From Burned Out to Balanced: The Three Pillars of Productivity

Do you feel you have to push yourself every day just to stay on top of your work? Well, this week I’m looking at why this happens and what you can do to prevent it.

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Script | 372

Hello, and welcome to episode 372 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

If you have ever watched a Formula 1 race, it can be easy to believe that from the moment the lights go out and the race starts, the cars go flat out until the end of the race.

Ah, as if it were that simple.

The truth is if a team tried to do this, they would be guaranteed to lose the race.

Even though a race may only last ninety minutes, during the race the teams will need to conserve their tyres and fuel. Going flat out to the finish would degrade the tyres too quickly, which would mean they lose essential grip in the corners, and running out of fuel would be game over for a team.

You are like that Formula 1 car. When you start your day you have a limited amount of energy and your ability to focus needs to be managed through the day.

It’s not physical energy. Your body has a way to utilise your fat reserves to help keep you out of danger when necessary, physically. It’s your mental energy. That is limited. And it’s a lack of mental energy that results in you making mistakes, procrastinating and being unable to make a decision about what to work on next.

It your mental energy that requires careful management each day. Getting home exhausted each day won’t do very much for your relationships. You won’t be in the mood to do very much, and having a conversation with your partner or kids won’t be a top priority.

Yet, your family may have been waiting for you to get home to talk with you, play and just have some quality time.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. There are things you can do to preserve your mental energies so you arrive home feeling relaxed, fulfilled and ready to engage with your family.

However, before we get to how to do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Matt. Matt asks, Hi Carl, do you have any ideas on how to stop feeling constantly tired and using the weekends just to recover before doing it all again on a Monday?

Hi Matt, thank you for your question.

If you are constantly feeling tired, my first advise would be to go see your doctor. A constant feeling of fatigue or tiredness could have an underlying reason and it’s better to get that checked out first.

If, your doctor reports there are no underlying illnesses, then it’s time to look at your lifestyle.

As I wrote in Your Time, Your Way, there are three areas you need to keep in balance. These are the foundations of any productive life.

They are:

Sleep, movement and diet.

Are you getting enough sleep for you? We are all different when it comes to the amount of sleep we require. Some of you may work well on six hours, while others may require eight or nine hours sleep.

If you want to operate at your best each day, finding out how much sleep you need would be a first step.

For years I thought I only needed six hours of sleep. Yet when I did the test that Matthew Walker, the sleep doctor, suggested, I discovered I actually needed seven hours twenty minutes.

What is that test? I hear you ask. What you do is sleep with no alarm for seven days and calculate how much sleep you slept each night. Then you add the total number of hours you slept and divide that number by seven.

That will give you roughly the number of hours of sleep you need.

I did this experiment while I was on holiday—when I didn’t have to wake up at any particular time. That way I had no anxiety about not waking up on time.

Now I make sure I get seven hours at a minimum.

Movement does not mean you have to go to the gym or out running. If you look back to a time when fewer people were overweight, the 1950s for instance, there were very few gyms—and the gyms then were centred on specialised bodybuilding or competitive sports people.

You didn’t see people jogging round parks either.

Instead, people moved more. They walked, took the stairs, manually cleaned their houses and were more active in general.

The statistics are shocking. In the 1950s, around 10% of the adult US population were classified as being overweight. That number was 6% in the UK.

In 2020, those numbers had increased to over 40% in the US and 38% in the UK.

While I know convenience is wonderful, it’s also destroying our health. Humans were designed to move. We are not designed to spend as much as fifteen hours a day sitting down.

Your brain needs movement. This is why often you will find you come up with solutions to difficult problems when walking down a street or exercising.

Movement does so much more for you. It gives your brain a chance to reset, relax and more importantly these days, gets your eyes off the screen.

And then there is diet.

I am sure you re familiar with how you feel after a lunch high in carbohydrates. You feel drowsy, sluggish and sleepy. It even has a name; the afternoon slump.

If your diet is a mess—full of highly processed foods, sugars and carbohydrates, you are going to struggle to focus. You’ll always be feeling tired, sluggish and exhausted.

Switching your diet to a healthier one, will do wonders for your overall productivity and mental energies.

So, get those three basic fundamentals of a productive day sorted first and you will see a significant improvement in your productivity and focus.

Next, though, is how we apply ourselves each day. In other words, how we manage our workloads.

