How to work 8 hours and accomplish more than 16 hours of work?

Study the table of the worlds most productive countries in the year 2015. Except Ireland and the US, workforce of every other nation work less than 30 hours a week. (And most of the workforce takes well over 24 days of vacation a year).

Now look at yourself. Look around you. EVERYONE is busy. Be it a child that hasn't learnt the word busy yet or the rest that have, everyone appears to be busy. Twenty four hours look just too few for a day. Unfortunately, no technology has been invented (yet) to slow down the clock. What can you learn from productive workforce? ONE thing: to stay sane and achieve balance in life, you need to produce more by working less. To learn how to master that skill, you don't need to visit a top B-school or hire a time management guru - lessons from the humble woodcutters should suffice.

A group of woodcutters was tasked with cutting trees in the forest. One of the woodcutters took the longest breaks but turned in the maximum logs, whereas those with the minimum breaks mysteriously produced fewer logs. A detailed investigation revealed the reason for this anomaly: the woodcutter with fewest work hours used the breaks to sharpen his axe: the resulting tool increased his productivity allowing him to achieve more with apparently less effort.

Great idea in theory - What does that translate to in colloquial or business life? It turns out that your own brain provides clues - in the rough and tumble of life, you miss those clues.

(If you prefer to watch a TED video on high productivity and how advanced nations are more successful here, please refer link below.

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The whole science of being productive is about producing the right mix of 3 powerful chemicals - called neuro-chemicals - in your brain.

1.      Dopamine

2.      Serotonin

3.      Oxytocin.

Let’s understand these chemicals and how they control your productivity.

Dopamine:

Dopamine is the ultimate source of motivation for EVERY task in life – from the most mundane tasks like waking up from bed to more advanced ones that need deep cognition and analysis. Also called the reward or happiness chemical, dopamine creates feelings of euphoria and fulfillment when it floods the brain. High productivity is all about producing optimal dopamine levels in your brain. Now, dopamine isn’t your servant and won’t obey your command to flow. How then do you trick your brain to produce more dopamine?

Let’s take an example: recall an assignment in your academic pursuit or a project at work or a life ambition like community service that you always wanted to do. Recall how you felt doing these.

Very likely, you were so absorbed in the tasks that you NEVER noticed the hours go by. Hours feel like minutes as work happened effortlessly. Why?  Because when you enjoy your work, dopamine automatically starts flowing in the brain at a steady rate, producing feelings of happiness or euphoria as it flows. Since you love these feelings, you do MORE of this work and now a virtuous cycle of "work – dopamine – excitement" is created. Any work done in this state of mind is of the highest quality and you are at the peak of your productivity – you are likely to feel fulfilled and find meaning in your work.

Take a look at the opposite perspective. When you work on a task you DON’T enjoy inherently, your dopamine flows reduce or even stop and the resulting demotivation drains you out mentally.

Seen in this light, it isn’t the number of hours, but the content of those hours that decide how the brain perceives hard work. Even a few hours of dull, boring work appears a lot more hard to the brain than long hours of interesting work. Take a look at this graph to understand how hard work impacts productivity negatively.

The FIRST secret to being productive in life is to do what spurs dopamine in your brain naturally by doing what you love to do. Highly productive nations ensure that their staff works on tasks in line with their passions - and this spurs dopamine flows of majority of their workforce.

Identifying what you love isn't as challenging as you think.– keep observing yourself as you work and ask yourself:

1.      When you get up in the morning, do you have an automatic urge to go to work or do you feel you are dragging yourself to work?

2.      Do you feel an internal sense of fulfillment for the greater part of working day?

3.   Why do you do what you do? Is it for the joy of work? Or is it for external factors like money, job titles, position, perks, social status or because you love your work?

If you answered NO (even a faint no) to ANY of the questions above, you need some self-introspection. Life is too short to be doing unexciting things. Experiment with yourself and see what interests you along the way – it could very well be things outside your current profession. The longer you stay in a profession that isnt in line with your passion or purpose, the longer you deprive your brain of dopamine and the lower the meaning and fulfillment in life.

So with exciting work, are you set for a lifetime of high productivity? Well, wish life were so easy.

 Like the star of a movie who needs a strong supporting cast to make a mark on the audience, dopamine needs strong supporting neuro-chemical star cast to keep your productivity high. Oxytocin and serotonin are vital parts of that star-cast.

Let’s re-analyze your internal motivations that spur dopamine flows to see what could be impeding factors. You love your academic engagement or work project, you do a great job at it and now need to present your work to your boss or professor, BUT have a strained relationship with them. You love your work but find it difficult to gel with co-workers. 

With such poor relations, how do you feel now as you work? You still love your work, but the poor relations are a distraction that reduce your motivation – And you cant seem to run way from this distraction. There is no field of endeavor where you wont encounter or need to collaborate with people – learning to work with them is vital. Oxytocin provides this vital missing link.

Oxytocin is the chemical of trust and closeness among humans – partners, mother-child and colleagues at work. Once released, it reduces feelings of worry and insecurity fostering harmonious and smooth relations. While dopamine helps you produce peak productivity individually, oxytocin multiplies productivity by improving team dynamics and creating a feeling of fulfillment.

The 2nd secret to being productive is to maintain smooth working relationships with all stakeholders in your life by producing enough oxytocin - in your and their brain.

There are some practical tips that can help naturally release oxytocin in work environments – lets look at 3 of those.:

1.  Smile: Smile from your heart as often as you can. It stimulates flow of oxytocin in you and the person you work with.

2.  Warm Touch: Shaking hands warmly and genuine pat on the back go a long way in sustaining relations and releasing oxytocin.

3.  Be Genuine and empathetic: Being truthful and genuine with people works wonders. If you have the best interests of others in your heart and in every decision you make, you are likely to build trusting relations with people – and release a copious amount of oxytocin along the way.

Smooth relations – be they personal or professional – are vital ingredients for productivity. It isn't without reason that someone said - The quality of your life is proportional to quality of your relationships.

With exciting work and working relationships, is productivity guaranteed? For the short term yes, but, you need one more ingredient to sustain dopamine - and high productivity - level in the long-run. Lets understand this with an example. 

Lets imagine you are on your dream vacation to Hawaii. Sun-kissed beaches, fresh air, breath-taking scenery and perfect weather – everything is just right. The expectation of excitement leads to a dopamine surge in your brain in the short-term. But life has alternate plans. You reach the airport late and miss your flight. You take the next flight but due to delays, miss the connecting flight. Somehow you make it to Hawaii a day later than planned. The next day your wallet is stolen. You lose money and emergency cash from the bank arrives late. By now, you are getting the drift of the story - Man proposes, God disposes. Assuming this is happening to you now, Whats your mental state?

Unless you have meditated for over a decade, you are bound to be in a foul mood. The fun and positive expectations of a wonderful vacation have been dampened by the delays, challenges, losses. The overall unpleasant experience have left you with a foul mood. Using the terms of the brain, the strong dopamine flows have been dampened by low flows of another chemical - serotonin.

Serotonin is powerful chemical that facilitates several vital functions in the brain, one of which is to regulate your mood. If you ever find yourself getting moody, showing signs of mood swings or changing disposition, it is a sign that your serotonin levels could be dropping fast. Serotonin provides the cushion of positive mood to sustain dopamine flows and rev up smart work in life.

The third secret to being productive is to maintain a positive disposition by releasing enough serotonin in your brain. 

Like dopamine, serotonin isn’t your servant – it wont obey your command to start flowing to maintain your mood. How do you cause it to flow?

Two factors help maintain your serotonin levels:

1.  Food and exercise: Eating the right diet, basking in the sun and exercising is perhaps the easiest and the most natural way to maintain optimal levels of serotonin in the brain.

2.   Elimination of distractions: To the extent possible, eliminate distractions at your chose field of endeavor.

To summarize, the three pillars of productivity are:

1.      sustain the right flow of dopamine by doing what you love,

2.      oxytocin by strengthening working relationships with others

3.      Serotonin to sustain mood.

Dopamine is like electricity. Used correctly it can light up your life and make it meaningful but used incorrectly, it can cause a shock. Serotonin and Oxytocin provide the insulation of good relations and cheerful mood to eliminate any shocks in life so dopamine can provide you meaning and fulfillment.

Like the smart woodcutter, you need to sharpen the axe of these chemicals often. How? Go and get some sleep. The brain is an energy hungry organ – despite being 2% of body weight, it consumes 20% of the total energy. Your dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin producers need rest to be able to the produce these chemicals in the right amount and the right time. No single factor does as much damage to smart work as insufficient rest to the brain. Refuse to listen to those who ask you to work long hours by cutting your sleep.

How much rest do you need? There is no firm answer and perhaps that isn’t even the right question to ask: what’s more important is how sound the sleep is in those hours. There are experienced meditators who can get by with just a couple of hours of sleep and there are those who sleep for more than ten hours and still don’t wake up fresh. A two-hour sound sleep is a lot better than a ten-hour disturbed sleep. Quality matters than quantity, when it comes to sleep.

Being productive is a science, not an art any longer. It is all about understanding self. The Greek aphorism “Know Thyself” is as true in today’s age of artificial intelligence as it was millennia ago. Know Thyself and you are set for a life of productivity - fulfillment and meaning will your serendipities.  

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Raja Jamalamadaka is a TEDx and corporate speaker, entrepreneur, mentor to startup founders, "Marshall Goldsmith award for coaching excellence" award winning top 100 coach to senior industry executives and a board director. He also serves on several CEO search panels. His primary area of research is neurosciences - functioning of the brain and its links to leadership attributes like productivity, confidence, positivity, decision making and organization culture. If you liked this article, you might like some of his earlier articles here:

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