How to be ultraproductive, with Christian Poensgen

0:03 Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning.

0:10 This is Laura.

0:11 Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode will be a slightly longer one, part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. So today I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Christian Punzgen to Before Breakfast, a Christian is the co-author with Eric Partaker of the new book, Ultra Productive, the 90-minute method to optimize focus, sleep, and stress. Christian, welcome to the show.

0:39 Thanks, Laura. Great to be here. This is going to be great.

0:42 Yeah, I'm excited to have you talk about productivity, my favorite topic for sure. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

0:48 Yeah. happy to. So I'm obviously German, right? My name kind of points to that fact. And my background is in business administration and psychology. I did a PhD on the interplay between stress and performance. And the first thing that I did after that PhD was co-founding a startup that pretty much went down in frames rather quickly, which was pretty stressful. So I got to really learn and test and experiment with a lot of the stuff that I learned throughout my PhD in real life. So after that, I kind of worked in a couple of think tanks, co-founded my own, and then set out to, with Eric Partaker, write the book that is now out, right, Ultra Productive.

1:31 And it's basically a simple and science-based method to have more focus, better sleep, and less stress. Because, like, from what we've seen going through hundreds of books and thousands of studies and, like, like, Also from what we've learned in the School of Hard Knocks, like focus, sleep and stress are really some of the 80-20 levers that everyone can and should basically pull if they want to do their best work without sacrificing their health or relationships. Yeah.

2:02 And in your book, I mean, you mentioned you obviously were coming out of the stress of a failed startup and Eric had a huge health crisis as well. And that was part of, you know, his story here.

2:13 Yeah, he actually had a heart attack on the airplane when he was 36, like 15 years ago. So that was scary for him. This was a really serious health scare. Mine was more of a mental one. So like I said, the startup failed and I got pretty close to burnout, to be honest. So sometime later, our paths crossed and then we basically learned that we went through very similar kind of uh experiences where we thought that like hustle culture and like working and basically the idea of like taking care of one's health and relationships after the thing has succeeded right we learned that this actually works up to the point where it doesn't so yeah i think both of us come from a place of uh of suffering right and so we're really passionate about offering ways

3:09 that people can go about their lives and their work that prevents them from going through something similar that we've gone through. Yeah.

3:18 And in your book, you talk about three pillars, like the three areas. Can you just talk real quickly through what those are?

3:24 Yeah, absolutely. So I don't know about you and you're an expert in this field as well, but there's so many tips and protocols and things that we should do when it comes to being more productive and also when it comes to being more healthy and all of this. And we were like, okay, what are the most important, like 80, 20 levers that we and others can and should pull in order to get the most out of what we actually end up doing? And ultra productive, right?

3:53 That's the title of the book. It relates to the 90 minute ultradian cycle that many of your listeners probably are familiar with. Most people are familiar with the circadian 24 hour rhythm, which is Of course, the day and night kind of shift or rhythm that all of us are on. And the Australian rhythm is a 90-minute rhythm that also governs many things across our day, including how long we're able to focus before we need a break, how we go through different sleep stages at night, and even how we evolve to deal with stress, right? And in a nutshell... The core of the book is all about prioritizing one deep focus session per day of 60 to 90 minutes, right? That's the first part. The second part is getting plenty of quality sleep as in 90

4:43 minutes of deep and REM sleep, right? Because that's as or even more important than just quantity sleep. And then with stress, it all starts with being able to embrace the short-term good acute stress while also being able to like avoid the bad kind of chronic stress that goes on for hours, days and months or even years, right?

5:05 So focused sleep and stress, it all comes down to that 90 minute kind of logic. And there's, some studies that show that just 90 minutes of like deeply focused work per day can double what you can get done in a day without working a minute longer. And at night it's similar because it's not so much, like I said, about sleeping eight hours. It's more about making sure that you get both 90 minutes of deep sleep and 90 minutes of REM sleep. And this is what we want to share with people that it's not about doing more.

5:34 It's more about like doing better in so many regards, especially when it comes to focused sleep and stress.

5:40 So it's interesting you say 90 minutes of focused work in the day could double your productivity. I assume that means that most people are not spending anywhere near 90 minutes of focused work per day if that's such low-hanging fruit to get to.

