The 90 Minute Productive Hack
Trying to be more productive in this world is more important than ever. Businesses are realizing that meetings aren’t productive and rather spend the time on more effective ways. Employees are more aware of productivity too. Considering everything that happens in our lives, it only makes sense to maximize our limited time and energy. Like with all my past episodes, there may be a simple solution. By working about 90 minute intervals could maximize your productivity. Here’s how that works:
Strategic renewal
If you ever been to a crowded city, people are always rushing from place to place — like the next ask to another. It’s the only option to get anything done. Days are just so packed that slowing down doesn’t feel possible. But taking that time to relax actually does a lot of good in the long run. The New York Times had an article about “strategic renewal”. Which is everything between naps and workout sessions to vacations. They all have shown productivity increased after time doing these. So taking a break may seem counterproductive — it isn’t.
The Basic-Rest-Activity-Cycle (BRAC) impacts our waking and sleeping lives.
Ever since the 50’s we’ve learned that good sleep happens in 90 minute intervals. You may have noticed it yourself with a sleep tracker. From light sleep to deep sleep to REM (dreams) state that we go through every 90 mins or so. About a decade after we learned about this natural sleep cycle, researchers began to realize that we follow a similar pattern in our waking lives as well.
To maximize productivity, work in 90-minute intervals.
Florida State University Professor K. Anders Ericsson has said in a response to a better understanding of productivity by studying the people who perform the best in their chosen field. This was over the course of chess players, athletes, and business owners. Ericcson discovered work that lasted 90 minutes or less — with breaks in between sessions had the most results. Also important to note that these people mostly worked 4 1/2 hours in a day.
“In effort to maxmimize their practice” Ericsson said,”These kinds of people needed to avoid exhaustion and purposely limited themselves to recover from performing daily or weekly at their best.
This is why limiting fatigue will allow us to recover quickly and go back to working just as hard as before. This is through maximizing work effort and productive efforts. Now when you’re tackling your next big project — get them done in 90 minute intervals to not get burned out so quickly. So that we’ll eventually get to the point where we can work only for 4 1/2 hours and still achieve our dreams.
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