Maintaining Your Best Productivity Tool
This tool seems very underappreciated, but learning to work with it and maintain it will give you a sustainable productivity boost that will also help prevent burnout.
Let’s talk productivity and tools!
What is productivity?
There are a lot of definitions flying around, and the one I’m talking about is closest to efficacy. Not efficiency, but efficacy. Because it’s not just about optimizing for more work. True productivity is not a goal in and of itself, but in service to helping people reclaim joy and their lives outside of work.
With true productivity, you’re able to focus your attention on the important tasks at work that move your business or your career forward. Instead of cramming through as many tasks as you have on your list, you prioritize only the critical ones and delegate, outsource, automate, and even delete the rest.
Did I just say delete a task? GASP! Yes, if something is neither important nor urgent then it probably shouldn’t be done in the first place. If it’s not important, then the business owner shouldn’t be taking care of it, and that’s where the delegation/outsourcing/automation comes in.
True productivity means being mindful about the work you’re doing. You’re not just trying to get through all the tasks, but you’re intentionally choosing priorities. Yes, this does mean saying no sometimes. In fact, the word “no” is pretty important if you have goals you want to accomplish.
It means you block time in your calendar every day to work without distractions. This allows you to focus on those important tasks so you can complete them. When you allow distractions to pull away your focus, the items take longer to complete. Plus you get that nagging feeling of leaving work undone – unless you punish yourself by working more hours to get it done.
This time block for undistracted, focused work also does not move around the calendar willy-nilly as other things get scheduled. It’s a “big rock” that gets put in first, because you do it at the best time for your brain to tackle this important work.
What’s the point of sustainable productivity? It’s so that you can have a life outside your business. No matter how much you love what you do (and I love the work that I do), spending time with loved ones and doing other things you love have their place in a full and well-lived life.
And when I say spend time with loved ones, I don’t mean sitting near them while you’re on your phone dealing with work emails or whatever. No, I mean actually talking to them, being present with them, maybe doing fun activities with them.
There have been studies about what people regret at the end of their lives. I don’t think a single person on their deathbed has said, I wish I’d worked more. Most people regret not spending enough time with loved ones, or leading the lives that others wanted for them and not doing the things that lit them up.
That’s what productivity is about: fewer hours at work because you’re focused only on the things that truly matter.
Tools and their maintenance
Humans are not the only tool-using animals. Many of our primate cousins also have tools, like using rocks to smash open a yummy foodstuff. Crows and some other birds are also noted tool users. But no other animal seems to have the variety of tools that we do,
Tools allow you to leverage your strength (not always physical). You could smash a nail into a wall with the heel of your hand (depending on the wall), but a hammer makes that a lot easier. You could walk pretty much anywhere on foot, but we invented bicycles and cars to get around faster and farther. Plus trains, planes, ships, etc.
You could carry stuff in your hands to get them from one place to another, but we invented bags and carts to carry more without being overburdened. You could render human fat to get lye and wash your clothing in a stream, but we invented washing machines and different ways of making laundry soap. And so forth.
Many of the tools we’ve invented need maintenance from time to time. Your car (at the very least) needs regular oil changes and tire rotation so they wear evenly.
Dryers need regular lint trap maintenance and duct maintenance now and then to clear out anything that could cause a fire. The knife you use to prepare food has to be honed periodically because dull knives don’t cut well. You can use boiling water plus some baking soda to help clean your shower and sink drains.
You also know that different tools have different maintenance requirements. You wouldn’t pour boiling water into your car’s oil gauge, nor would you pour engine oil into your shower drain. You can’t hone your dryer or vacuum your knives to improve their performance. (I’m using silly examples here, but you get the point.)
Maintaining your best productivity tool
Did you guess I was talking about computers, or possibly software? Nope – the part about this tool avoiding burnout is your first clue. If you want to accomplish more at work so you can have more of a life outside your business, your biggest tool is your brain.
Yep, that two-pound (or so) organ of squishy, fatty meat zapped through with electricity is your best bet for getting sh*t done. Tech and apps can assist around the margins, but if you’re not maintaining your brain correctly, you will not see solid and sustainable productivity gains.
Humans have (at least in recorded history) thought about the brain in terms of whatever the latest human-generated technology is. When fluid mechanics were the latest in tech, people thought the brain worked like a hydraulic system. Today’s no different: people tend to think of brains as being like computers.
But they’re not. At the most mechanistic level, computers (at least in most popular and corporate use) operate solely via electrical signals. Brains use both electrical and chemical signaling. Computers can operate much faster than the human brain for certain tasks, but fail utterly at others that are pretty standard for brains.
