440. 7 psychology tips to hack your productivity

0:04 Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties.

0:35 If you're watching on Netflix, I promise you I'm not worrying my pajamas. I just need to say that I've just looked at my outfit and realized that looks very pajama like, but it's not. And considering we're talking about productivity today, it's kind of ironic, but yes, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about productivity specifically. I wanted to share seven of the best, most underratedly spoken about tips to just get more stuff done by doing less.

1:01 I love these episodes. I love doing them sometimes, and I feel like so many of us in our twenties, we have these huge ambitions and these projects and these tasks that we want to undertake, and we also feel like we don't have any time and we're working really hard, and like anything that can help us a little bit, anything that can like psychologically nudge us in the right direction, especially when those tips are back by science, are great.

1:25 And I thought, you know what, let's do an easy episode today, one that's just let's just do a little list episode. Let's just go through the science, find what works best. I'm going to deliver it to you guys in a simple package form, and I just sincerely hope it helps you be more productive, be more efficient, but also enjoy your life as well. Let's get into it. So, I think one of the biggest lies about productivity that we've been sold is that discipline is like the singular most important ingredient or factor that is driving productivity. The people who you admire who get stuff done, they just have this inherent trait that you don't. And although they may have it inherently, although they didn't really have to

2:15 do anything to get it, your inability to access it yourself, that though, is a personal character flaw or a fault. And until you can unlock or access your discipline, it's not happening for you. Good luck, Like it's just not happening. You need to be disciplined or nothing else. I think this is a rather kind of narrow, unfair, like psychologically inaccurate way to think about productivity that really just tries to shame us for what we haven't been able to do without thinking about why we haven't been able to do it. Here's the thing. Our productivity is not reliant on discipline alone. In fact, discipline is only about twenty five to thirty percent of the equation. And it's actually what we would call a spark it is. It's a

3:00 cognitive spark, not a cognitive fuel source. Discipline is incredibly finite, It's incredibly influenced by so many other factors we often ignore, like our sleep, our hormones, our stress, the difficulty of the task, the environment you're in, your established habits, your past experiences, your confidence in yourself. That this is stuff that we don't always seem to like consciously think of as a factor. It's so easy for us to put it all down to this one thing alone, this neat discipline explanation, and just kind of ignore the rest. And it's you can't ignore the rest that is an equal part.

3:41 In fact, there's a really notable meta analysis that was conducted by the psychologist Peers Steel, in which he describes procrastination not as a discipline problem but a form of self regulatory failure. Importantly, what the paper does not say is that procrastination is about laziness. He actually found that procrastination was primarily shaped by emotional regulation and how unpleasant the task was, the a mental state that you were in, how impulsive you were, whether we believe we could do it, how capable we were feeling our mental health, like our inability to do certain things, is not about mental fortitude.

4:29 It's about, yeah, your emotional state and your emotional gooiness and how you're feeling. We also know that willpower and discipline are firstly don't always factor in those things. They're also mentally very exhausting, and that actually lessens our performance on other tasks afterwards. There is this finding that came from a nineteen eighty eight study by bo Mister and colleagues where they put people in a room. They put them in front of a plate of cookies and a bowl of rad both on the table, and they asked half the participants to not have a cookie. You can have a ratish, you can't have a cookie, And they told the other half. You can have one cookie. You can have a cookie. And then they left the room

5:12 and they just kind of were like, just don't do it. You guys be in charge of correcting or following through this action. They then made people do a geometric puzzle. People who had the cookie, they did the puzzle for nineteen minutes, those who had the ratish eight minutes. And it wasn't just the sugar rush. It was the fact that they had to draw on all this will power to resist the cookie, and it's assumed that that kind of drained their self control for all subsequent situations. So, when you were constantly only relying on willpower and discipline to get stuff done, you know, to help you study harder, to help you avoid temptation, to help you, I don't know, lose weight, the effort that you have for other areas

5:55 of your life and the discipline or the motivation you have for other things declines. And this is why relying on discipline is an incomplete way to look at our productivity. What we actually need to be addressing is that emotional thing that we're reducing, the emotional resistance of the task or the goal in question, and also setting up our structures and our behaviors and our surroundings so that the easier thing is the easier thing, like the thing we want to do as the least resistance. So that really informs I think this it's important to say this because this informs what we're going to talk about next, which is the seven best things that you can do based on that knowledge of discipline. And now, of course this

6:39 isn't going to turn you into like a twelve hour day working machine. To be honest, I don't think you guys know me by now. That's I really don't care about that. Like I really think that hustle culture and like the girl Boss five thousand, work all day, sleep on your dead archetype is dead and should be left there.

