Less Productivity

Let’s nerd out for a bit to explore an idea that I personally find fascinating, and which might also give you some peace of mind as you invest in calm: how investing in calm makes us more productive.

The best productivity advice really does allow us to both earn back time and accomplish more of what we want to do. But it often misses a crucial part of the productivity picture. Most productivity advice focuses on all the possible ways we can get more done. But in focusing on this, we neglect to think about the reasons we might be getting less done than what we’re capable of. We must identify what our productivity inhibitors are.

Let’s say you have the goal of becoming as productive as possible at work. If this is your goal, you should focus on advice that falls into both categories. For starters, you should focus on strategies that let you work more intelligently and deliberately, and on what’s important. This advice is fun to follow because of how immediate the results are. Strategies like planning out your week, keeping a to‑do list, and say ing no to unimportant work are all techniques that are helpful from the get‑go. When you notice they work, you’re more inclined to stick with them.

The second category of advice is tougher to master, far more neglected, yet just as critical if you care about your productivity level. In addition to focusing on ways you can get more done, you need to focus on all of the reasons you are getting less done than what you’re capable of. This means paying attention to variables that limit your performance without your realizing it. Factors that put an unnecessary cap on how much you’re able to accomplish include many ideas from this book, including:

• When you’re burnt out because of the chronic stress you face, you become disengaged from what’s right in front of you.
• Flying at an incredibly high stimulation height can lead you to procrastinate more and waste more time, because working on something essential means going from a high to a low height of stimulation.
• Constantly striving for more can lead you to become overly re‑ liant on dopamine, which diminishes your capacity for presence.
• Spending too much time in front of screens can provide you with even more sources of hidden chronic stress.
• Anxious self‑talk can cloud your judgment while distracting your mind from thinking about more important things, includ‑ ing planning projects, generating ideas, and reflecting on goals.
• Continually thinking about the opportunity cost of your time can prevent you from becoming immersed in the moment.

These are just a few factors that are tough to fix with a quick productivity hack. Left unchecked, they will lead us to become less calm, more anxious, and less productive.

Anxiety and Productivity

With this in mind, let’s calculate precisely how much less we accomplish while anxious.

For all of the reasons I’ve just mentioned, this has been a book about productivity as much as it has been about calm. The first type of productivity advice—which leads us to work smarter—is sexy and lets us get more done, especially at first. But by overinvesting in this category of advice and simultaneously neglecting to fix productivity deficits, we may become less productive than we’d like. This is especially true as time marches forward and we fail to focus on how much we’ve got left in the tank—mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually.

If you doubt the extent to which an anxious mental state can im‑ pair cognitive performance, you don’t even need to take my word for it: you likely have many examples from your own life that illuminate this phenomenon. For example, think back to when you last had to give a speech in front of a group of people (if that sort of thing makes you nervous). You probably dreaded the event: public speaking is up there with death as one of our most common fears.

Recall what the state of your mind was like immediately before the talk. Could you focus easily, or did your mind barrage you with negative self‑talk that hijacked your attention? Were you able to mentally process a lot at once—calmly carrying on conversations with whoever was around you—or were you busy fretting over what you were going to say? If, theoretically, before going onstage, someone had asked you to proofread something that required deep concentration, would you have been able to give it your full attention?

After your talk started, did you process it fully? Do you remember what you said?

Maybe you’re lucky, and you haven’t given a speech in front of a large group of people, or perhaps you’ve spoken in front of enough groups that you’ve stepped back from these anxious thought patterns. If that’s the case, think of the last time you flew on an airplane and hit a pocket of turbulence. If you were reading a book, did you have to re‑ read the same passage a few times? If you were listening to a podcast or watching a movie, did you need to rewind or mentally try to fill in the gaps of what you missed?

These are examples of anxiety compromising our cognitive performance. If anxiety is something you experience—even if that anxiety is subclinical—it probably limits your productivity in ways you don’t yet realize. Your mind presumably (hopefully!) doesn’t freeze up as much with everyday tasks as it does during something like a speech, airplane turbulence, or losing track of your kid in the department store. But these are good illustrations of an extreme, of how anxiety can compromise our attention and productivity without us realizing it.

Ironically, anxiety can make us less aware that our performance has plummeted because of how attentionally demanding it is in the first place.

From How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey, published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Chris Bailey.