To say I was busy this month would be an understatement. Two big projects, a book to write, a podcast to host, editing responsibilities, several freelance assignments and this column meant I was overworked and exhausted. With multiple deadlines converging, I needed a serious productivity boost.
Obviously, instead of getting on with the work, I started researching how to become more productive. Could I boost my attention, time my work to align with my body clock or somehow coax my brain into an ultra-productive state?
What I found was a myriad of myths, some intriguing science and some very counterintuitive results.
Advertisement
“We’ve got a productivity crisis,” says , scientist-turned-entrepreneur and co-author of Ultraproductive: The 90-minute method for more focus, better sleep and less stress. “We treat ourselves like machines, constantly multitasking, never truly unplugging – this relentless hustle is backfiring [because] this idea of productivity, of doing more, is making us less effective and more exhausted.”
Too many distractions
Our attention at work certainly seems increasingly fragmented. In 2004, at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues found that people on screen-based or paper tasks before switching to a different activity. Between 2016 and 2020, her data showed this had .
WhatsApp messages and emails are my personal Achilles heel, so my first instinct was to turn off those notifications. Interestingly, that might not necessarily increase how much work I produce. In a 2008 experiment, Mark and her colleagues asked 48 people to do an HR email task three times, once without any interruptions and twice while interrupting them every few minutes. Participants actually without any more mistakes when they were interrupted compared with when they were left alone. However, the catch was that they experienced more stress, frustration and perceived effort. It seems we can compensate for interruptions by speeding up in the short term – but at a psychological cost.
Interruptions are one thing, but what about purposefully juggling more than one task at once? Multitasking is a skill I tend to consider useful for my productivity.
“Multitasking is a myth,” Poensgen tells me. “You’re actually just switching tasks really, really quickly. There’s a lot of research that [shows] this makes us less productive.”
When we jump from one task to another, leaving the first unfinished, part of our attention remains on it, creating what at the University of Washington Bothell calls , which can impair performance on whatever we do next.
I’ve often read that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain focus after you switch tasks – it’s a stat that gets rolled out any time multitasking or distractions are mentioned on social media. Happily, the reality isn’t so dire. It comes from misinterpretations of an experiment by Mark and her colleagues, who , noting when they chose to swap to a new activity, leaving their initial work unfinished, or were interrupted by emails, phone calls or colleagues. It found that these workers tended to do more than two new activities after being interrupted and took, on average, 25 minutes and 26 seconds to return to their initial task (this stat was later misreported as 23 minutes, 15 seconds by ). Importantly, this was how long the distractions lasted – it wasn’t measuring how long it took their brains to refocus once they returned to their task. Also, sometimes those distractions were activities directly related or helpful to the initial task.
In reality, lab studies suggest our performance recovers around . Unsurprisingly, “nested interruptions” – where you get distracted by one task, then another – increase the time it takes to return to our original task.
So, notifications are off, as is trying to juggle more than one piece of work at once.
Sleep soundly
Needless to say, getting a good night’s sleep is an unglamorous but effective productivity tool. A found that even short-term sleep restriction impairs our attention and decreases executive function – our ability to plan, hold information in mind and resist distractions, or, in other words, many of the abilities that help make us productive.
Poensgen also recommends what he calls “ultra-focus” – one 60- to 90-minute protected session of deep concentration each day, which he says can “double what you can get done every day without working a minute longer”.
He argues that if we push through the uncomfortable first few minutes, we can enter into what psychologists call a “flow state”, becoming so absorbed in a task that time and space fall away and effort seems minimal. It can take a few minutes to enter a flow state because distractions are generally useful; they alert us to potential danger, among other things. Getting the brain to filter these out seems to involve the slow increase of chemicals such as dopamine, noradrenaline and acetylcholine, which are involved in motivation, focus and attention. After 90 minutes, you’ll be amazed by what you’ve done, says Poensgen. “Being productive doesn’t feel good at the beginning, but it feels great later.”
Recent studies suggest the experience of flow may relate to activity in the locus coeruleus, an area in the brainstem that is widely connected to other brain regions and produces noradrenaline, or norepinephrine, a hormone that helps us stay alert and focused.
Researchers argue that when we have just the right amount of activity in this area, our alertness and attention is raised so . This sweet spot of focus appears to help the brain become more efficient – and help us be more productive.
How much more productive, though, is less clear. One widely quoted claim is that people become five times more productive in a flow state. It comes from research by , which asked more than 5000 executives, surveyed over roughly a decade, to estimate how productive they were during this state. Five times was a common estimate, but it wasn’t an objective measure of their output.
Timing may matter too. Our alertness changes across the day thanks to circadian rhythms, while our chronotype – whether we’re a night owl or a morning lark – also affects when we tend to feel naturally most able to work.
Again, though, there are few neat rules about how to use this to improve our productivity.
A concluded that, in general, our attention seems to be relatively poor in the morning, improves towards midday, declines after lunch, then improves again towards late afternoon and early evening.
A of 65 studies from 18 countries also found some evidence that people performed better on tasks when tested at a time that suited their chronotype. But the effect was far from universal.
One daily fluctuation may be worth paying attention to, however: the post-lunch dip. Poensgen says that taking a 15-to-30-minute nap, doing a guided meditation or just resting during this time can be really effective for increasing productivity in the afternoon. Post-lunch naps have improve their performance, and for 2 hours afterwards.
One result I particularly like came from surgeons. In a randomised trial of 51 complex operations, surgeons who took a 5-minute break every 25 minutes were considered to be more productive than surgeons who didn’t take any breaks, with slightly better performance. Their cortisol levels were also around 22 per cent lower, suggesting they were less stressed.
So where does that leave me and my work?
Mostly with advice that is less exciting than the internet would have you believe. Sleep properly, switch tasks less. I’ve taken on board the regular breaks and post-lunch nap with exuberance, and am finding that protecting 90 minutes a day for getting into the flow offers real benefit. I’m not convinced there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, or that you can quantify the increase in productivity from any particular hack – neuroscience suggests our brains aren’t that predictable. But something must be working. I’ve finished my column, for once, with a little time to spare.
Make me well: How to outsmart the wellness industry
See Chris and Xand van Tulleken at Â鶹´«Ă˝ Live 2026