6:56 But I also believe in in devotion and being able to prove to yourself what you're capable of, and I think this stuff takes us to that space and gets us into that mindset in a much more healthy and sustainable way rather than this like alternative that seems to be the only alternative, which is if you are not actively suffering for what you want, and if you are not actively in a constant state of exhaustion, you must not want it that much. This is this is the middle ground. This is the middle ground where you get stuff done, but you also can enjoy your life. So productivity hack number one is the three to one equation.

7:33 This is a method of structuring your to do list so that your day is both focused and varied and therefore productive every day. If you want to feel accomplished, your to do list should contain three chores, two small tasks, and one big task. That might look like Your three chores are wash your bedding, like, vacuum your room, take the bins out, pay your parking fine, like those kind of things. Things that are like add many that are a little bit annoying, but like you know, you need to get done. The two smaller tasks are things like, okay, clear out my email inbox from like the night, from the day before, every little email that I've been avoiding.

8:10 I'm going to get that done today. I'm going to write my project update. I'm going to send out that important document. There's a meeting I've been putting off. I'm going to do that important meeting. I'm going to do the first two hours of planning for that trip, that event, that important work thing, and then you have the one big task. This is like the meat of the sandwich.

8:29 So this is the thing that you can expect to spend three to four hours on or longer. Mine is always the same writing scripts, but for you it may be writing large sections of a report or an essay, concentrated study for an exam, doing complex equations, making a major headway, or on a project. Again, it is the meat in the sandwich, or if you're a vegetarian, it's I don't know, the toepo in the sandwich. The reason this works is that it gives your brain a balanced sense of progress. Notice how the big task is still really sizable, but it doesn't take over your entire day.

9:10 A lot of us either overload our day with a lot of those tiny tasks that make us feel busy but not meaningfully fulfilled. All what we do is we do is we put one absolutely huge, intimidating task on the list, and then we feel like a failure if we don't complete the entire thing. Again, we are looking for balance. The three two one method gives you both momentum and cognitive diversity, and that cognitive diversity is so important for your brain. So that it can be challenged by different things so that it experiences the refreshing and the important power of novelty. You know, the three chores, the two small to us visible progress, but they also you know, they reduce like a lot of the menial stuff as well they give you progress. They also clear

10:00 out the clutter of maybe things that you've been putting off. And then the one big task sits in the middle, and it means that you actually feel a meaningful sense of accomplishment at the day, at the end of the day, whilst actually still having done stuff. The other reason this benefits long term productivity, besides helping you not get bored with your kind of larger goals, is that it builds self efficacy. Probably our favorite term on the podcast, the seff efficacy is the sense that we can meaningfully change outcomes through our actions, our own actions and behaviors. Small accomplishments are just as important as big accomplishments for self efficacy because it gives us a daily reminder that mental, emotional,

10:52 cognitive input, our input is creating physical output and progress even on day is when the big goal feels very very far away, Even on days when you know we don't have twelve hours to do. Stuff just makes you feel good. It makes you feel like, Okay, at the end of the day, I have done my oh my god, now I can't remember how many it is, six things I've done, my six things. I feel accomplished. I've done a little bit of everything. I'm good. I can rest now, okay.

