Boosting Productivity

0:03Krutika Adatia:Hello and welcome back to On Your Marks from ACCA. I'm Krutika Adatia and I'm a chartered accountant. I now support accountancy students through their training and as an educator, I'm regularly up close and personal with some of the common issues people face while studying for and sitting their accountancy exams. So in this series for ACCA, I'm chatting to experts about strategies we can all use when facing some of life's challenges. This week we're looking at productivity. When there's a lot to do, studying, working, household chores, and a million other activities that make up everyday life, we all know it can be really hard to fit everything in. So how can we stay productive when faced with lots of tasks to accomplish? How does stress both help and hinder productivity? And what are some of the real techniques we can all use to make the most out of our time without burning out? This is On Your Marks, because you'll never know until you try. Now I don't know about you, but I'm constantly battling with a never ending to do list of tasks, both within and outside of work. There never seems

1:18Krutika Adatia:to be enough hours in the day and so I'm hustling hard to do everything and feeling like I'm achieving nothing. Even when I was a student studying for my accountancy exams, optimizing for productivity just felt like a constant challenge. So I'm really excited to be speaking with Dean Burnett. He's a neuroscientist, author, and broadcaster fascinated by our brain's behaviors and how we can optimize for them. So Dean, I'm going to start with what I think might seem like an obvious question, but what does productivity mean or being productive actually mean?

1:56Dean Burnett:It's obviously a very important question and I think it's one which can differ depending on who you're talking to. But I think ultimately it is the time you spent doing things to achieve a certain goal or a certain outcome. In terms of psychology and neuroscientific stuff, we think of tasks and goals. So obviously what you count as productive will very much depend on what you're doing, how important it is, how much progress you made towards achieving or completing the task. And so yeah, it's a kind of a mishmash of various things, but I think we all understand at a basic level that it's getting important things done or useful things done perhaps. That's probably a better way to phrase it.

2:35Krutika Adatia:Yeah, I really like that. And I guess when I think of productivity, maybe with my accounting hat on, I often correlate it with efficiency. So the input that you put in and the output, and I sort of like how you've kind of described it as the goals and sort of achieving what you want to achieve. Just thinking about some productivity hacks and even when I was a student dean, I was told that listening to classical music as an example helps with productivity or it's meant to help something in your brain. What are some of the productivity hacks that you're aware of that actually help to be more productive?

3:12Dean Burnett:Yeah. Well, the music one is actually quite intriguing because a lot of people did once think that, well, that's a distraction. Surely you shouldn't be trying to focus on two things, you focus solely on the thing in front of you and music is something else to pay attention to. But that isn't quite how it works with our brain and things like that because a lot of subconscious processes happening when we're trying to consciously focus on a task like something complex like accounting. As you play music, it actually sort of keeps them occupied in terms of the parts of your attention which would normally distract you like background noises or if you're in a library, someone coughs, that could be quite distracting, it's a very natural, normal thing. It's just like the fact that it's totally silent and those things stand out can make them more distracting. So if you have music playing, then those parts of your brain, which would be looking for things to pay attention to are occupied. So like giving a sort of excitable dog a chew toy, just like, " Okay, be quiet. I've got work to do." I think there's some

4:00Dean Burnett:studies which suggest that the soundtracks of video games have the best effect in this area because just by sort of necessity, they are developed to be something which you can hear in the background while focused on something else. So that's sort of the reason they exist is to allow you to concentrate on a different task.

4:16Krutika Adatia:Yeah. And it's interesting that you mentioned the video games and the music of that. I'm also thinking back to when I was doing my Maths A level, I used to study with one of my friends who loved listening to Choice FM. So for our listeners or those viewing that don't know what Choice FM is, it used to play a lot of R& B hip hop music. So there was a lot of lyrics, a lot of upbeat music and every time I would study with her and listen to Choice FM, I couldn't actually focus because it had lyrics in there, whereas classical music worked for me. So I guess I'm just trying to also ask, are there any nuances like that or anything else that we should be mindful of when it comes to productivity hacks?

4:56Dean Burnett:If you have a preference for things like hip hop or R& B, then obviously your brain's very familiar with it. So you can sort of treat it as background. Now, if you go on YouTube, you'll find things like lo- fi study music. It's just calm, soothing, background noise, which is complex enough to occupy those parts of your brain, but not so complex that you have to think about it. But in terms of the productivity (inaudible) other things offer, there are plenty of apps, things that lock you out of social media if you're working on your laptop as most people are these days or your phone and therefore they can sort of, if you just compulsively check your feeds just every 10 minutes, they stop you from doing that. It depends on how much of a problem that is for you. If you aren't someone who checks social media regularly or anything like that, then they won't make much difference. Everybody is unique and no two brains are ultimately alike. So yeah, there's always going to be a subjective element.

5:47Krutika Adatia:Yeah. So it's not a one size fits all kind of thing.

5:50Dean Burnett:Really, yeah.

5:51Krutika Adatia:There's something else I've also heard in terms of productivity hacks around making sure that you're well nutritioned and eating well to try and be productive. Any kind of advice around that?

