Latest / Spacious Success / 07 | Productivity Hijackers – Why Working Harder Isn’t Working

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07 | Productivity Hijackers – Why Working Harder Isn’t Working · Spacious Success

• 0:00
  Hi, it's Kristi here and welcome back to Spacious Success.
• 0:10
  In today's episode I want to tackle, in fact I want to bust one of the most common productivity
• 0:17
  myths out there and that is that multitasking equates to working harder.
• 0:23
  If you've ever found yourself like me trying to do all the things all at once and feeling
• 0:28
  like you're dropping the ball anyway, this episode will show you, in fact I'm going to
• 0:34
  explain why.
• 0:36
  By the end you'll understand what's really happening in your brain when you attempt
• 0:41
  to constantly switch tasks, the mental juggle and some of the practical tools that you can
• 0:46
  use to reclaim your focus and your time.
• 0:49
  So let's jump in.
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  I want to tell you a story, a day that goes nowhere.
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  Let me paint a picture for you.
• 1:01
  I hear from some clients all of the time, you wake up, you open your laptop, you reach
• 1:05
  for your phone, before you know it, you haven't even had your first sip of coffee in the
• 1:10
  office and you're in your inbox, you're triaging your team's chats.
• 1:14
  You answer a couple of quick emails, you check Slack or team's messages once again, you
• 1:19
  respond to a got a sick email and suddenly it's 11.45 a.m.
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  You haven't eaten, you haven't moved and that big important project, you know the one
• 1:30
  that you'd swore that you'd tackle today, well it's still sitting there untouched just
• 1:36
  as it was every single day last week.
• 1:40
  So you tell yourself I'm going to do it after lunch except lunch rolls around and after
• 1:45
  lunch it becomes meeting after meeting, then more of these emails and then before you
• 1:50
  know what it's five o'clock, you've been busy all day but have you been productive?
• 1:56
  Probably not so much.
• 1:57
  Does this sound familiar?
• 2:00
  You see we have adopted old productivity, outdated productivity models.
• 2:06
  This happens because so many of us even today are still trying to work to an outdated industrialized
• 2:13
  era model of productivity.
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  One that says the more hours you put in, the more output you'll get out.
• 2:21
  Now that model may have worked when it meant that we were producing widgets on a production
• 2:27
  line but today very few of us are operating on a conveyor belt.
• 2:32
  We need to run on our biology and our biology, well it has biological constraints, limits.
• 2:40
  You see there are some productivity hijackers.
• 2:43
  Let's look at four of the biggest culprits that might be stealing your day.
• 2:48
  Constant context switching.
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  Every time you jump between tasks, tabs or conversations, you pay what we call a switch
• 2:55
  cost.
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  Multiply that by the dozens of times each day, your brain is fried by lunch.
• 3:03
  When you go from your inbox to a spreadsheet, you're leaving behind what Sophie La Roy calls
• 3:08
  attention residue.
• 3:11
  Question it like little fragments of your thinking, your thoughts are on the previous
• 3:15
  task.
• 3:16
  We do this throughout our days.
• 3:18
  The next thing is our always on culture.
• 3:21
  Availability creep convinces you that you need to be responsive.
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  It means being permanently reachable, always on.
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  But what it really robs you off is deep focused work and often your ability and time to have
• 3:37
  a psychological break from your work.
• 3:40
  This is why our help teams establish their digital guardrails to explicitly articulate
• 3:45
  what some of our digital norms, practices and principles are.
• 3:50
  How do we communicate after hours?
• 3:52
  Do we have a communication escalation plan?
• 3:55
  Next one is attention residue.
• 3:58
  Every ping, buzz and alert leaves mental residue that drags your focus long after the
• 4:04
  interruption.
• 4:05
  In fact, research tells us that if we're distracted by chatty, Kathy in the office or talkative
• 4:11
  Tom or the ping of a notification whilst we're doing our focused work, it takes the average
• 4:16
  adult around 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back into that deep focus state.
• 4:22
  It's the resumption lag.
• 4:24
  And the fourth one is productivity theatre.
• 4:27
  I think we spent our days today often looking busy of moving the needle back to back meetings,
• 4:32
  endless email chains and the performance of productivity without any actual real progress.
• 4:39
  Too many of us are spending our days doing work about work.
• 4:43
  You're not imagining it.
• 4:44
  Microsoft Research, and this was based on usage data, suggests that around 57% of our work
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  days are now communicating, emails, teams, chats and meetings.
• 4:53
  I mean 43% of our days is actually doing the work.
• 4:58
  Talk about workplace performance and productivity theatre.
• 5:03
  Here's what the science says.
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  Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that handles planning, decision making, executive
• 5:13
  function.