11:21 Tip number two. I think we've all heard the term like eat the frog, right. This was always something my dad said to me when I was growing up, like eat the frog. Basically, always do the hard thing first. When you look at that list, the three two one list, the biggest thing, the most unpleasant, difficult, annoying thing, the thing you are most reluctant to do, the one that you were most likely to procrastinate on. That's the one you go for at the beginning. I think we have this tendency to think that we should ease ourselves into things, or warm up for the day, or warm up for the hard stuff obviously, like if you're big task, like if you're exercising, like a warm up. But don't leave the work out to the end of the day. Don't

12:02 leave the most important email to or five PM. Don't leave the tiring conversation or the writing push till the point where you are exhausted. Even if your motivation improves throughout the day, your focus probably doesn't. There is probably a specific time, likely when you first start, where you are going to have the most cognitive resources available. Not using those resources is avoidance. You're avoiding it. When you avoid the hard task, you get the momentary feeling of relief, the momentary feeling of like hope, but surprise, surprise, the task is still there. It stays on your mind, It follows you throughout the day. It makes any break or sense of achievement from other tasks. It always feels like

12:49 it's slightly contaminated because you're like, yeah, yeah, I did that, but ah, that thing is still there, like that thing I've been avoiding. I still haven't done it until it's done. The rest of the day feel half. It feels like a distraction. So before you give your brain the day to negotiate, to rationalize, to delay, catastrophize, overthink, just decide to begin and begin is the keyword here. Doing the hard thing first doesn't mean that it needs to be done perfectly, doesn't mean you need to finish the whole hard thing at eight am. It just means give your freshest, fullest attention to the task that would otherwise drain your emotional energy all day. And as we said, a lot of productivity is just emotional regulation, is just seeing the

13:36 hard thing that's going to linger and pushing through it. From like our one. To add to this, researches from New York University in a two thousand and six paper highlighted the concept of implementation intentions and this play is a really important role for this tip. Basically, it's specific plans about when, where, and how you will act. They suggested using these implementation intentions for goals that you want to avoid because they significantly improve your chances of achieving them.

14:10 In other words, if you build out how exactly you're going to go about doing something, you're more likely to do it. So instead of just I'm going to work on this in the morning, if you say, okay, after breakfast, I'm going to sit at my desk and I'm going to write three hundred words before checking my phone, that's going to be more effective. Like, that's going to be much better. So yes, do the hard thing first. But also to cement this into action. Define the hard thing clearly enough, Define it with a timestamp, Define it with an endpoint, a progress point, a location. Even because it's harder to argue with a plan than a wish, I'll give you some other examples just to help you out with this. Instead of saying I'm going to sort my finances, try,

14:59 you know, before I anything else, I will open my banking app and make a list of every subscription service I'm paying for. Instead of I'm gonna work on my dissertation, try Okay, at eleven am, I'm going to have done these things, and I will go to the library and I will write the first three hundred rough words of my literature review. Instead of saying I'm gonna get my life together, try right after lunch, I'm going to spend twenty five minutes replying to emails that have been sitting in my inbox and going through all of my text messages from my parents and my family and just answer them.

15:34 The hard thing becomes less threatening. The thing we procrastinate about the most becomes less threatening when it becomes concrete. A lot of productivity advice focuses on time management. We are focused on emotion management. Can you tolerate the discomfort of starting. Can you tolerate the task being imperfect? Can you act before you feel fully ready? What is going to make you feel more emotionally capable of starting right now?

16:01 Think of doing the hard thing first, not as like, it's not about punishing yourself. It's about freeing yourself from the emotional burden attacks of avoidance that is going to follow you for the rest of the day if you don't just buy the bullet. Okay, let's take a short break here, then we will return with a bunch more advice.

16:23 Stay with us. So the third tip may be my favorite, so much so that I wrote about it in my book, not once, but twice. I literally wrote about it twice, and I didn't even realize until after the book came out and somebody DMed me and was like, Okay, we get it, give it a rest, like you like this, you like this tip? Okay? And I was like, Oop, just didn't even realize I've done it. But my third productivity hack is to stop copying somebody else's schedule and start studying your own rhythm. We are told the only way to be productive is to get up at five am and journal and drink lemon water and work out and do all these things before you do eight hours of work, and you should be totally switched on for

17:15 those eight hours of work as well. And yeah, for some people the morning into the nine to five routine is where they feel most productive. But just because it's what's fed to us generally doesn't mean it works for everybody. It's this myth that just because something is normal must mean it's the best for you. It might not be.

