Rejuvenate: Reenergize Your Mind and Body, page 65.
The Rule of Fifty
- Jack Nevison, the founder of New Leaf Project Management, crunched the numbers from several different studies on long work hours and found that there’s a ceiling to the number of productive work hours someone can work in a given week.
- Push past fifty hours of work in a week and there’s no productivity gain for the extra time. In fact, it goes backward.
- The more you work beyond a fifty-hour threshold, according to his research, the less productive you become.
Productivity Myth
- Energy is fixed, but time can flex. You can get a consistent return on your effort while expanding your hours.
- Said differently, you are just as smart, strong, and engaged at 100 hours as you are at 50 hours.
- In reality, however, time is fixed, but energy can flex.
- Every day contains the same number of hours, while your energy swings up and down depending on multiple variables, including rest, nutrition, and emotional health.
- Personal energy is a renewable resource, replenished by seven basic practices.
Seven Basic Energy Renewal Practices
- Practice 1: Sleep
- Nightly rejuvenation is the foundation of productivity.
- Sufficient sleep keeps us mentally sharp and improves our ability to remember, learn, and grow.
- It refreshes our emotional state, reduces stress, and recharges our bodies.
- Going without sleep makes it harder to stay focused, solve problems, make good decisions, or even play nice with others.
- Sleep-deprived people come up with fewer original ideas and tend to stick with old strategies that may not continue to be effective.
- Rejuvenating comes down to two things: quantity and quality:
- Adults require seven to ten hours of sleep a night to perform at their peak.
- You can also increase the quantity of sleep by adding a short 20-30 minute nap to your daily schedule.
- As for quality, there are several ways to improve that as well:
- Turn off all screens one hour before bed.
- Blackout shades.
- Lower the room temperature.
- Use white noise.
- Practice 2: Eat
- The food we eat makes an immediate, long-lasting, and powerful impact on our energy levels.
- Just one in five employees get away from the desk for lunch.
- 40% of workers and managers eat lunch “only from time to time” or “seldom, if ever.”
- Eating a healthy lunch can pay big dividends in expanding our energy.
- Leaving our desks for lunch also pays creative dividends. “Creativity and innovation happen when people change their environment, and especially when they expose themselves to nature-like environments.”
- Staying inside, in the same location, is detrimental to the creative process.
- Missing lunch means you’re sacrificing breakthrough moments that could take your organization to the next level.
- Practice 3: Move
- Too often we tell ourselves we don’t have enough energy to exercise, but exercise itself is an energizer.
- Few things have as direct an impact on our energy levels as a decent workout.
- If you get moving early, it will pay huge dividends all day long.
- A single workout can immediately boost higher-order thinking skills, making you more productive and efficient as you slog through your workday.
- According to Harvard Business Review, “New research demonstrates a clear relationship between physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposive and one’s ability to manage the intersection between work and home.”
- Exercise reduces stress, and lower stress makes the time spent in either realm more productive and more enjoyable.
- Exercise creates a greater sense of self-efficacy, the confidence we have in our ability to get things done.
- Maintaining an exercise regimen despite often-overwhelming demands on your time forces you to sharpen your self-discipline and increase your capacity for self-sacrifice.
- An exercise regimen also helps you hone your efficiency, dedication, planning, and focus to juggle competing interests and opportunities.
- Practice 4: Connect
- We can’t talk about managing energy without talking about the effect that other people have on our energy level.
- The people around us have the power to dramatically boost or drain our energy faster than almost anything else.
- You can get plenty of sleep, eat a healthy diet, and work out every day, but if you’re keeping yourself locked away from other people, not taking the time to invest in quality relationships – or worse, hanging out with energy vampires – you’re missing out on one of the most powerful energizers of all.
- Managing your social energy sources goes beyond your organization to include your full social circle. You’re coworkers, colleagues, customers, and clients all play a part in your energy management.
- Consider taking a Social Audit where you ask yourself, “Am I surrounding myself with energy producers or energy drains?”
