This story needs a rewrite.

A few points on how strategically working fewer hours leads to increased productivity:

Mental Energy – Not All Hours Are Equal

Your brain cannot do difficult mental work in a focused way for more than so many hours a day. We are deceiving ourselves with our eight-hour (or longer, God forbid) workdays. It isn’t efficient, and it sets us up for mental exhaustion. It’s much better to distinguish between the hours you can and want to focus intensely (say 2-3 hours), and reserve them exclusively for your intellectually most challenging work. In the schedule I shared this week, you will see I did this by using my mornings for this type of intense work. The afternoons were much more flexible, less focused, and more distracted. The balance between focus and intensity, and more routine hours, allowing for more distractions, made it doable. When are your best hours? Are you using them well? Quality over quantity.

Mental Energy – Recovery Matters

Working in intervals allows you to recharge every hour, or more often, thereby keeping your mental energy high. This works in the short run, as well as in the long run. It makes sure you are sharp when you need to be, and honours your need for off-time, protecting you against burnout. As we discussed last week academia is a high-risk environment when it comes to stress-related physical and mental health problems. This way of working: more intensely some of the time; while appreciating the necessity of recovery and renewal, provides tools to manage the demands of a chronic stress-environment better. Self-care isn’t at odds with productivity; they are mutually reinforcing. How could you incorporate looking after yourself?

Mental Creativity – Better Ideas

As we will discuss next week, a relaxed mental space is essential for creativity. It is how new ideas form and pop up, unlike analysis which is strictly logical. You need both: the focused attention of analytical thought, and the mind-wandering that is conducive to creativity and aha-moments. To have innovative ideas time away from the intellectual problem you’re working on is essential. In other words: down-time is work. It is the non-active, non-doing part of work. It is when you allow ideas to come to you. Cultivating this space is an investment in your quality of thought. (Feels good too.)

Mental Focus – Boundaries Matter

Distractions and temptations are everywhere, and they pose a problem for doing intellectually challenging work. You need a time and space where you can go deep, be uninterrupted. It’s impossible to shield yourself from all distractions for the entire day. It would require you disengaging, going offline, isolating yourself. You’d need a cabin in the woods! Become a hermit! Yet isolating yourself for just a few hours a day is possible. It’s doable. Achievable. And what if it’s enough? Thinking ‘small’ in this way, will help you create the conditions in which you can concentrate. What are your key distractions? Any way to escape them for a few hours daily?

Mental Focus – The Time is Now

Working shorter, more structured workdays will help you keep going. It will help you stay out of the zone of limbo: where you are hanging out, not actually working, but not doing must else either. It keeps you present. Every work session is an opportunity to start again. If you didn’t manage the full 45 minutes because you started late for whatever reason, you have the chance to jump in right now, and aim to use the remaining minutes of the session well. Then, after a short break, you get a new chance. There’s a new work session ahead. If you work long days in an unstructured way, you don’t have these touchstones, and it’s easier to drift off. Scheduling a finite number of sessions a day helps. Right now is always the moment to get started. Until it is time to stop.

Mental Motivation – Limits Give us a Goal

Limits give us a goal. And goals give us a boost. I don’t know who said: ‘work expands to the time allotted’, but there is some truth to that. Why is it papers come together just in time for that deadline? Now, with these well-limited work sessions you have a deadline of sorts every hour. It is the sprint mentality that makes them powerful.Whereas before you could spend all day, now you are challenging yourself to get stuff done within that shorter timeframe. It is a pick-me-up and can be very motivating, especially once you realise how effective these work sessions can be. It helps to clearly demarcate the limits. That’s why using a timer is so helpful. Are you using one? (I used to stop literally mid-sentence when my timer rang. Time’s up! It works.)

Mental Habits – Get into the Groove

We are creatures of habit. If we get used to setting out timer every morning and getting straight to work, at some point it will be (almost) automatic and effortless. In this way working in intervals can help us overcome procrastination and get us into a work flow. You’ll get used to switching ‘on’ and ‘off’, moving from intense focus to relaxation and back when you decide. It will make you feel in control of your workday (important especially when you feel like you have little control over outcomes, as is often the case in academia). Process matters.

Think about this: what if intensity and depth can only be achieved if you create space for it? What if focus is only realised within limits and boundaries? What if relaxation is a requirement to make intellectual achievement (and emotional balance) sustainable over time? And what if mental relaxation is intrinsically valuable?

We need to flip the script and say no to the story that tells us we should be ‘working always, everywhere’. It is not true.

Some questions I got on this topic:

Q: A lot of the time I am not even sure I am ‘working’ at all. I am doing a lot of pondering and thinking, and I don’t really know whether I am being productive or not. It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know how to apply the tools in my situation. I feel that if at least I put enough hours in, it will pay off eventually.

A: What you are doing here is trying to achieve some measure of control over your work. Seen the absence of tangible progress, you count hours instead. This is the exact reason 8-hour workdays are the norm: at least we have something to measure! It is also the reason counting publications is the norm of achievement in academia. Or why inflexible deadlines are set. The problem here, is that you are measuring quantity, not quality. We can do better than that. What you want to measure is the quality of your mental energy. If you are in tune that way, you can devise a much smarter work schedule. (See point 1: not all hours are equal.) Some phases of PhD research are times of diffuse (and confused) thinking, in which a lot of conceptual work gets done, but you’ll only see the results weeks, or sometimes even months or years (!) later. Especially during these phases it’s important to create structure in your day, and make a clear distinction between hours of intense work (even though you don’t feel productive), of more routine work, and hours away from work.