17:36 This is where I want to introduce the idea of your chronotype. Your chronotype is basically your natural, genetically determined preference for your sleep wake timing, and that is it reflects our circadian rhythm. It's just like the layer below. There was a twenty twenty three review in Chronobiology that discussed how cognitive performance can be really affected the interaction between the time of day that you are working and your individual chronotype, so whether you are a morning person, a night person, a midday person, and these findings have even been reflected more recently in twenty twenty five they did another review. What this means is that people you may perform differently depending on whether you're working in sync

18:23 with your natural rhythm or not. It's not just dependent on discipline. You know, someone working at six pm can be more productive than someone working at nine am. But if your work only allows you to do work at nine am, it must make you start at nine am. Of course, you're going to feel lazy. You're not working in accordance with your chronotype. Same with like you know, maybe your most productive hour is hours like one am to five am. But if that is your natural rhythm.

18:50 But if your system and your environment doesn't allow you to operate them, you're not going to be as productive. Knowing this, you need to work to figure out what this may be for you, because you might be constantly sabotaging yourself by scheduling hard work for a time of day when your brain has already checked out. I know I said swallow the frog, but if the best time to swallow the frog is at seven pm and instead of nine am, you should be working at seven pm.

19:16 Some ways of identifying your chronotype, what sleep pattern sleep weight pattern? I should say? Do you typically follow on holidays or when you don't have to work? When does your body naturally feel sleepy? When does it naturally feel alert? When do you feel your sharpest, when do you get most easily distracted, When do you feel most creative or in a state of flow, When do you feel most excited by admin tasks? As you go along, you can kind of match your rhythm to your natural energy levels.

19:49 And I know this isn't possible for everybody. I know it's so difficult when you are you do work a nine to five or you do work shift work, But try and schedule, try as much as you can to even match your kind of daily life to this as well. I know my chronotype is like I actually don't know what the name for it is, but it's like threety seven and then nine till midnight when I am like, no, I'm going to be most alert, which is at like six PM or later. That's when I do all my planning or my editing, all my high energy things. My low energy window, which is normally like in the morning, kind of is like when I focus on more shallow tasks like formatting, tidying, basic admin, still things that need to be done, but not things that require like deep,

20:39 deep thinking. This is the thing about productivity. The most productive people are actually probably some of the most self aware mentally because they know that abiding by what everybody else is telling them to do and how their days should operate isn't gonna work for them. They stagger their workload and work when works best for them. Obviously, it's also a lifestyle thing, so we're not going to say like, oh, these people who don't work a nine to five must be the most emotionally aware because they can work whenever they want. No, it's just that I think people who understand that and understand the role that their chronotype plays, which is not one hundred percent but it is a large factor, are able to be more productive both within

21:27 an outside of a typical work structure, because even if you have a nine to five, your coronotype is still going to be active, Like your chronotype window is still going to be active for some part of that. I'm just saying, it might not be nine am when everybody expects you to do all the hard work. It might be like five or six pm. And so how can you think about your day that maximizes that like peak productivity window best for you? Okay. Tip number four is habit stacking, and it is one I added to this list specifically for the boring things. Habit stacking had its moment online a few years ago after James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, made it very very popular, made it grow I guess viral. I don't know if it

22:17 was viral, but everybody seems to know it. It is when you attach a new behavior to an existing queue you already have. So after I brush my teeth, I take my vitamins. They're in the same place, same time. After I finish, I don't know brushing my teeth, I automatically wash my face. Whilst I make my coffee, I am going to write my to do list. The same habits are paired up every day whilst I drive to work, I call somebody in my life who I need to catch up with, Like every single day, those two things, something that I know I'm always going to do, is paired with something that I really want to do that I know is important that I know I'm fine hard and finding it hard to do. There was a twenty ten study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology

23:08 that looked into the science behind habit stacking. They had ninety six participants to choose an activity behavior to carry out daily, so it's basically a chore to carry out daily in the same context for twelve weeks. They found that when participants paired that behavior with something that was already happening, the time it took for that behavior to reach a level of automaticity. So basically, this is the highest level of habit formation where you don't actually even have to think consciously about doing something, you just do it.

23:41 The more people who paired, like if you were somebody who paired the new behavior with an old behavior, you got to that level of automatic processing, an automatic habit stacking, automatic habit processing much faster. A further twenty nineteen paper from researchers at the University of Bath actually suggested that habits, rather than intentions or goals, are the vehicles for self control because they reduce the need to constantly deliberate and decide.