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  It's responsible chiefly for your focus.
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  Well, your prefrontal cortex only has a four to six hour battery life per day, four
• 5:21
  to six hours of peak output.
• 5:23
  Push beyond that and your quality will take a nose dive.
• 5:26
  Now I'm not saying, don't misconstrued this, that you should only work a four to six hour
• 5:30
  work day.
• 5:31
  What I am saying is that in order for your brain to perform at its peak, you've got basically
• 5:36
  a four to six hour window per day.
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  So if you're consistently pumping out 14 hour days, you are working against your human
• 5:44
  operating system.
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  We know you're working memory that mental post-it note that you use to juggle information
• 5:51
  will it maxes out quickly when it's cluttered.
• 5:54
  So half finished thoughts from previous interruptions will erode it.
• 5:59
  We know we get stuck in the dopamine adrenaline loop.
• 6:02
  It keeps us addicted to checking our emails and teams messages because we crave as humans
• 6:07
  novelty.
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  Our brains love new things.
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  And so this keeps us stuck in reaction mode instead of creation mode.
• 6:15
  Another thing we're doing is ignoring our old trading rhythms.
• 6:18
  We naturally have a 90 minute cycle, which is an energy peak and then a deep.
• 6:24
  And many of us are missing a really simple way to supercharge our productivity.
• 6:29
  We know and many of my clients work in 90 minute sprints, I call them digital dashes.
• 6:34
  And then we pause for some recovery.
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  And this protocol, this cadence dramatically improves our productivity and performance.
• 6:42
  So why are ambitious women feeling like these distractions are more acute for them?
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  And ambitious women often feel these hijackers even more acutely.
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  There's something called the digital double burden.
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  Work emails plus school app, sports group, dentists reminders on our phones, family logistics
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  on WhatsApp, just to name a few.
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  There's the mental and caring load, keeping track of all the invisible tasks that really
• 7:12
  get written on a to do list, but often must get done so your child doesn't forget to turn
• 7:18
  up to school in mufti clothes on Tuesday.
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  And you don't forget to contribute to grandma's birthday gift contribution.
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  These are the things that often clog your to do list, but have to make it to the calendar.
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  Unfortunately, we've adopted a multitasking myth.
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  Research tells us that it doesn't save us time.
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  It literally burns brain fuel.
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  We call this glucose and we do this when we attempt to multitask.
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  Being stressed, changes in hormones and the invisible mental load and the digital double
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  burden, many women simply aren't getting the restorative sleep that their brains and
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  bodies need for focused work.
• 7:59
  I see this in my clients wearable data on whoops, straps and aura rings.
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  So how do we recalibrate your productivity?
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  How do we stop these hijackers from denting our performance?
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  The first thing is to work in digital dashes.
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  Treat your focus like a sprint, not a marathon.
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  Work with your ultradion rhythm.
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  So work in roughly 90 minute bursts or maybe start with 45 minutes and increase to 90.
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  Then recover.
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  Research tells us and my clients data tells us these bolsters our performance.
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  Set some digital guardrails of your own.
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  Turn off your non-essential notifications, batch your emails, create VIP lists.
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  So when you're on focus mode, you do not get your attention diverted by these non-essential
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  notifications.
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  Number three, monotask, don't multitask.
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  Choose your high priority, potent tasks that you can do each day and stay until it's
• 8:55
  complete.
• 8:56
  Avoid distractions, layering your chronotype and we're going to do a whole episode about
• 9:01
  this.
• 9:02
  This is the natural peaks in your energy and focus.
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  This is how you work with rather than against your human operating system.
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  I want you to know that productivity isn't about doing more.
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  Please breathe a sigh of relief.
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  It's about doing what matters when your brain and body are best equipped to do it without
• 9:21
  letting the hijackers run the show or dent your performance.
• 9:26
  Your success doesn't depend on you being always on.
• 9:29
  It depends on you being strategically on.
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  It relies on a powered up high res version of you.
• 9:36
  In our next episode, we'll dive into the science of sustainable peak performance.
• 9:41
  One of the rhythms and the recovery rituals that allow you and a accomplished woman to
• 9:46
  achieve big results, but without the side of burnout.
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  Until then, choose just one strategy from today's episode and try it.
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  Not all three, just one.
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  Your future self will thank you trying to break up with multitasking.
• 10:02
  If this episode landed for you, share it with a friend, send the link to a colleague.
• 10:07
  The colleague who's constantly busy, but feels like they never caught up.
• 10:11
  And don't forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
• 10:16
  Because I want to share with you that working harder isn't the answer.
• 10:20
  Working with your human operating system, your HOS, is the trick.
• 10:24
  And that's exactly what I want to share with you.