But perhaps something more sneaky is going on. An important question to ask yourself is whether you are using the strategy of working long hours to compensate for the feeling of ‘not being productive’. Maybe that way you can at least feel good about yourself for ‘working hard’, even if you don’t see any direct results. If this is the case (hello PhD guilt), and we all do this to some degree, we need to remind ourselves of the folly of our ways!! You are probably not doing your best work when you are working long, long hours. You are the only one to judge, of course, but consider whether this may be more of a psychological coping mechanism than an effective work strategy.

When you’re doing challenging intellectual conceptual work the best way to approach it is to think hard about the question at hand for a set period of time (say a couple of 45 minute sessions on a given day) and then relax and do something completely different. Your brain will come up with answers and ideas, whether you are consciously thinking about them or not. You cannot force or analyse these answers into existence. Research we’ll discuss next week shows that new insights that are so important in solving intellectual puzzles, come to us when we are relaxed, and after we have been thinking hard about the problem. Better to step away from the computer/ your articles from time to time.

It takes a leap of faith to trust that this method works, and it may be uncomfortable in the beginning. This becomes easier once it starts to pay off, and you realise that you are becoming more productive even though you are not spending as much time at the computer.

Q: I never feel I have done enough at the end of the day. There is always so much still left to do, and I admit I will often skip going to the gym because I want to finish something I’m doing. If I start cutting my work hours I fear I will be even less satisfied with what I’ve done.

A: Academic work is slow. Often it can feel too slow to bear. A first tip is to write down what you have been working on after each work session. Take the time to really appreciate what you’ve done. We tend to to shrug small accomplishments off as insignificant, but they’re not. Step by step, they lead to your larger accomplishments: the finishing of a paper or chapter, and finally the finishing of your PhD. As humans, we have a negativity bias. It’s a survivor drive that causes us to pay more attention to those things that are not yet done, than to our accomplishments. In a four-year-marathon PhD, this can make for a lot of feeling miserable. Counter this tendency by appreciating your small accomplishments along the way, even if it’s just a paper read or a couple of paragraphs written. It’s one step forward. Congratulate yourself every single day. You are doing great work. Maybe it doesn’t feel like that right now, but you are doing great work anyway. The payback comes weeks, months and years later. But it will come. Trust that, and give yourself a pat on the back.

On a more fundamental level we can suffer from what I call a ‘never there, never enough’ mentality (more on this in week 6). The truth of the matter is that your work isn’t done, and it won’t be done soon either. Academic work is never done. Yes, the moment will come that you finish that chapter, publish that paper or hand in your PhD. But afterwards a new chapter, article or book will be right there waiting for you to be written. It never ends! So if you’re going to wait until ‘it’s finished’ to be satisfied, you will be waiting for a very long time indeed.

The mistake we make is to make how we feel about ourselves dependent on getting somewhere. We think: ‘Once I get there, I can be happy’. ‘Once I get that paper finished I can feel good about myself; once I get my paper published I can feel good about my work; once I get positive feedback from my supervisor I can be happy with my achievements.’ The problem with this mentality is exactly what I’ve mentioned above: we never arrive. There is always more work to do, and the moments of brief success such as finishing a chapter are fleeting.

A better approach is to work from a place of ‘already there’. How about feeling good about ourselves and our work from where we are right now. I mean, if we never truly arrive anyway, it may make more sense to stop waiting until we arrive before feeling good. What would it feel like once that chapter is finished? What would it feel like once your PhD is finished and you have done a really good job? What would it feel like to see your name above a paper in a journal of your choice? Imagine what it feels like, and really feel it. Maybe it makes you feel confident, buoyant, excited, taken seriously or strong. Whatever it is, that’s the feeling you can work from, instead of towards. It is a mistake to think that the outside experience (getting the article published for example), will lead to a long-term higher level of satisfaction. It will lead to a short-term boost, but you will find yourself back at your normal baseline level of feeling ‘not there yet’ more quickly than you’d like. The next day, probably! Instead, you can let your desired experience (your feeling of confidence, or whatever it is you expect to gain from ‘arriving’) be a place from which to work, even though you are not objectively ‘there’ yet. This really does work, and week six will show you in detail how to do it. Once you shift your perception from ‘never there’ to ‘already there’, your energy will no longer be drained by the feeling of continuously falling short. Your work is never done, but you can choose to always be ‘already there’. Once you really get that on an emotional level, the feelings you desire can become a source of emotional energy that can contribute to your productivity.

On a practical level, give this week’s techniques a go. You don’t have to believe it works, at all. But do try it. Resist the temptation to fill up your entire day with work. Stop early, even if it’s hard in the beginning. It may take a few weeks to figure out how this way of working can be applied in your circumstances. Give yourself that time to try different ways of implementing the tools discussed, and to evaluate what works for you.