24:10 A goal is kind of something you have to decide on every day, a habit is not. This is exactly why meal prepping, gym plans, automatically saving sums of money, those kind of goals are so effective because a habit is something that reduces choice, and when we have to make less choices, that is when we are our most productive.

24:32 Because the cognitive friction of having to decide every single day, am I going to do this or this or this or this in pursuit of my goal is removed. The goals should not inform your habits every single day. Your habits should be the thing that is the basis for your goal. Next, I think it's number five, But up to number five, I always get off track when I do these list episodes, but get rid of all or nothing thinking. I've been very guilty of thinking, well, you know, I don't have an hour to go to the gym today, so I'm just not going to bother or you know, I know I'm going to be drinking at my friend's birthday, so why not drink on Thursday and Friday as well?

25:10 But this kind of thinking eliminates the minor progress that builds into major progress. I think one of the biggest traps we fall into with productivity is waiting for the perfect time, waiting for the perfect environment, waiting for the perfect moment and equation, and for everything to go right in order to act. Because we want to give ourselves the greatest chance of success. You know, we tell ourselves, well, if I'm going to work out, I may as well I need to have the full hour, so I do it perfectly. If I'm going to clean the house, I have to have the whole afternoon because I don't want to do it half fast. I'm going to sort out my emails the next time I can sit down and really give them my full attention. I'll start writing that

25:55 book when I really have the perfect quiet morning. I'm in the right mood, the desk is clear, the sunshine was great, you know. But then life is always going to be too busy for that. Life is never going to give you perfect conditions, and so we do nothing, and we blame the conditions not being perfect, and not ourselves for operating regardless. The other thing is, if we know we have that extra time unfilled, that twenty minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, the other work we need to do or procrastination is always going to end up filling that time. Anyways. This link's really nicely to something called Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law, it's not about the disease. It comes from the British historian Cyril Northcolt Parkinson, and he

26:44 introduced this idea in an essay he wrote in like the nineteen fifties. In the economist, where he basically said work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. He was kind of writing satirically actually when he wrote this essay, was talking about how like you're actually talking about the political system and like the public service system, and how these administrative systems can grow and create more work for themselves even when the actual workload does not increase. But it applies to my life, it applies to your life as well. If you give yourself all day to clean your house, the task is going to take all day, But if you give yourself thirty minutes, you're probably going to get a lot more done. If

27:30 you give yourself three hours at the gym, chances are you're probably going to do about as much exercising as you would only do if you had forty five minutes. Do you see what I mean? Like the task expands to kind of fill the time we give it. Like there is a sprawl. Parkinson's law gives language to that sprawl.

27:54 You need to stop giving yourself such big containers to act in, or such so much space to act with. Now I have to say this is a psychology podcast. Parkinson's law did not begin as a psychological theory about personal productivity. But I think we can take a lot from this idea because it captures something many of us recognize in our everyday life, which is that we often overestimate how much time things are going to take, and we underestimate how well we will rise to the occasion.

28:31 But also we forget that, I think side on top of that, we forget that when we have less time, we will push and we will be more productive in that case as well. The problem is that we have no time, it's that we dismiss the time we do have because it doesn't feel ideal, and we kind of also self sabotage and think we're less capable. If you only have twenty minutes, twenty minutes compared to zero is already better, even if it's not an hour. What happens if you do two twenty minute workouts let's say every two weeks, that's one hundred and forty minutes, you know, seven days a week. If you just did twenty minutes compared to still zero, you're all or nothing. Thinking is keeping you from the power of cumulative or compound growth.

29:20 Right respect the time you have, even if you believe it's not enough respect your capacity to actually work your butt off and to be motivated and to be inspired by urgency. Okay, I realized I told a fit because I said tip number four was my favorite. That's a lie. This one here is my favorite tip most certainly, and it's probably my most personally relevant tip I'm going to give you guys on this list. If you watched our last episode I Think on Netflix with Grace Beverly, you'll know I spoke about how I've been doing something that doesn't sound particularly productive but is, and that has been that I've been sending off the most outlandish emails to the most insanely out of reach people, asking them to

30:09 be guests on the Psychology of your twenties. The example I gave was Simone Biles, and I talked about how she was like one of the only people to say no instead of just say nothing. This may not sound relevant, but the reason I've been doing this is part of something that I've been calling shoot your Shot Wednesdays. Shoot your Shot Wednesdays is where every Wednesday I dedicate two hours of my day to just testing my luck. Every week I will send out some of the most insane hail Mary emails. I reach out to like the most amazing people who are probably never going to see it.

