4 scientifically proven methods to increase your productivity

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4 Scientifically Proven Methods to Increase Your Productivity

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Page 1: 4 Scientifically Proven Methods to Increase Your Productivity

4 scientifically proven methods to increase

your productivity

The way we are working isn’t working anymore, and hasn’t been for some time.Checking email in bed the

moment we awake, chugging too much coffee, hour-long commutes twice each day…they all take a toll on the

quality of our work and our lives.

Not to mention that when we get to the office, many of us are often marginalized and overworked. Our efforts

and ideas are ignored during 50 or 60+ stressful hours each week. Some of us are treated more like numbers

than people, as companies choose stack ranking systems over weekly conversations and gathering employee

feedback. But all is not lost, the movement toward people-centered leadership is well under way.

The better we understand ourselves as leaders, the better we understand the capabilities and limitations of

those who work for us. This new leadership paradigm involves constant learning about all of the elements of

a healthy, balanced life. Research in the areas of neuroscience, biology, and human performance have

produced some brilliant and counter-intuitive ideas about getting more accomplished in less time. I have

shared these methods for understanding and achieving potential with my team, and now I will share them

with you:

Neuroplasticity

I am not a neuroscientist, but I do play one at work. By that I mean that I am constantly reading about new

discoveries regarding mental health, brain chemistry and the science of productivity. I use this information to

become a better leader and share it with my team so that they can be happier and more productive.

The better we understand ourselves as leaders, the better we understand the capabilities and limitations of

those who work for us.

The prevailing wisdom used to be that people are mentally malleable for only a number of years until we

reach adulthood. At that time we are fixed in terms of our mental capacities and behaviors. New research

posits that the adult brain has an incredible capacity for change. Safe environments, healthy diets, exercise,

and meditation practices can destroy unhealthy neural pathways and essentially rewire our brains.

Page 2: 4 Scientifically Proven Methods to Increase Your Productivity

In other words, employees are not fixed-resources. With supportive leadership, sufficient challenges,

minimal stress, and a healthy lifestyle they can be transformed into the best versions of themselves. Their

innate talents can evolve. Good employees can become great, and great employees can become excellent.

Stress Hormones and the Paleo-mammalian Brain

Did you know that you have three brains?

The most ancient structure is the reptilian brain, so named because it is made up of the stem and cerebellum.

These structures also appear in reptiles, animals that lack the more developed brain components described

below. The reptile brain is ancient, controlling heart rate and breathing and designed to protect us.

When people feel unsafe at work, their more primitive brain structures are activated, and they can’t access

their frontal lobes to innovate.

The next structure, the limbic brain, is shared by all mammals. It is where emotions, memories, and

aggression live, and it controls much of our behavior. When we worry about our social lives and

relationships, we recede into our limbic brains.

Finally, we humans and other primates have a specialized structure called the neo-cortex. This structure, also

called the frontal lobe, is responsible for language and abstract and creative thinking.

Why does this matter in the world of business? Because everyone is looking for ways to increase innovation

and creativity. These are the differentiating factors in just about every industry. When people feel unsafe at

work, their more primitive brain structures are activated, and they can’t access their frontal lobes to

innovate.

You can’t say to employees, “innovate or your fired”. Fear will trigger their brains to start producing

adrenaline and cortisol, and their creative minds will shut-down. Even if you aren’t that blunt, creating an

unsafe and stressful environment is bad for employees and for businesses.

Pulse Your Productivity

How many of us read emails or take calls during our commutes, then go right to our desks where we flit back

and forth between projects and communications for hours at a time? Sound like your day? You’re probably

not alone.

Page 3: 4 Scientifically Proven Methods to Increase Your Productivity

The truth is we are not designed to work that way. Our bodies and minds follow a daily cycle called

a circadian rhythm – “physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle,

responding primarily to light and darkness in an organism’s environment”.

Think of healthy sleep. You don’t simply close your eyes and enter one state of sleep for eight hours, then

awaken. We shift between several 90 minute cycles of deep restorative sleep and lighter, dream-filled REM

sleep.

Turns out, this is how we were meant to work also. Going full-throttle for eight hours goes against our design.

During the day, we cycle through ultradian rhythms. These are periods where we are more and less-focused.

The ideal rhythm is to work four or five 90-minute chunks throughout the day, with breaks in-between. A

good practice is to schedule three important tasks a day that you can fit into these segments, and set a timer

(not on your phone!) to manage your rhythm. Or if you are tuned-in to your body’s signals, just notice when

you get restless, groggy or lose focus. That means it’s time for a 15-minute break.

Flow states

The more a job resembles a game – with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals and

immediate feedback — the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihaly from his bestselling book, Flow

Have you ever gotten so into something that all sense of self or your surroundings melts away? This often

happens during passive experiences like watching a captivating film or television show. We can also enter

these flow states during activities. When a basketball player seems to be repeatedly flying down the court,

making every shot for several minutes, they are in flow.

At work, flow is more difficult to attain. We are bombarded by distractions from a multitude of different

communication tools like email, text messages, video conferencing, or phone calls. We vacillate between the

various goals that must be accomplished by the time the whistle blows, instead of focusing on one task at a

time – a demonic ritual called multitasking.

Page 4: 4 Scientifically Proven Methods to Increase Your Productivity

Flow states require setting goals that are just challenging enough so that a person can keep their attention

focused for a sustained period of time. Then we must remove all distractions from our workspaces. Finally, it

needs to be clear to us that we are succeeding at each task that we are trying to achieve. When we can enter

these states we dramatically increase the quantity and quality of our work, and the satisfaction we feel from

doing it.

Leaders must possess certain natural skills and talents, but these must also be augmented by information

about how and why people perform at their peak. Once managers understand that people are designed to

grow and improve, they can create environments that are most conducive to high performance.