Boost Your Productivity with a 10-minute Workout - Part 1
Before I explain how you can boost your productivity in a multi-post series, I’ll explain how I fortuitously learned that 10 minutes of exercise can be enough to increase one’s productivity and overall health. In the next post, I will share my routine and will follow it up with a discussion of why I think it works because the neuroscience and psychology behind this all is very fascinating.
Energy Trap
Up to a couple of months ago, I was stressed and my productivity had tanked. By 3pm every day I was exhausted. I got my work done, but writing a few lines of code took an incredible amount of effort. When it got to the point where I had massive headaches and felt like crap, I would finally drag myself into the gym after work to get a temporary boost.
I have way too many goals to get by like that.
In my desperation, it occurred to me that I should go back to working out in the mornings as I had done two years ago.
But how the hell was I going to wake up at 8:30am (sadly, that was early for me then) to hit the gym and get to work on time when I was stressed and it could take me up to half an hour of snoozing to get up? Fortunately, my experience two years ago had done marvels for my productivity, so it took little convincing of the ugly mind to get me to try it again. I also knew that working out in the morning meant I wouldn’t have the excuse being too tired after work; or that I’d get hungry and eat a late-night crappy meal; or that I’d get get home too late, or that…
When the brain detects a drop in available energy, it gets a little nervous. What if it runs out of energy? Like the banks, it may decide to stop spending and save what resources it has. It will keep itself on a tight energy budget, unwilling to spend its full supply of energy. - Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct
I was essentially stuck in what I’d like to call an energy trap. Inspired by the great analogy above, think of an energy trap as a liquidity trap in Keynesian economics. Your body and especially your mind, begin to hoard energy. You actually have more than enough energy and may even end up storing it as fat as you become less active and consequently, even more stressed. What you need in these cases is a stimulus. In order to have energy circulating in your system again, you need to expend lot of energy rapidly in something that will yield the greatest energy multiplier. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but exercise achieves just that. When you exercise you recruit lots of cells in your body thereby spending lots of energy and then recruit even more to recover from the oxidative stress your body and mind undergo. However, throwing your mind and body into this kind of shock, will force them to become more efficient at spending their energy reserve in the future, making you more productive in general terms.
Shock and Awesome
I had to throw my body into shock and do so quickly. I began waking up a bit earlier (8:40am or so), but still too late to get a standard 20-30 minute workout at a gym. “Oh well, I’ll go all out for as long as I can,” I thought. Thereafter, I had to get my workout in because I was feeling so energetic and productive that even 10 minutes was incredibly addictive. I started with just three workouts a week. And for the last three weeks, I’ve been exercising 10 minutes every morning and I’ll never again skip a beat… unless I’m on vacation.
Nowadays, I can now wake up as early as 5am. The last time I willfully did that was on Saturday mornings as a kid to watch King Arthur and the Knights of Justice or more recently to watch the World Cup.
Having improved my productivity, I also noticed other beautiful side-effects. I was no longer constantly hungry (more about this and losing weight later) and I generally had more willpower to do even menial tasks I often avoided. Need to organize my clothes immediately after doing laundry? Boom! Done. Need to get out of bed to grab my phone? Done! Previously my stressed-out brain tricked me into believing I didn’t have the energy to get off of my bed after coming home exhausted from work. I would instead pull some crazy acrobatics from bed with a previously broken elbow to stretch and grab it from my desk. Obviously, this probably wasted more energy.
Hey, I was becoming me again.
Note that you don’t have to be stressed to enjoy any of the benefits I’ve discussed. I haven’t been stressed for weeks, but still find that doing my 10-minute routine helps me get more done during the day. This in turn will help you prevent any future stress that will derail any goals you may have.
After a month, I was not only feeling more energetic, productive and overall awesome, I also started losing weight and continue to do so. Best of all, I don’t have any crazy fluctuations thanks to what I consider a more efficient metabolic system of mine. If you’re looking to lose weight, I’ll share some more insights on this in other posts. But your first order of business should be to feel great — otherwise, you’ll lack the willpower to work out consistently. With a 10-minute warm-up you’ll see immediate results in your brain’s energy level, so you’ll easily achieve a goal on a daily basis (this feedback-loop in itself is important for your confidence).
One Percent
What’s going on? I have very basic knowledge of neuroscience and psychology, especially the pre-frontal cortex (more on this baby later), so I’ve been reading some more. I’ll get into the science a bit in future posts and will point you to other resources that will satisfy any additional questions you may have.
Still with me? Here goes: ten minutes of exercise a day is enough to improve your health and productivity. Bummer, that means you’ll no longer have an excuse to skip your daily exercise because you think don’t have enough time. Ten minutes represents less than 1% a day and it will make your other 99% insanely better.
You go through all the trouble of showering (I hope), finding the right clothes to wear, and finding a matching pair of socks (I swear there’s a troll who steals my socks) every morning. And if you’re a woman… well, you may apply some make up and do your hair—my god the hair. Why? Because you want to look great. Well, what about feeling great? Your brain is a chemical soup. If you don’t cook up the right ingredients in the morning, your day will be ruined and there’s no fake smile good enough to make you look great.
How you exercise those 10 minutes, however, matters. And in the next post, I will share my intervaled routine and other tips to maximize the benefits of your daily warm-up.
In the meantime, you should check out an article which appeared recently in the The New York Times Well blog. While their workout promises improved fitness and strength, I would recommend readers first focus on improving their energy level and overall productivity before setting any specific physical fitness goals. If you feel you’re already very fit, you should also check out Tabata.
(I’d like to thank Andre Encarnacao for his feedback and especially Rajan Lukose for all the valuable discussions over the last few weeks leading up to this post.)