30:44 I like blindly ask for things. I reach out to brands, I pitch articles because why not? Why not? Like you don't ask and the answer is no, I'm really just trying to increase my surface area for luck. And although that may sound spontaneous, it is still productive. This is why I believe this tip deserves its place on this list, even if it is a bit atypical. As well as clearing tasks getting work done, productivity also deserves a reframe in that it creates possibility. I don't think we should just be using it for things that are boring or or things that are a slog I think it should be utilized for expanding as well. You might have a perfectly organized inbox. You might complete every small task that

31:36 is required of you every day, but still be no closer to the life that you really crave because your productivity doesn't also include audacity. The psychology here is really around agency, and if we revisit that self efficacy theory again, self efficacy is our belief that we can change an outcome and is built partly through our confidence and our master of experiences. So moments like this where we say, hey, I really want something, I'm responsible for that. I'm not gonna wait for somebody else to give it to me.

32:14 I'm gonna go out and get it. Like I'm going to open myself up to the opportunity, because who's to say the answer is going to be no. I'm just I'm open to the next great opportunity that comes along. I'm producing those opportunities for myself right I'm being productive in a way that may not seem structured and organized, but is definitely worthy of output. I would highly highly recommend carving out space in your week for this doesn't have to be a full day for me. Sometimes it's just an hour or two where it is something that I have on my agenda constantly. I'm going to push my luck. I'm gonna see how far opportunities can take me.

32:55 I'm going to see how far just asking for something can take me, and to me, that is a productive endeavor. Okay, we're gonna take one more short break, I know, but we will be right back very very soon. As we near the end of this episode, I have one final surprising piece of psychological advice for you if you are looking to build that productivity muscle, that emotional productivity muscle.

33:29 I'm gonna introduce this with an analogy. Have you ever seen those Jim Bow videos from like the toughest, strongest like men and women in the world giving their exact routine. These people can like crush cars. I don't even know what that capable of. They are like so strong. I don't know, maybe it's just my algorithm. I will occasionally get these videos and I'll watch them because I want to be able to crush the car. But something they always incorporate in their routines that I've begun to notice is rest. Huge part of how they grow is how they rest. Now, before you stop listening here, because I feel like you know where I'm going to take this.

34:08 I need to make my argument for why you should be pausing and stepping away from work more than you probably are for at least an hour or two every single day, and I need you to be as serious about your unproductive downtime as your productive uptime. Similar to that all or nothing fallacy we end up in, we also end up in a rest is either optional or a distraction mindset, and we kind of half ask our rest.

34:39 We don't fully dedicate ourselves to having time off or to switching off, and by not doing that, we don't realize the insanely positive consequences of this for regular productivity. An article published by Berkeley in twenty seventeen I was reading about just recently was speaking about how even in our brain's resting state, when we are not directly focused on a task, our brain is still active. It is engaging its default network to plug away at problems, examine and toss out possible answers, discard others, look for new information.

35:17 We may not be able to control these processes completely, but by learning to rest better, we support them. We support the secondary kind of work our brain can only do when we are calm. We let our brain do the automatic stuff. If you're constantly working, that doesn't happen. Additionally, when we rest, and we are intentional about rest, it replenishes what was previously depleted by hard work, things like our attention, our focus reserves, even our eyes ability to direct themselves, our bodies' ability to calm itself, our capacity for divergent thinking. This is what this means for you when you're not working. When you're taking a break, you need to be as present in the break as you are present in the work. Often, you know we're not

36:08 fully working, but we're not fully resting either. We kind of sit down to relax, but we like keep scanning for like what else we should be doing. You know, we're meant to be replying to messages from friends, and then suddenly we're also refreshing our email. Like we've told ourselves that you can sit and read a book, and then suddenly now you're half answering the messages. Like we take a break, but we feel guilty the whole time, So we're like doing twenty five percent of a task at any given moment. That is not a productive way of being. You need to be able to mode switch.

