Adam Markel breaks down how to sustain energy and focus. Working uninterrupted for two to three hours boosts productivity by 59% in the morning and 65% in the afternoon, according to Harvard research. He recommends building 10-30 minute recovery breaks into your day to restore mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy.
Chapters
We just found another study that we thought we'd share with you today, which is from a Harvard professor talking about similar things, but extended breaks. Those other breaks were just 10 to 15 minutes. But what this study showed is that when we've got longer breaks, two, three hour. And these are not necessarily breaks, but they're periods of interrupted productivity or interrupted focus on things, we're not multitasking, we're not being interrupted. Productivity goes up 59% in the morning and 65% in the afternoon. Just from periods, blocks of time where you are not being interrupted. That's it. So one, the toggle method, that's the one that we talk about a lot. Sometimes it's when I was a swimmer in college, we called it interval training. Sometimes it's called the pomodoro technique. There are other words to describe it, but it's this idea that we cannot maintain our focus for very long before we need to change, shift, create a state, change. Just that simple. So what do we do with this? How do we create energy for ourselves? And I think it's an important question to understand energy at this level because when it comes to. I'm going to come back to this for a second. When it comes to the options for us to go back and forth between things, to toggle, there are so many. And this is where the details are actually a lot of fun. So I can't talk about all these things today, but I'm going to say a few things about it. One is that the sweet spot is 10 to 30 minutes that we get into that 10 to 30 minutes of we bake it into the bread for the day. We decide here, there and somewhere else, we're going to take a 10 minute, we're going to do something for ourselves, just for us to recover mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, up to 30 minutes, that is optimal.