5:52 Yeah, actually, that's true. So there's a study from a kinsing company. I think it was basically done in 2013, where they looked at how much time people spend in the deeply focused flow stage. And they found that the average is only 24 minutes, right? So I don't know about you, but you're probably doing more than that because you're a writer as well and podcaster, right? So do I.

6:13 But we also do executive coaching. And what we see a lot with executives is that this thing, like this one thing, of bringing up the share of time and deeply focused work per day is what gives them the most bang for the buck because it's often less than 24 minutes. Many, many people live in the five-minute world, as we call it. They go from one email to the next, and there's another meeting, right? Then there's Slack or Microsoft Teams, which is all great, right? So we're not against collaborating with others, right? It's only by... working together with others, that we can get stuff then that no one would be able to do by themselves. But if it's like five minutes, like 24-7, it's really hard

6:58 to get some really challenging things done, to learn new things, and to really... do the work that actually moves the needle. And this is also why many people end up working late during the day, end up working on weekends, end up working during vacations, because they never get to do the actual work in so many instances because there's never any focused time. And yeah, by getting that share from 24 minutes up to 60 to 90 minutes, according to that study, and we've seen it hundreds of times or even thousands of times, there's actually... like a doubling in productivity or in meaningful output to be had. And this applies to almost anyone as far as we see. All right.

7:41 Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Christian Punzken.

7:51 Well, I am back.

7:52 I'm interviewing Dr. Christian Punzgen, who is the co-author with Eric Partaker of the new book, Ultra Productive, The 90-Minute Method to Optimize Focus, Sleep, and Stress. So Christian was mentioning earlier that we want to aim for 90 focused minutes of work. And a lot of his clients are working in five-minute chunks here and there. So let's say somebody is very distracted during the day. What are some steps we can take to get that 90 minutes or at least get close to 90 minutes if we haven't been doing that?

8:21 Yeah. So the first thing is that you don't want to start with 90 minutes, right? So the target should be 60 to 90 minutes and it would start with 15 or something like that because For most people, it's really hard because they're very used to checking email first thing in the morning, jumping on a meeting as soon as they start working. So going from zero to 90 or from zero to 60 will usually not work. So I would start by blocking out maybe 15 minutes, maybe 30 per day to work on your most important task.

8:54 This could be stuff that you've been procrastinating on. This could be some high-impact tasks challenging type of work, like writing something, creating a presentation, doing analysis, learning to do new things, like working with AI, for example. So block one 50 to 30-minute block per day. It doesn't have to be the same time every day, but I would really make it small, again, 15 to 30 minutes. And then there is research to show that the three times during the day where we are best able to do challenging both physical and mental work is about 30 minutes, three hours, and 11 hours after waking up. We talk about the 33-11 rule in the book. So for most people, that's probably going to be in the morning. Only 21%

9:39 of us are night owls who cannot really focus well early in the day. So if you're not a night owl, I would do it before the actual work day starts, like in the first three hours, ideally. And that's the first thing that I would do. I would shrink it to 15 to 30 minutes. I would put it into a calendar, and then I would do it like for most people, I would do it like early in the day before the first meeting or like even email or messages get replied to because let's face it, your inbox is a to-do list put together for you by others, right?

10:12 And you want to start your day creative before being reactive as my co-author Eric likes to say. So that's like three simple tips, right? Shrink it to 15 to 30 minutes, time it right, and then for most of us, be creative, proactive before being reactive, because then it gets so much easier to actually work on your agenda as opposed to everyone else's.

10:36 Well, and you mentioned that it can be hard at the beginning. Like we suffer through the first few minutes of feeling like, what am I doing here? Which is when many people wind up distracting themselves. that a lot of distractions are not external. They are, in fact, you did it. Like you are the one who stopped what you were doing. It's not that there was an emergency somewhere else. It was that you stopped because it was uncomfortable before getting the returns on that time.

11:01 Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. And it makes sense if you like think about how we all evolved or how our ancestors evolved like thousands of years ago, because like back in the day, right, If you were, for example, stoking up a fire, and then there was a stable-tooth tiger coming out of the bushes, and if you weren't super destructible and alert for danger, then you would probably not have survived. And the next human, or prehistoric human, who would basically stop stoking the fire and then run away, or fight or whatever, and would then get to stoke another fire, that person would survive and then have kids and so on. So it's not easy for a reason.

