bottlenecks might be the culprit. Schedule a free consultation with me to see if we’re a good fit to work together.