We’ve been told that we should get up and go go go for the day. Yes we may eat lunch and take a couple of breaks but generally the culture of the day is get busy stay busy and wear it as a badge of honour. Well the research doesn’t back that up in fact if you follow that line of thinking you’ll slowly reduce your output and productivity across the course of a the working day.
This is the traditional model:
This really doesn’t look like real life does it? But that’s what’s expected of us!
In fact if we were to take a deeper look into how the human brain really works there are cycles not unlike sleep cycles which we can tap into to maximise our output and recharge in-between these to then be able to create the output needed for another burst of energy and productivity from the brain.
These rhythms are natural cycles in our energy. You could see them as a miniature version of a circadian rhythm – which as the name indicates is around a day whereas these ultradian rhythms are many cycles within one day. There are a number of different ways to work on your productivity which I have talked about in the past, for example the Pomodoro Technique, but this is a great over arching view of how we should look at our days and then apply the more detailed processes that works for us as individuals. As we probably know we aren’t designed to work for 90 minute bocks without a break, it can happen though. So breaking the day down into smaller bite size pieces using something like Pomodoro – you’ll be leveraging both the macro and micro cycles and be set for one hell of a powerful day of productivity!!!
Give them and go see how you get on.