In Aug 2009, when I quit McKinsey, I was on the verge of collapsing with stress. I needed a break, and hence, I joined an investment fund where life was completely chill. Suddenly, I had no more daily deadlines or hourly deliverables. I could finally breathe. 

I felt great and I was loving it. 

But over the next year or two, something weird started happening. I slowly began feeling a sense of disquiet and dissatisfaction. No, I wasn’t pining for that stress to come back, but I felt I wasn’t accomplishing as much as I once used to. 

Partly, it was the early days of the smartphone distractions. But partly, it was also that I had no explicit deliverables or deadlines. Private equity investing is a slow profession, where things happen over months and years, not days or weeks, since you make only 2-3 investments a year. 

While this was great for lowering my stress, I felt it was making me unfocused and slow. 

So that brings us to a question: Is stress always bad for productivity? Or can it also be good under some circumstances?

Let us understand stress – what is it really?

Evolution has designed our body to operate in two states:

• Rest & Digest (Parasympathetic Nervous System)
• Fight-or-Flight (Sympathetic Nervous System)

The first mode (Rest and Digest) is a calm, relaxed state, where we ideally want to spend most of our day. But when facing a real threat or an opportunity (e.g., our ancestors spotting a deer that could be their dinner), we would need a burst of energy. 

That is what the fight-or-flight mode (also called body’s “stress response”) is made for. It floods the system with adrenaline and norepinephrine, priming the body for action.

But what does this have to do with productivity? 

It turns out that our body treats all threats similarly – whether a tiger prowling (in case of our ancestors), or a deadline at work that we face, even though the latter does not require a physical burst of energy. So goals and deadlines also create stress. 

When the goals are reasonable, it increases our alertness and heightens our focus and we have the right level of stress. As you can see in the graph below, as the level of brain arousal goes up and we reach the zone of optimal performance, where we experience the flow state.

But when the stress spirals out of control, e.g., if the deadline is too extreme to be realistic, you hit panic mode, where the brain shuts down and nothing gets done. 

So you do need a certain amount of stress and brain arousal/activation to be focused and productive, but not too much. That is why short-term goals or realistic deadlines improve your productivity. 

How do we harness productive stress?

Stress becomes valuable when two conditions are met.

Condition 1: Balance between your abilities and the demands of the task

Pick tasks that will engage your mind. If the task requires skills that match your ability, it is even better. Then, set short-term goals that are not too easy, but also not too hard – just achievable. 

This will create stress that will push you without shutting you down.

Condition 2: Singular focus

Even when you have the right stress level, it should drive you toward one clear goal. 

But if you’re juggling five different high-stakes tasks at once, and your mind is jumping from one to another, you will tend to multitask and your focus will degrade. That destroys productivity. 

So you need to pick one goal for a limited period and drop other tasks for the time being. 

These two strategies will create the right kind of stress that fuels you rather than drains you.

How to implement these ideas?

1) Prioritize and pick one task for a few hours at a time

Start by listing everything on your plate, prioritize ruthlessly, and pick one task for the next 2-3 hours. 

I recommend a formal prioritization exercise where you actually plot your tasks against Urgency vs Importance or Effort vs Impact. Do it quick and dirty on a piece of paper, NOT on a spreadsheet or Powerpoint. Make it an easy exercise, not an elaborate one. 

Once you have done that, pick just one task to focus on.

2) Do deep work sprints

Once you pick a task, set a clear goal, give yourself a set amount of time (I recommend 25 to 50 minutes of focus at a time), and dive in. Shut everything else out. No checking messages, no bouncing between tasks. Just full focus.

Deep work is a regular part of my daily routine, and I’m still amazed at how magical just a few hours of focus can make you feel.

These ideas are just a very small part of the larger productivity roadmap that I teach in our Zen Productivity Program (customers rave about the program). 

Thank you for reading this. Hopefully, I have motivated you to seek stress – but of the right kind, and in the right measure.

It’s been a while since I last emailed you. But I’ll be back with my next newsletter soon and look forward to staying in touch. 

 

Rajan