Josh Davis shares advice on how to keep the body and mind healthy during work.
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By Josh Davis
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 e-mails to answer, more phone calls to return, more paperwork to fill out. And everything needs our immediate attention.
[Read: Sometimes Putting Yourself Before Others Is Vital: 4 Examples]
In fact, too many things need our attention before we can even get to the tasks that really matter — and too many things matter. We frequently work all day long — at the office and then at home, taking care of our families, cleaning up, paying bills — sometimes only stopping to sleep. There simply isn’t enough time, but so much always needs to be done.
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. In my book, “Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done” book, I share in detail 5 deceptively simple strategies that I have found are the most successful in helping busy people create the conditions for at least 2 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 tasks based 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 ocean tides. 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 for success 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 game — and how to adjust your environment accordingly. Once you know 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 even seem like common sense. But we rarely employ them. Understanding the science behind them helps us know what’s worth acting on and how to do so within the constraints we have. We can all learn to deploy them regularly and consciously with powerful results.
There’s nothing magical about 2 hours. I’m recommending 2 hours because I’ve found that length of time to be both attainable and sufficient for getting to enough of what matters each day. The specific number of hours is not critical. As you gain experience with these strategies, you can set up conditions for 4 hours or even just ten minutes of peak mental functioning, depending on what suits your needs that day.
Note that I’m not suggesting you identify 2 specific and consistent hours every day (say, from 9 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 a morning 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 in your 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, 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.
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This article originally appeared on Maria Shriver.com