11:49 So it's not natural for us to be deeply focused. So it's absolutely normal that the first five to 10 minutes always feel lousy. There's this idea about flow stays and that this is always going to feel great. And it does feel great after some time. But the first five to 10 minutes, which we call the fight phase, usually feel pretty lousy. And this is just due to the fact that our brain needs some time to basically prepare for being in that deeply focused state, maybe even the flow state. But it never happens after a couple of minutes because just as you cannot fall into deep sleep right after lying down, right? It always takes five to 15 minutes to fall asleep. In a similar way, it's also impossible to get into a deeply focused state

12:38 right after sitting down. It just takes some time for your brain to get into that state. And it's really helpful, I think, to remember this and to not kind of misunderstand the kind of frustration and the struggle that all of us feel every single time. I don't know about you, but I always feel it, right? Still, after doing this for, seven years now, pretty much every day. But it will go away. And after five to 10 minutes, you will get into that second phase, right? Where things will get easier.

13:06 They will feel a lot less effortful and a lot more effort less, if you will. And this is where you get a lot of work done. This is where you will feel amazing. Even if it's something as profane as doing your taxes or whatever. For me personally, One thing I've always procrastinated on is doing my taxes each month.

13:25 And I know that every month I will suffer to the first five to ten minutes. But after that, it's okay, right? It's even fun in a way. So it's always about getting started when it comes to doing challenging work.

13:40 So let's pivot from there to talk about sleep. Because obviously, you know, we have the pillar of rest here. And the goal is getting 90 minutes of deep sleep over the course of a night. I assume that takes a fair number of hours to get to 90 minutes, correct?

13:56 Mm-hmm. So that number 90 for both deep sleep and REM sleep is not like the same for everyone. But on average, like shooting for 90 minutes of deep and REM sleep is an ambitious and also fairly realistic and like good and healthy goal, right? So for some, it's like more 60 minutes, for some it's 90, but 60 to 90 minutes of deep and REM are ideal. Deep sleep happens in the first half of the night and is responsible for mostly the physical recovery of your body and brain. And REM sleep happens in the second half of the night and is responsible for the emotional recovery, right?

14:30 So it's a bit like your body's own psychotherapy that you can give yourself overnight. And both deep and REM do a lot more than these, right? But these are like the most important functions that deep and REM sleep have when it comes to productivity performance and like both short-term and long-term health, right? And like you said, said correctly it it doesn't just take 90 minutes to get 90 minutes of deep sleep usually um like in order to get both plenty of deep and ram most people have to sleep for at least seven ish hours some can do with six but for most it's seven and the the deep sleep that people get almost exclusively happens in the first half of the night meaning the first three or four hours so you could like like theoretically

15:18 get 90 minutes of deep sleep and just four hours of sleep. But then you would cut away all of your REM sleep, which is a horrible idea. So I would always recommend that people sleep at least six, better seven plus hours to get both 90 minutes of deep and REM. And the unfortunate thing with deep sleep is that if you, let's say, sleep for seven or eight hours and you for some reason, and we could talk about these, you don't get to go through this deep sleep phase in the first three to four hours. So you, for some reason, miss the opportunity window for deep sleep in the first three to four plus hours. Then you cannot make up for it by simply sleeping longer, right?

16:00 So getting into deep sleep is similar to landing a plane, right? Which just takes some time prior to going to bed because just as with sleep, Landing a plane is very different from parking a car in your garage. It takes some time to basically land the plane. In a very similar fashion, there's a couple of things that you can and should do to make sure to not miss that opportunity window of plenty of deep sleep in the first half of the night.

16:29 Yeah. So, I mean, there's obviously lots of good sleep hygiene tips out of there, like putting your phone away, not drinking a lot before bed, you know, things like that. But, you know, a lot of people we live in the real world. You, I know, have a young family. I think you have a three year old and a one year old. I don't know what your one year old is like. My one year olds were never very good sleepers.

16:47 I'm curious how you approach this. you know, need, you and your partner both need to sleep and you have young kids, how do you make this work? Like, how can you protect time for deep sleep for both of you in this scenario?

