Two Awesome Hours
Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done.
You’re stressed. I’m stressed. We’re all “crazy busy” and to deal with increasing demands we work longer hours; we multitask; we track, measure and optimize. All the while we sacrifice other values, such as sleep and exercise, healthy eating and family time.
I see people from all walks of life—from executives to doctors to students to entrepreneurs to government workers—gravitate toward the same ill-fated solutions to find relief from this work overload. And these solutions are making the problem worse. Over and over, I watch smart, dedicated, hardworking people fall for the trap of “efficiency”: We try to stay on task as much as possible, capturing any downtime throughout the day and putting it to use.
Whether we love or hate our jobs, the amount of work most of us have to do each day has reached unsustainable levels. We start a typical workday anxious about how we will get it all done, who we might let down, and which important tasks we will sacrifice—again—so we can keep our heads above water. As we grab our first cups of coffee, we check our e-mail inboxes on our handheld devices, scanning to see who has added a new task to our to-do list.
The stress builds as we read e-mail after e-mail, each containing a request that we know can’t be dealt with quickly. We mark these e-mails as unread and save them for . . . “later.” We mentally add them to the piles of work left undone the night before (when we left our offices much too late). More emails to answer, more phone calls to return, more paperwork to fill out. And everything needs our immediate attention.
I see people from all walks of life—from executives to doctors to students to entrepreneurs to government workers—gravitate toward the same ill-fated solutions to find relief from this work overload. And these solutions are making the problem worse. Over and over, I watch smart, dedicated, hardworking people fall for the trap of “efficiency”: We try to stay on task as much as possible, capturing any downtime throughout the day and putting it to use.
The Efficiency Trap
While helping high-level executives and professionals become more effective, I’ve learned that regardless of how high up the ladder we are, we typically respond to being overwhelmed by work in two ways.
One is to force ourselves to stay on task without breaks in order to make the most efficient use of our days. The other is to work more hours—and to ask anyone who works for us to do so too—to make the most efficient use of our weeks. Underlying both of these solutions is the belief that to manage our workload we should stop “wasting” time—we should be “efficient.” This belief follows from a fundamental misunderstanding of how our brains work. Staying on task without a break and working longer hours are wonderful solutions for a computer or a machine.
Computers and machines don’t get tired, so the quality of work is identical every time they are used. Using them more frequently will only lead to greater productivity and efficiency.
But, of course, we’re not computers or machines. We are biological creatures. Continually demanding one kind of work—and a consistent level of effectiveness—from our brains is like continually demanding the same speed from a runner under any circumstances—whether sprinting or competing in a marathon, or whether running with no sleep after fasting for a day, jogging after recovering from a hangover, or exercising after being fed and rested.
Embodied cognition
There are consequences of being biological creatures on how we think. A number of people in the scientific community call these consequences “embodied cognition.” Embodied cognition includes the many ways that having a body influences thought. The brain serves as part of the control mechanism for the rest of the body.
Cognition— any kind of thinking—cannot be properly understood without referring to the body it serves. What does this mean? It means that how you move your body may greatly affect your thoughts. Sitting with your hands behind your head and your feet up on a table—a pretty common “power pose”—can increase your level of testosterone and decrease your cortisol, a hormone combination that can lead you to both feel powerful and act like a leader. Your physical movements may affect your moods too and can colour your interpretations of other people’s thoughts or intentions.
Research suggests that if, for example, you make a hostile gesture—like flipping the bird—while evaluating someone, you are more likely to see the other person as hostile, because the movement primes the idea of hostility. Or consider how you learn: you rely on memories. But you don’t install memories in your brain the way you install a software program or download a file into a computer. Rather, memories are something you grow. It takes time for neurons to structurally change so that they can more easily reactivate one another in the future, which may help explain why cramming the night before a test is not as effective as learning the material over multiple days, if you want to retain it long-term.
These are a few of the thousands of findings illustrating the ways in which, by virtue of being biological creatures, we are quite unlike computers or machines and therefore cannot achieve the level of efficiency they do. However, each of us has vast untapped potential as a human that computers and machines do not have. And trying to be efficient all the time will block us from harnessing it. If my aim were to do ten thousand push-ups, I’d have a really tough time doing them without a break. But I would have no problem if I did a small number at a time between other exercises and spread them out over multiple workout sessions.
