How To Be More Productive – A Framework For Getting More Done With Less Time (Part 1)

So recently I have been spending a lot of my free time researching effective studying methods & productivity. This is primarily because I am going back into education this September and I want to make sure that I do it right this time. Previously in school & college I never studied, and I never really attempted to study, To be honest, I didn’t really want to study, I would have rather spent my time playing League of Legends or Skyrim instead. Due to the fact I never bothered to study, I never actually learned how to study effectively so this left me in a strange position whenever I did eventually have to sit down and do some work for upcoming exams I never really knew what I should be spending my time doing and often I would just engage in useless busy work to feel better about myself.

After spending the better parts of my days trying to find out & connect information on becoming better at studying and how to become more productive as well. I have managed to compile together a framework of key areas that I believe to be the most important when concerning getting more done with less time. Some of the stuff I will be taking over in this post series I have been using for a long time and I swear by them & some of them are relatively new ideas that I am trying to incorporate.

Productivity Dissected

When it comes to productivity you want to, maximise your work output & minimise the time spent actually working. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be studying 8 hours a day every day if I could be spending only 2 hours and get the same results. Here are the 4 key areas that I have collected together based on various principles and scientific research:

  • Focus: (External) minimising – distraction
  • Focus: (Internal) – maximising capacity for focus
  • Efficiency – Maximising output
  • Speed – Maximising input

This was originally going to be one post talking about everything but I had to split them up because they were much longer than I anticipated and I don’t want to overload people with too much information all at once.

Focus – The First Hurdle

What good is being productive and super efficient if we never actually sit down and do any work? While focus isn’t a direct contributor to efficiency it is however a vital part of being able to actually get stuff done. If we can’t actually sit down and do the work it doesn’t matter how efficient we are!

Attention Residue – The villain

We often work in an environment in which we are distracted, more often than not will be checking our phones, looking at emails and just trying to multitask and juggle 5 different activities at once. Distraction is an enemy of productivity, if we are spending time distracted and engaging in other tasks that aren’t directly contributing to our work output then we are wasting time. There is an interesting concept called attention residue outlined in a scientific article by Sophie Leroy. This paper explains that when we switch tasks from A to B task A is still interfering with our focus (even if task A is finished) when we are now on task B1. The article describes it as such

Attention residue reflects the persistence of cognitive activity about a Task A even though one stopped working on Task A and currently performs a Task B.

Excerpt taken from Leroy’s article

Basically, our brains are still doing background work on task A even though we’re not working on it currently, this is detrimental to performance on task B and ties directly back into productivity because were are now getting less for our time

Deep Work – Our Hero

A way to limit the effect of attention residue on our brains is Deep Work a concept popularised by the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World the concept is extremely simple however most effective. All you have to do is set aside some time to work undistracted and undisturbed on a specific task. This means no phone, no emails, no food, minimising toilet breaks if you can. It’s just you and the work. This actually means a lot of things for your brain not only in the way it stunts the effects of attention residue but it also has ties into the brain’s reward system & Dopamine.

Dopamine – motivation

Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical. whenever you engage in a pleasurable activity the brain releases dopamine2, for example, when you eat food that you like you release dopamine, or when you’re scrolling through Instagram your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine plays a key role in motivation and acts as a reinforcer for a task, dopamine is what increases the desire to do the task again. But not only this Dopamine neurons have been shown to become more or less excited based on a behaviour known as reward prediction error. If the reward for an activity is unexpectedly high the dopamine neurons will become more excited however if the reward is unexpectedly lower dopamine neurons will be inhibited3. What this means for us is that if we are constantly using external stimuli to make a given activity more engaging we are more likely to need that external stimulus to become motivated to do the tasks in the first place otherwise we risk a punishing effect from the dopamine neurons that will seek to suppress engagement of the activity in the future4. Engaging in deep, focused work on a specific task actually will make the task more engaging than if you had external distracting stimuli and also make you more likely to want to engage in that activity in the future.

Time pressure

Going back to the study by Leroy they also talk about the effect of unfinished tasks and that people need to finish one task before they can switch their focus on the next and how leaving tasks unfinished before switching has a negative performance impact on the next task. They further state in the abstract that:

Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.

Taken from the abstract of Leroy’s article

Key Takeaway

Using time pressure will be explored later on in an upcoming post. In the meantime, the key takeaway from this subsection of the productivity guide is to engage in focused deep work and to minimise distractions to extract the highest amount of performance from your mind and put it into the work you are doing.

Footnotes & Sources

  1. Leroy, S. (2009) ‘Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), pp. 168–181. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
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  2. Juárez Olguín, H. et al. (2016) ‘The Role of Dopamine and Its Dysfunction as a Consequence of Oxidative Stress’, Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, 2016, p. 9730467. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/9730467
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  3. Bromberg-Martin, E.S., Matsumoto, M. and Hikosaka, O. (2010) ‘Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting’, Neuron, 68(5), pp. 815–834. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.022.
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  4. Bromberg-Martin, E.S., Matsumoto, M. and Hikosaka, O. (2010) ‘Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting’, Neuron, 68(5), pp. 815–834. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.022.
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