17:01 Yeah, so maybe, like, I could share one or two, like, really important things that everybody should do every day to, like, maximize the chances of getting plenty of deep sleep. And then I can talk about how my wife and I basically have been doing this for the last couple of years, right? Because as you said, we have two kids. And in the real world, things change all the time. Our kids' sleep schedules and sleep kind of regularity and all of this changes pretty much every week. So there's no silver bullet for us and for no one. But I would love to share some general principles and ideas of what's been working for us. Yeah, let's hear it. So when it comes to getting plenty of tea sleep, it actually starts...

17:46 the minute where you wake up or at least the first couple of hours. Because when you wake up, this happens by a surge in the hormone cortisol. And cortisol has a bad rep as a stress hormone, but it's actually the waking up hormone. And all of us get a surge in cortisol, like one in the 24-hour rhythm.

18:04 And you want to make sure that this happens really early in the day. And a couple of ways to like, get this peak early in the day is to first just get up, right? So that's the first step. Then to drink a lot of water right after getting up. So I always try to really drink one or two bigger glasses of water in the first hour. And then thirdly, light is really important, right? So in the first 60 to 90 minutes, and for sure before 10 a.m., you want to make sure to get some sunlight or at least really bright artificial light into your eyes Because it's only by doing just that that your body will switch from night mode to day mode by basically boosting that cortisol peak by another 50%. And if that happens, you

18:49 have the peak early in the day. And also, there's a timer that gets started for another hormone called melatonin to be secreted about 10%. 12 to 16 hours later, which is important to fall asleep easily. So light and water in the first hour is really important. If you cannot get sunlight in the first 60 to 90 minutes or before 10 a.m. for any reason, I'm a big fan of those 10,000 lux artificial daylight lamps. You can get them for $ 50 on Amazon. And I always switch on one of these when it's dark, when I get up.

19:25 So this is the only gimmick that I actually use and would recommend to anyone because it's really such a big difference to your energy and mood during the day and to your ability to fall deeply asleep at the end of the day if you've got plenty of water and light around. in that first 60 to 90 minutes of your day. So it starts really early. And then the one thing that has been my personal analysis in the evening is to eat too late or too much right because like in order to get into deep sleep you have to drop your core body temperature by a couple of degrees and if you eat close too close to bedtime your body is busy with digestion and then it doesn't happen and you like miss that opportunity window

20:07 you can do so really fast The amount of time can be anywhere between 90 minutes and four hours. For me, it's like three hours. So if you want to be on the safe side, have your last bite of food like three hours before bed, and then you'll eliminate most of the quote-unquote deep sleep killers that are there to basically prevent you from getting plenty of deep sleep. So that's just like some general principles for optimizing for plenty of deep sleep in that first time of the night. Yeah.

20:38 Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break, and then I want to hear about what you specifically do with little ones to make sure you get enough sleep. So we'll be back in just a minute. Well, I am back talking with Dr. Christian Punzgen, who is the author of the book Ultra Productive. So you've given us some great tips for getting more deep REM sleep. What do you do with the little ones so that you are making sure to still get this time?

21:09 It's very, very difficult. Right. So I don't want to lie. If you have a child that that that like is waking up every 60 to 90 minutes, which we used to have. So our younger child who is like one and a half now, more or less. Right. She really had like a hard time like sleeping through the night. Now it's better. Right. But. Like. control the controllables, right?

21:33 And one way to do this is to be a team as parents, right? And the way that we do this right now, right, is as follows. So both of our kids are early risers and so am I, right? My wife, not so much. So what I usually do is I get up earlier than my wife, right? One or two hours earlier and so do our daughters, unfortunately, right?

21:55 So what I do is I get up two hours earlier than my wife and then I take care of the kids and that's, really early. It's like at around 6 a.m. or something like this so that my wife can actually catch up on the REM sleep that comes in the kind of last couple of hours of the night. So that's one way to basically get plenty of REM.