The brain is very much like a muscle in this respect. Set up the wrong conditions through constant work and we can accomplish little. What I’ve learned from working with highly productive and happy people, and from my study of neuroscience and psychology, is that to be truly productive, our best bet may just be to ditchefficiency and create, instead, the conditions for two awesome hours of effectiveness each day.
Two Awesome Hours
The key to achieving fantastic levels of effectiveness is to work with our biology. We may all be capable of impressive feats of comprehension, motivation, emotional control, problem solving, creativity, and decision making when our biological systems are functioning optimally. But we can be terrible at those very same things when our biological systems are suboptimal. The amount of exercise and sleep we get and the food we eat can greatly influence these mental functions in the short term—even within hours.
The mental functions we engage in just prior to tackling a task can also have a powerful effect on whether we accomplish that task. Research findings from the fields of psychology and neuroscience are revealing a great deal about when and how we can set up periods of highly effective mental functioning. These are five deceptively simple strategies that I have found are the most successful in helping busy people create the conditions for at least two hours of incredible productivity each day.
1. Recognize your decision points.
Once you start a task, you run largely on autopilot, which makes it hard to change course. Maximize the power of those moments in between tasks—that’s when you can choose what to take on next, and can therefore decide to tackle what matters most.
2. Manage your mental energy.
Tasks that need a lot of self-control or focused attention can be depleting, and tasks that make you highly emotional can throw you off your game. Schedule tasksbased on their processing demand and recovery time.
3. Stop fighting distractions.
Learn to direct your attention. Your attention systems are designed to wander and refresh, not to focus indefinitely. Trying to fight that is like trying to fight the oceantides. Understanding how your brain works will help you get back on track quickly and effectively when you get distracted.
4. Leverage your mind–body connection.
Move your body and eat in ways that set you up forsuccess in the short term. (You can eat and physically do whatever you want on your downtime.)
5. Make your workspace work for you.
Learn what environmental factors help you be on top of your two awesome hour’s game—and how to adjust your environment accordingly. Once youknow what distracts you or what primes your brain to be in creating or risk-taking modes, you can adjust your environment for productivity.
These strategies, derived from neuroscience and psychology, may sound simple; some may evenseem like common sense. But we rarely employ them. Understanding the science behind themhelps us know what’s worth acting on and how to do so within the constraints we have. We can alllearn to deploy them regularly and consciously with powerful results. There’s nothing magicalabout two hours. I’m recommending two hours because I’ve found that length of time to be bothattainable and sufficient for getting to enough of what matters each day. The specific number ofhours is not critical. As you gain experience with these strategies, you can set up conditions forfour hours or even just ten minutes of peak mental functioning, depending on what suits yourneeds that day.
Note that I’m not suggesting you identify two specific and consistent hours every day (say, from nine to eleven a.m.) when you will aim to be effective. If you are like most busy professionals, you don’t always have control over when things need to get done. If you are amorning person and your boss asks you to give a presentation at the next staff meeting—in the middle of the afternoon—you better be in top mental shape when you deliver it.
These strategies can help you set up the conditions for peak mental effectiveness at any time inyour workday. While I believe that you can accomplish great things under the right conditions, I’m not suggesting you’ll be able to get all your work done in just two awesome hours. I do think, however, that when you are mentally effective, you can accomplish whatever matters most to you at that moment, with pride in your work and inspiration to do more.
The rest of the day you can devote to those tasks that don’t require much strategic or creative thinking: slog through e-mails, fill out forms, collect reimbursements, manage schedules, pay bills, plan travel, and return phone calls. You can more successfully decide what to let go of among those tasks, too, when you’re thinking more effectively. Working in tandem with our biology—setting up the conditions for a couple of hours of peak productivity— allows us not only to focus on the tasks that are most important to us and our success but also to restore some sanity and balance to our lives.
At some level we all know from experience we can be remarkably effective in short amounts of time when we treat ourselves right – and horrifically ineffective when we don’t. Once you understand the science behind what makes us truly productive, I hope you’ll trust and build on what you already know about yourself and start thinking about your day in terms of how and when to set yourself up for two awesome hours.
About the Author:
Josh Davis - This article is the abridged version, read the full article here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/260071280/Two-Awesome-Hours-by-Josh-Davis-Excerpt