Constantly switching your attention between designing a presentation or trying to figure out how to ask Chat GPT the right prompts so it gives you the answers you are looking for while a the same time responding to Slack or Teams messages will leave you completely wiped out in no time at all.

Your brain was not designed to be switching contexts in that way all day. It’s called cognitive overload and while, perhaps, in the moment you don’t recognise it, what you are doing is rapidly depleting your brain’s capacity to make decisions, and remain focused on the job at hand.

It’s the most inefficient way to go about your work.

The danger is it becomes addictive. I’ve seen in recent years this called “dopamine addiction”. This is where you have become addicted to the drama of urgent deadlines, the sound of another notification and constant buzz of distractions from breaking news and short videos with flashing lights and rapid changes in context.

It destroys your focus, mental energy and leaves you feeling worn out and exhausted at the end of the day.

To improve your focus and better manage your mental energies, look for ways to group similar work together.

For example, if you find that you focus better in a morning, try to avoid having meetings at that time. Instead, perhaps start your day with a two hour session of work on a particularly difficult project or task. One that requires a fair bit of creativity or skill.

Then give yourself thirty minutes or an hour before you attempt to do another mentally challenging task.

I’ve found that when I suggest to clients that they use these gaps between periods of deeper focused work to get up move around and use their phones to reply to messages using the dictation feature, or return phones calls, they get an instant boost in their energy levels.

If you think about it physiologically, you’ve gone from hardly moving at all—sitting down and focusing on something—to getting up and moving and suddenly your blood is surging again, in a positive way.

More importantly, you’re not context switching in a mentally depleting way.

A quick tip I can share with you here is to keep the first thirty minutes of your work day free. Use that time to get a heads up on your day. Clear your email inbox, have a chat with your colleagues or hold a quick team meeting to discuss the objectives for the day.

What this does is prevents that sense of FOMO (the fear of missing out). It settles your mind, gets you focused on your objectives and gives you time to deal with any unknown emergencies before you settle down to doing some difficult work.

I’, currently reading a book called “In Search of C. The Biography of Mansfield Cumming”. Mansfield Cumming was the founder of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The British version of the CIA.

The service was founded in 1909—five years before the start of the First World War. The majority of the UK’s workforce at that time were employed either in factories or in service.

In service meant people who worked for the aristocratic landed gentry in their large mansions and palaces.

Very few people worked in offices.

Those that did, didn’t work a nine till five job. It was far more flexible than that. Often the day was spent travelling between meetings. And given that most transport at that time was horse and cart, you can imagine how slow that was.

Then there was large liquid lunches, often taking up to three hours.

It was in the evenings that any work managed to get done. Mansfield Cumming, for example, would spend most of his evenings replying to letters and reading documents.

One time, when Cumming was ill and bed ridden, his superiors send over a typist so he could stay on top of his correspondence.

120 years ago, people recognised the dangers of letting correspondence get out of control on the efficiency of getting work done.

And don’t be fooled into thinking things were very different then. Not only did they get an equivalent number of letters as we do emails, they also got telegrams—the equivalent of Slack or Teams messages today.

It might not have been digital, but the volume was very similar.

Today, we allow ourselves to neglect staying on top of our correspondence and admin. When we do that it creates a low level of anxiety draining our energies. The fear of not knowing what is waiting for us. And the fear that we might be missing something important.

To avoid this, find some time each day to dedicate specifically to dealing with your messages. Try to do this as late in the day as you can. This avoids you getting trapped in email ping pong. That’s were when you reply you give the receiver time to reply to you the same day. That just doubles up the time you need to spend dealing with your messages.

Slowing down your response times, gives you space to get back to doing the work you have identified as being important.

So there you go, Matt. If you want to have the energy to do a days work and have enough left in the evening to spend doing the things you want to do, then first make sure you are taking care of the basics, tough sleep, movement and a healthy diet.

Then avoid getting trapped by context switching. Protect time on your calendar for doing specific types of work that is similar in nature, and allow sufficient flexibility between these sessions for moving and dealing with the inevitable message load.

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.

Oh and one more thing. Yesterday, saw the launch of my summer sale. If you would like to pick up a course, or a bundle of courses, or perhaps join my coaching programme, you can now save up to 25%. All you need to do is visit my Summer Sale page and get all the details. I will put the link in the show notes.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.