22:16 Kind of be a team and look at how you can make sure that both parents get like some one or two or three kind of uninterrupted hours in the late part of the night to get plenty of REM sleep. And if possible, do the same early in the night. What does that mean? If you have a kid that kind of usually, after you've put it to bed, sleeps for a couple of hours, maybe three or four before it gets up the first time, and this is basically how both of our kids used to be or still are, then it makes sense to not go to bed a lot later than the kid goes to bed because then you can basically get that deep sleep that happens early in the night before the kid wakes up for the first time. And this, by the way, also applies to

23:02 people who wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning and then stress about not getting enough sleep. When you wake up at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. and stress out about the fact that now your night is not great and now you have to take care of the kid or something, you've probably already gotten plenty of deep sleep, which happens in the first three-ish hours, maybe three to four. And if you basically do what needs to be done, take care of your kids or relax and then like do fall back asleep eventually, even if that takes like half an hour or an hour longer, you will still be able to get like plenty of REM towards the end of the night. And you probably already got plenty of deep in the first part of the night. So waking up is perfectly normal and it's

23:46 not a huge problem. if you get like the edges of the night, like the first and the last kind of three-ish hours, right? And this is what we try to do as a couple pretty much every day. And then throughout the week, we actually like take turns at doing the nights, right? So right now I do the weekend nights and then one day or one night per week so that she gets like four or five, four-ish nights per day where she can also get some amount of great sleep, actually. You've got to be a team, I think. And optimizing the edges in a way so that deep and RAM can be kind of accounted for.

24:34 And then also being a team over the course of the week can be really powerful. And then, of course, it's tried, right? But sleep when your kid sleeps, right? So whenever... you're really tired and your kid is sleeping during the day, take a nap as well. Ideally, naps should be 30 minutes or less to avoid sleep inertia, that groggy feeling that you get when you're waking up in front of a deeper sleep stage, or a full 90 minutes, because then you really get some restorative sleep and REM sleep maybe even during the day. So I would sleep when the kid sleeps and then I would limit it to 30 or 90 minutes and Like if you take these into account, I think you can get better sleep at least. It's not going to be perfect

25:21 with kids. Never. Right. There's no perfect, but it's going to be better. Going to be better. Awesome.

25:26 Well, Christian, I always ask my guests this question, which is what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?

25:35 Yeah, that's a great question. So there's one thing that I do pretty much every day now, right? Because again, our younger kid is not sleeping like perfectly well as of now. So I'm really big on getting some deep rest during the day. And this comes down to the fact that most people, pretty much everyone, hits an energetic trough around like between 2 and 3 p.m. or between 1 and 3 p.m. So that's perfectly normal. All of us have it. It's the afternoon trough. And it's not just like a result of eating too much at lunch or something. This always happens. And I used to push through that trough with caffeine or with whatever, right? Just work.

26:18 And nowadays, I always take 10 minutes, right? where I just do nothing. I just sit there. I sit somewhere. Maybe I close my eyes. Maybe I look out of the window. Sometimes I even listen to a non-sleep deep rest or yoga nidra protocol, which is basically something that is similar to meditation, but it involves a body scan and some deep breathing to basically reset your brain. And by the way, the CEO of Google also does this every day, right? So 10 minutes of doing nothing or doing a non-sleep-depressed protocol, or if I have some time, even taking a 10 to 30-minute power nap, like between 1 and 3 p.m., whenever I can, this really helps.

27:04 tends to make certain days from good to great or from great to awesome because it gives you two days in one. So you kind of get a second morning instead of having to push through that like trough and then kind of like force your body and force your brain to perform when like investing 10 minutes of rest or maybe even a little bit more can give you a much higher return on investment when it comes to time, focus and energy. I love it.

27:30 Well, two mornings sounds great for a show like Before Breakfast. So Christian, where can people find you?

27:37 Yeah, so people can go to ultraproductive.com if they want to learn more about the book. There's also a pre-order bonus, which includes nine one-pagers. that cover pretty much all of the major methods and principles from the book, including on focus, like the 3311 rule, sleep, like how to optimize for 90 minutes of deep and REM, stress, and like a whole bunch of other things, right? So that's included. And the first couple of thousands pre-order readers also get a free seat in our algebraic accelerator program, which happens in January and February, right? So this is what people can find.

28:15 ask them more about the book. It comes out in October. And yeah, we'd love to see as many as possible in the accelerator that we're doing in January. And apart from this, we post on LinkedIn every day on topics like leadership, peak performance, productivity, and related topics. So that's probably a good place to go.

28:35 Wonderful. Well, Christian, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the.

28:51 Most of our time.

29:00 Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.