Computers can (among other things):
Crunch numbers very fast
Run complex tasks 24/7 as long as they’re attached to a power supply
Do complex tasks at any time of the day
Perform more than one complex task at the same time (multi-tasking)
Avoid distractions
Among other things, computers can NOT (but human brains can):
Heal the human body (I’m referring to the placebo effect here)
Ready the human body to fight or flee when danger lurks
Prioritize tasks for your business
Encode learning from the day, prune neural pathways in the brain and power up others, repair muscle tears (thus strengthening muscles), flush out cellular waste and toxins
Release hormones and neurotransmitters to promote motivation, ready the human body for reproduction, the ability to focus, and many others
Determine from another human’s voice their emotional state
Experience joy
Because the human brain is not a computer, what works for computer maintenance doesn’t work for human brain maintenance. If you try that, you’re pouring engine oil into your shower drain.
Your brain is running 24/7, but you’re not conscious all that time. It can’t do cognitively demanding tasks (crunching numbers, using spreadsheets, creating reports and analyses) all day. You only get a few hours a day (about four) when your brain is primed and ready to do this kind of work. That’s why you get a huge boost in productivity when you marry this time with this work.
It’s important to note that this time period is not the same for everyone. F*ck, and I cannot stress this enough, those so-called productivity gurus and time hackers who tell you to get up at 4 am to start your day.
That works for early birds/lions and for exactly no one else. So if you’ve been trying to get up super early and you’re finding that you’re sluggish and can’t concentrate, you’re not lazy. You’re just not an early morning person. Go back to bed and wake up at an hour that actually works for you.
The human brain can’t multitask. It might feel like you can, but what’s happening in the brain is that it’s switching rapidly back and forth between the tasks. That takes longer, because you don’t have full attention on either one. Also, it tires the brain out, leading to bad decisions as the day goes on.
The computer’s “attention” (it doesn't really have this capability) is always on the tasks it’s been programmed to do. It doesn't get distracted by people asking it questions, or by social media or email notifications, or the pretty view outside, or the noisy smelly leafblowers that your neighbor uses. It’s more difficult for the brain to focus.
That’s why it’s important to give your squish meat the maintenance that it needs. It’s incredibly powerful, but performance does degrade when you don’t give it what it needs. Just as a knife loses its cutting edge without regular sharpening, your brain needs regular attention too.
The items in the fourth bullet above [Encode learning from the day, prune neural pathways in the brain and power up others, repair muscle tears (thus strengthening muscles), flush out cellular waste and toxins] all occur during sleep. That’s why sleep is so necessary for humans. In order for all of this to happen, you need enough sleep, which for adults is seven to eight hours.
Only a very small percentage of the population, about 1%, can perform well with four to five hours of sleep. So if you pride yourself on not needing sleep, how likely is it that you’re one of these few? If you have to mainline coffee, energy drinks, or other caffeinated beverages while you work, guess what: you’re in the 99%, not the 1%.
Some brain maintenance is only required once a day, like sleep, but others need to occur more frequently.
Rest breaks during the day – after about an hour of intense focus, your brain needs a break. Scrolling through feeds or emails is not a break. Playing with your pet or kid, drinking water, taking a 10-minute walk: all of these are good rest breaks.
Nourishing food – some people prefer to eat a number of smaller emails, others get three squares, and some eat only once a day. Whatever your brain needs, and you know what nourishing food is. Ultra-processed food that comes in a box or package degrades performance. Eating that stuff is like deliberately dulling your knife instead of sharpening it. The squish meat is an energy hog requiring nutrients.
Moving your behind – a computer can run with just a power cord, but your brain needs oxygenated blood to perform at its best. The way you get that is through movement. Any kind is okay for brain purposes, but different kinds build up different areas of the body. Humans survived as a species at least in part because we’re persistence predators, which means the body is used to moving a LOT and needs more than a half hour a few days a week.
Socialization – yes, even for us introverts. Another reason we survived as a species is that we banded together to hunt, gather, build shelter, and so on. Being isolated, doing all your transactions online, and avoiding human contact is bad for us.
Play – this is one of the biggest ways we can experience joy.
Once you understand what your brain needs as far as maintenance, you can take back control of your energy and get high performance work completed… which gives you more time for the fun maintenance like play and being with loved ones. It’s an upward spiral.
Recap (tl;dr)
Productivity is not the goal in and of itself, but as a means to lead a more joyful and fulfilling life. Many tools require maintenance, and the human brain is your best tool for improving efficacy at work. Human brain maintenance requires very different things compared to computers, because computers are different (and actually less powerful) tools.
If you want to accomplish more at work so you can free up time for fulfillment, click here to schedule your free consultation.