36:42 When you're in work mode, you're in it. When you're in relaxation mode, you're in that as well. Staying in the middle ground where you're like, I really deserve a break, but I don't deserve a break. I have to work. I really should be working, but I haven't given myself a break, so I should have a break. It just wastes more of your time. Now, is there a right way to rest? Yes, I'm very glad you asked the author what's her name? Sandra Dalton Smith. She did a really famous head talk in which she identified seven types of rest that we need to be hitting across the week to be productive. These are physical rest, emotional rest, spiritual rest, mental, social, and sensory. Sounds like a lot of things, you often tick them off at the same time.

37:27 The most important one, though, that she says, is also the most neglected, is psychological rest. Authors of two thousand and seven paper I think it was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology identified that to truly recover from work stress and to be able to be productive day in and day out, yes we need to engage in relaxation. Yes we need to see our friends, of course, but most important for recovery cognitively and mentally is psychological detachment.

37:59 So being able to put emotional distance between you and a task, having a sense of closure to the work or to the productive day. Just physically relaxing is not enough, which sounds like a barm uk because it's like, wow, we're already doing so much, but you even if you stop working physically, sometimes your mind lingers mentally, so you need to have some kind of ritual, some kind of interrupter, some kind of pattern shift or mode shift that can say we're not doing that anymore. I'm out of that zone.

38:33 I am in this zone now, and I know that in order to be the most productive when I'm in the zone from before, I need to be all here, Like I need to be mentally disengaged from work, and it's not helping me switching between one and the other. I think we also need to learn how to say when a task is finished or finished enough for now, Like this is another thing I find with people who are very motivated, very ambitious. I'm sure you're one of these people, Like there's always more that can go on the to do list. There's always more that can go on the to do list, Like there's always going to be something else that hasn't been done. That's why all of these I think tasks and all of these tips kind of combine to create a productive day where you

39:19 know you are doing enough that three to one list. You know by the end of the day that you have completed what is required. I'm sure you've heard of this idea of hardonic adaptation, where people get more and more used to pleasure until they need more and more of it. So like it's the same with greed. Like you know, one hundred dollars is a lot until you have one thousand dollars, and then one hundred dollars isn't that much, and then you get a million dollars and a thousand dollars isn't that much anymore either. Like that happens for greed, that happens for enjoyment, it also happens for productivity. I think this is something you need to be very aware of. The more productive you become, the more productive you expect yourself to be. And so dedicating

40:00 yourself to your rest and being like all right, I'm gonna switch off stops you from feeling like, oh my god, this whole day was a waste because it wasn't as good as the day before or the day before that. There are times to be on, there are times to be off. Even nature understands that even the cells that make up your most basic state of being understand the flow of I guess creation and reproduction and then also slowness and renewal. You need to be following that as well.

40:35 It's really just like a wave chart or like a wave structure of like, if you want to hit the peaks of your productivity, you have to hit the lows of your rest. So that is all I have. That is my final soapbox moment for this episode. Treat your rest as important as your work. I hope that the combination of these tips was useful. I hope that you found the research helpful. To summarize the seven tips so you can just go away with the basics. Implement the three two one method, so three chores, two small tasks, one big task. Eat the frog, so do the hardest task first, or when you are most productive. Speaking of when you are most productive, learn your chronotype when you are going to be the most on habitstack, reject all

41:28 or nothing thinking. Carve out some time to be productive in an enjoyable, spontaneous way. I eat with a shoot your shot Wednesday, and take your rest seriously. That is all. If you have any further tips so you can always leave them in the comments down below. If you are listening on Spotify, a big thank you to our research on Libi Comet for her help with today's episode. Reminder we are on Netflix, where you're on substack, where you're on Instagram, we'd love to see you over there. And whatever it is you're working towards, whether it is your dissertation, I don't know, a big work project, oh my god, I can only ever think in like work in school.

42:08 There's like a thousand things in the middle. Maybe it's an art fair, maybe it's a math and I don't know whatever it is that you are dedicating yourself to right now, I'm just rooting for you, and I hope that this more sustainable approach to productivity and devotion and success is something that will help you get to where you want to go. So good luck. Until next time.

42:31 Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon.