Equating Stress With Productivity
Our ability to make plans is an important skill and a key part of our personal and professional growth. But what’s even more important than knowing how to make a plan is being skilled in the art of planning, which includes the ability to acquire and process new information so that you can move past the friction points you’ll encounter as soon as you set a plan into motion. In this episode I share three steps you can take to strengthen the way you approach planning.
Episode Transcription
Intro
There’s a common misbelief we have about stress and how it impacts our workday - and that belief is that in order to make significant progress each day, we constantly have to be moving quickly and in a state of stress. And so what we end up doing is equating stress with productivity.
But it turns out that in many ways that belief is backwards. When we’re able to identify the root of our stress and strip it away, that’s actually when we’re able to do our best work. Let’s talk about how to do it. Here we go.
EPISODE
I want to talk about a common misbelief that we have about stress and the role it plays in the flow of our workday.
There’s this collective story that we’ve been taught and that we observe about others, and the story is that work always must be hard - that everything we do when it comes to work must be challenging and difficult.
when we hear success stories of people who have achieved amazing things, part of the story always is that they pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and that at the heart of their success was their willingness to suffer and sacrifice.
And of course working hard is important, but when we hear these messages, one of the things we assume is that in order to get anything meaningful done in a day, the only way that will happen is if the work is hard and we’re struggling through it.
And this belief also leads to the feeling that if we’re enjoying what we’re doing, we’re not doing the right things. In other words, if I feel happy during the workday it must be because I’m taking it easy on myself, I’m slacking, I’m not trying hard enough.
We also tend to look to other people around us and take cues from them about how we should be feeling and acting during our workday. We don’t want anyone to think that we’re not working hard or to perceive us in a certain way, so we end up tailoring how we feel based on what we observe about other people.
So if everyone around us is complaining about how hard their day is, or if they’re bragging about how exhausted they are from working long hours and putting in extra time, or if we see them overworking themselves - we can see that as a reflection on us and what WE should be doing. We see that exhaustion and we think hmmm, I’m not exhausted right now - should I be? Am I not working hard enough? Could I be doing more?
And the result of that is that even in those moments when we do experience happiness in our day, or we do feel balanced and in a good state of mind, our mindset can sometimes pull us back, and tell us things like this:
“Ok, it’s nice that you’re experiencing some happiness and I know you’re feeling a little carefree right now but uh hey just REMEMBER, YOU’RE AT WORK. Don’t take this too far, Look at everyone around you, they’re not carefree right now, they’re not happy! Look I know you took it easy on yourself for a couple of hours but it’s time to buckle down and get back to work. Whatever you’ve been doing is too easy, because you’re not stressed out, so that means you clearly aren’t working hard enough.
We literally will beat up on ourselves if we feel like things are too easy.
Here’s another thing that causes us stress - we get so preoccupied and focused on time management that we lose sight of the purpose of time management, which is to get meaningful work done.
When we focus too much on managing every single moment of our day, we start to gain this belief that we need to account for every single moment of our workday - and that we can’t waste any of it and that all of it has to be accounted for.
So then we apply pressure to ourselves to move faster and faster and make every single minute matter. So in other words, we start to believe that moving faster automatically means we’ll get more things done, and we start to believe that the fuel for getting more things done is to be more stressed.
So this narrative that work HAS to be hard and that we have to constantly be moving fast can really be a controlling thought throughout the day that sort of lurks under the surface without us even knowing it.
But I want you to consider this:
What if making progress on important projects didn’t have to be hard all the time? What if we approached our day to day work in a different way? What if we started to believe that in order to accomplish big things and make big changes, it didn’t always have to be painful?
In other words, What if we stopped equating stress with productivity?
Now before I move on, I want to make one really important distinction:
I do believe that some uncomfortability is a good thing in a workday - to the extent that that stress or uncomfortability is giving us an opportunity to grow or it’s presenting us with a situation where we can learn and build upon our current abilities. I do also believe that pressure during a workday can compel us to take meaningful action.
So that kind of uncomfortability throughout a workday can be beneficial because it’s necessary in order to keep growing and it also can help us to approach our work with a deep sense of focus at times.
But stress becomes toxic when we need it as fuel or when we use it as a marker to determine whether we’re working hard enough.
Uncomfortability or stress should not be the defining characteristic of your workday. It shouldn’t be the primary thing that compels you to move forward.
What should be compelling you to move forward is that positive feeling that you’re making progress, or that you’re doing good work. You should be deriving that motivation from a place of strength and confidence, not from a place of being scared or overworked or being fearful.
When we’re stressed though we put the majority of our good energy toward managing the destructive, emotional state that being stressed has put us in in the first place - when we’re stressed, instead of focusing on our work, our mindset keeps shifting toward worrying about the future - like:
What if I’m not doing this right? What’s my boss or my client going to think about me?
What if I’m not moving fast enough? You need to move faster. So and So, my colleague, wouldn’t be taking this long to get this done. They’d probably have this done already.
What if I’m not good enough to do this?
And when we have these emotions swirling around, we use all of our good energy on managing these limiting thoughts when in reality that energy should be going toward using our abilities and our talent to do great work. We spend all of our good energy telling ourselves stories about the future and our abilities that just aren’t true.
When you put this pressure on yourself you’re actually hindering your ability to do the great work you know how to do. What we have to realize is that stress takes a HUGE toll on us mentally and physically.
So I want you to recognize that we don’t NEED stress throughout our day in order to make significant progress. We don’t always have to be rushing around and going at 100mph to get things done.
There’s a lot of value in slowing down and spending time to be deliberate about our work, and It’s ok to not fit every single waking moment of your workday with stressful work - or be stressed when you every minute isn’t accounted for.
Also, I want to be clear on this, slowing down doesn’t mean you’re being lazy, it doesn’t mean you’re not trying hard, it doesn’t mean that you’re wasting time. It means that you’re giving yourself the ability to access a level of clarity and focus that will ultimately help you to do better work. When you stop equating stress with productivity, you’ll experience a net gain because you’ve freed yourself from the draining hold that stress has on you.
And here’s one of the most valuable aspects of this too: When you strip the unnecessary stress away from your work, then you’re able to access what I’d call your zone of genius.
Your zone of genius is that place you enter when you’re getting things done and it feels effortless. You feel energized by your work and not depleted by it; you feel in a state of flow where time flies by because you’re concentrating on the work and not your emotions related to the work.
When you’re not struggling to manage the stress or the pressure you put on yourself to move faster and do it the right way, you redirect that energy toward the work itself and end up creating something that you never would have been able to create if you hadn’t removed that surface layer of stress.
So if you’re someone who’s experiencing a lot of stress in your day or putting a lot of pressure on yourself throughout the day, how do we start to move away from equating stress with productivity throughout our workday?
I want to give you 4 steps that I think can be helpful in turning this around.
Step 1: is to Identify workday checkpoints. The first step is really about helping yourself become aware of when you’re equating stress with productivity. You can’t make any changes to your mindset unless you first have the presence of mind to notice that it’s happening.
So what I suggest you do is set up a few checkpoints throughout your day - I’d start by identifying 3-5 times a day - where you want to check in with yourself on this.
Step 2: is to Take a self-inventory.
And what I mean by that is, ask yourself the question: Am I feeling stressed and if I am, what is the source?
This is the hard part because it’s going to force you to be real with yourself about why you’re stressed.
Here’s where I want you to practice what I mentioned a little earlier - being aware of stories that you’re telling yourself about how fast you should be moving, what other people are going to think about your work, whether you know how to do it, etc. These stories are often at the root of us experiencing the stress, so we want to identify them and call them out by name.
So I want you to write down the source of the stress or the story you’re telling yourself about the stress
As an example, let’s say the story you’re telling yourself is that you’re not moving fast enough. I should be doing this faster, if someone else on my team was doing it they’d have gotten it done already.”
This is a really common story we tell ourselves, and ironically it’s not our inability to do the work that’s impeding our progress, it’s the fact that we’re replaying this story over and over in our mind thats actually THE THING that’s making us move slower.
So step two is identifying whether you’re feeling stressed and if you are what’s at the source.
Step 3 is a simple one - take a few deep breaths.
What we’re trying to do here is just process some of that stress and get you back to being focused on your breath.
I don’t know about you but if I’m not careful I can actually go hours with a very tight chest and realize that I haven’t taken a deep breath in a while. And breathing is directly linked to stress reduction, which is why this is a good next step that will help us to start processing that stress.
And then Step 4: is to redirect your energy.
In this final step, I want you to practice letting go of the source of that stress and I want you to practice redirecting your energy back towards the work itself.
Sometimes when I do this I imagine that there’s this layer of stress around me that is literally just being peeled off of me.
So I want you to come up with a visual for yourself that involves sort of stripping back this layer of stress so that you’re letting your zone of genius come out. So just envision the stress being peeled back and you’re taking that energy and redirecting it back toward whatever project or task you’re working on.
We’re getting rid of that story that’s causing the stress - so in this case your belief that you’re not moving fast enough - and we’re redirecting that energy towards the project or the task in front of you.
Now eventually what happens over time is that we end up catching ourselves telling these stories that cause us stress and they have no basis in fact whatsoever. So if you practice this a few times a day, you not only become good at catching yourself doing this, but you start to replace that stress with a new thought that suits you better.
So to recap the steps here are:
Step 1: Identify workday checkpoints, I’d recommend 3-5 to start
Step 2: Take an inventory so that you can identify the story you’re telling yourself that’s at the heart of the stress.
Step 3: Take a few deep breaths so you can start to physically move that stress along
Step 4: Redirect that energy away from the story by letting go of the source of stress so you can access your zone of genius.
This is a simple technique that if you practice over time will help you realize that you don’t need to equate stress with productivity. Stress is not a marker for whether you’re doing good work, or whether you’ve had a productive day.
The truth is that when we peel away that layer of stress, that’s when we’re able to do our best work.
Go have a great workday.