- Even if circumstances force you into a relationship with negative people, recognizing their effect can prevent the worst of it from rubbing off.
- Practice 5: Play
- You know the old saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?” It also makes Jack ineffective, uncreative, unfocused, and unproductive.
- Never discount the power of play in your life, no matter how many other serious things demand your time.
- You’ll always have problems to solve, deadlines to hit, and tasks to finish.
- How do I define Play? It’s activity for its own sake, for fun, for connection with others, or for expressing your own creativity.
- When you’re not working toward something, you’re free to be inefficient, which means you can step back and experiment, try new things, and imagine the world differently than it appears to be.
- Play nurtures a supple mind, a willingness to think in new categories, and an ability to make unexpected associations.
- The spirit of play not only encourages problem-solving but fosters originality and clarity.
- Taking a break from the busyness of life to engage with nature, even for a few minutes, can bring positive effects on our mental stamina and our cognitive performance.
- The time [in nature] doesn’t have to be long. Short “micro-breaks” with nature have discernable benefits for our minds. But long, immersive stretches in nature offer big benefits for our creativity and problem-solving skills.
- Nature is a stress killer, which offers a cascade of other benefits, including:
- Rejuvenated physical activity
- Reduced anxiety
- Reduced muscle tension
- Decreased stress hormones
- Lower heart rates
- Decreased blood pressure
- Many of these benefits rebound our mental health, forming a virtuous circle.
- We’re hardwired to spend time playing, relaxing, and resting, especially in natural environments.
- If you want to stay sharp, you need regular injections of recreation, exercise, and outright play into your busy schedule.
- Practice 6: Reflect
- Rejuvenation could take many forms, but most often it’s something like reading, journaling, introspection, meditation, prayer, or worship.
- We need to spend time intentionally rejuvenating our minds and hearts.
- It’s easy for busy people like us to rush through life at warp speed, taking action and making decisions without ever stopping to figure out where we’re going, who we’re affecting, and what all these actions and decisions are adding up to.
- It’s possible to skip along the surface of life and never go deeper.
- We’ll never fully rejuvenate unless we slow down and contemplate our life and the way we move through the world.
- Strive to make time for reflection every day
- What ideas really matter to you?
- What are you feeling?
- Reflect on recent decisions you’ve made.
- Reflect on recent wins, losses, ideas, and insights.
- Reflect on what made this day unique and special.
- Daily reflection ensures you’re connected to a bigger “Why” and that you don’t get lost in the minutiae of life.
- Staying firmly connected to your “Why” will give you the energy and strength you need to complete your work and finish the race – every day.
- Practice 7: Unplug
- Next to getting ample sleep, unplugging might be the most challenging of the seven practices.
- Since unplugging is a struggle for so many, I recommend creating several rules to help you disconnect during nights, weekends, and vacations.
- Here are four I use, but feel free to create your own and share them with anyone who will help you implement them:
- Don’t think about work.
- Put it out of your mind.
- Be both physically and mentally present.
- Be mindful of worry creep.
- Don’t do any work.
- This includes staying in touch and up to date.
- Set your technology to “Do Not Disturb.”
- “Hide” your technology from yourself.
- Don’t talk about work.
- Avoid spending downtime discussing work-related items.
- Encourage people to call foul when you drift into work speak.
- Don’t read about work.
- This includes work-related books, magazines, blogs, podcasts, and videos.
- Cultivate other interests and use your free time to develop passions that aren’t work-related.
- Don’t think about work.
Exercise: Rejuvenation Self-Assessment
- Download a copy of the Rejuvenate Self-Assessment from FreeToFocus.com/tools.
- Rank yourself according to assessment questions and tally your score.
- This tool will identify specific areas that may need more urgent attention.
- Retake the assessment after a few months to see how you’re improving and what areas still need attention.
- Next, download a copy of the Rejuvenation Jumpstart.
- Reflect on a goal for each of the seven practices.
- Pick two goals you want to focus on in the next month.
- Keep your goals in front of you (Note on the mirror, time on the calendar, the background of your phone, etc.).
