Why energy management is the real key to boosting productivity

Paying attention to the clock in our body rather than the clock on our walls will help us have greater productivity gains, says Donna McGeorge, productivity expert and author of It’s About Time.

For years we have been told to work on things that are urgent and important using methods like time blocking and Pomodoro.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m a fan of both of those things.

However, time management advice has typically been focused on the what of the work and I’m suggesting we look at the when of the work instead.

There are good scientific reasons why we need to pay attention to when we do specific things at work. A lot of this can be explained by jet lag. When we travel across different time zones, we mess with our body’s natural rhythms, known as circadian rhythms. This is what creates feelings of fatigue and disorientation and often results in insomnia at 3am. Shift workers, who don’t work a typical nine-to-five day, may also experience this quite frequently.

It’s when we mess with our body’s natural rhythm that we begin to have problems. That’s why we need to do our most important work when our body — and brain — is most awake, alert and ready for action.

When is your most productive time of the day?

For most of us, our most productive time will be first thing in the morning. Making important calls, having important discussions and doing important work should be done in the morning before you suffer from decision fatigue.

Just stop and think about this for a minute. For many of us, our jobs require that we make decisions. We need good knowledge, experience and the ability to make a sound judgement in our area of expertise. If you are not making good decisions, then you are putting your career at risk. Decision fatigue affects everything that you, as an employee, manager, or leader, are paid for!

One study by Cornell University showed that we make around 200 decisions each day about food alone! Is it any wonder that we are exhausted by the time we have to approve the $1.5 million budget?

This is compounded by the fact that we make decisions every time we open, read and action an email. So, if the email is spam, and the decision we are making is to delete it, that decision uses up options we may need later when we need to formulate a more considered response.

Just think: if we only had 100 decisions available to us before our judgement became impaired, how many of these would we be wasting on email every morning?

When your mental energy is low, your brain starts to try and find ways to shortcut thinking. This can result in reckless decisions, or you might avoid making the decision altogether. This also explains why some of us lose our temper, make impulse purchases, buy junk food or do something that makes you later think, ‘Why on earth did I do that?’ Our self-control wears down and trying to do too much means we don’t end up doing anything well at all.

We may even shut down mentally and just accept the status quo.

Working with your body’s natural rhythm

Our body clock has a natural rhythm and we’re often working against it, not with it.

Recent studies show that energy (and timing) is everything:

• CEOs who had meetings about earnings with analysts and shareholders were more likely to be upbeat and positive in the mornings. The tone grew more negative as the day progressed. This was an alarming finding, as much of an organisation’s value could be determined by how those conversations went.
• Twitter users felt more active, engaged and hopeful in the morning. This plummeted in the middle of the day, and then rose back up again in the early evening. Culture and day of the week had no impact on the findings.
• Another study asked over 900 women to choose from a list of adjectives (happy, frustrated, annoyed, enjoying myself, and so on) to characterise how they felt at certain times of the day. The results were almost identical to the Twitter study in the previous point: overwhelmingly, people felt happier in the mornings.

The results are in. We are happier, more alert, optimistic, considered, and energetic during the first few hours of our day, and certainly before midday. We need to design our day to take advantage of that!

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