6:05Dean Burnett:The common refrain is that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You wake up, you have to eat your breakfast and therefore you're fueled up for the day ahead. And there is some evidence which supports that. You're thinking, I'm thinking about the work. You've not got the background hum of appetite just sort of slowly creeping up and distracting you from what you should be doing. So there's that argument, but there's also a lot of neuroscientific evidence which suggests that the experience of being hungry does affect your mental processes, but sometimes in helpful ways, because if you're hungry, it can make you more curious, it can make you more exploratory because obviously there's a deep part of your brain thinking, "

6:41Dean Burnett:Where is food? I need food, must find food." Therefore, you've got the urge to seek out stuff or look up stuff. But if your productive work involves that, that can be helpful. You are actually, the brain tends to run more efficiently then, but that's more of a sort of long- term thing. You can't skip breakfast and suddenly step up a gear. And that's more of a long- term diet plan. If you eat a lot of junk or if you drink too much caffeine or even alcohols the night before, it can obviously make you more sluggish, make you more irritable, lower mood and things which will impact your productivity.

7:15Dean Burnett:Yes, good nutrition is important, but it probably will never be the be all and end all. So keep it in mind, it's a factor in productivity, but you can't sort of make yourself totally productive with nutrition alone.

7:27Krutika Adatia:Yeah. And well noted. Thank you for sharing some of those hacks. And I guess on the flip side, I don't know if that's the right way to word it, but there are also productivity myths out there. Could you help share some of those ones that we ought to be debunking?

7:42Dean Burnett:Yeah. One of the things I've been delved into recently from one of my new books I've got coming out is this idea that early rising is the be all and end all because it's a very common trend online now particularly, but also in various interviews with high profile peoples like CEOs and influencers and billionaires and people who want to share their secrets with the world. It's a big trend for these really demanding daily routines and like basically people saying, "

8:11Dean Burnett:I get up at 4: 00 A.M. and do 7, 000 squat thrusts and I eat a bucket of cheer seeds and then I do all my emails and at 7: 00 A.M. and I'm ready for the day. What are you doing?" And okay, I can sort of see where that comes from, but there's no evidence that that actually helps at all because if you wake up at 4: 00 A.M., you are potentially losing sleep. It depends when you go to bed, of course, but the rest of the world doesn't revolve around your schedule.

8:37Dean Burnett:So there are this idea that you just go for a run, you'll instantly be more productive. Or if you eat clean, you eat more productive, you wake up at 4: 00 A. M. And get everything done. But if you look at these insane daily routines, assuming they are being truthful, the ability to decide that I'm going to wake up at 4: 00 A.M. and structure my day like this and everyone's going to conform to what I do, those are options available to successful people, high profile, rich people. So I wouldn't say, no, that is your routine now. After you've done all the productive work to get to this point, everyone who is successful has had a modicum of luck, have good fortune because that's just how the world works, but that's not really something you can sell. What works for you? What can you fit into your schedule and what suits you better? Like the whole wake up at 4:00 A. M.

9:22Dean Burnett:thing, people have what they call a chronotype. We say early birds or night dowels. If you wake up in the morning or you stay up late, these are chronotypes, like there's the sleep cycle your brain defaults to. Most people are early birds because humans evolve to wake up with the daylight. Some people will be genetically predisposed to staying up late and waking up late, but getting enough sleep for you is probably far more important than get in early nights and waking up early. So if you are someone who inclined to go to bed at 2: 00 A.

9:53Dean Burnett:M., fair enough, then make sure you get enough sleep. You want to wake up 10:00, you wake up at 10:00, if you get a full eight hours. That'll make you more productive than forcing yourself to be up at 7: 00 A.M. or 6:00 A.M. to fit everyone else's expectations.

10:05Krutika Adatia:So fascinating. When you were talking about those successful people and talking about the routines they have at that point I thought, " Has he been checking my algorithm and what I'm seeing?"

10:15Dean Burnett:It's quite common, yeah.

10:16Krutika Adatia:Because honestly, I do see a lot of that and sometimes that can go into sort of toxic productivity, which I'm sure we'll touch on as well and interesting that you also mentioned about chronotypes because I was thinking, " Yeah, I'm a morning person. I know that works for me." But there are others where that just doesn't. Something else we often hear about as a productivity hack, I suppose, is this idea of multitasking. And I've always thought, " Yeah, I can multitask." But it became abundantly clear that I couldn't when I was driving my friend to another friend's house and we approached a roundabout where the roundabout was unfamiliar to me and my friend was yapping away and I had to tell her, " Please stop yapping." Because I needed to focus on the roundabout. So I was like, " Yeah, I cannot multitask at this point." I couldn't hear what she was saying and also focus on the road. So what's actually happening in our brains when we're multitasking?

11:08Dean Burnett:Yeah. I think we come to multitasking, there's a preconception that we have multiple streams coming in at once and some people can focus on three or four, some can just do one or two, some can do five or six and those are better multitaskers, but that doesn't seem to be how the brain actually works. When it comes to the brain's attention stream, we have one, but it can sort of flip around a lot. So think of the world around us is like a stage and we have this attention which is spotlight. So we have one spotlight and you can illuminate different parts, it would depend on what's important. And some people can juggle different streams better than others. Some people are much more focused on one thing and like, " I'll do this, done. I'll do the next thing, done. I'll do that next thing, done." I mean, that also requires discipline. It's like this idea that multitasking is some sort of superior. It's just a different way of processing the world. Now again, some people can do that really well. Some people have more focus on one thing at a time. So that's when it comes to multitasking. You've got three tasks to do at once,

12:04Dean Burnett:you can flip between them without losing your thread essentially. And that's a good skill to have, but I know it can be make you more productive, but it also mean three things get done not as well as they would be if you were doing it specifically. So yeah, multitasking is a useful skill, it's not always the correct option.

12:19Krutika Adatia:I hear you. So I guess coming back to my example when I was driving, I couldn't do it because it was new territory for me, so I had to focus. So I guess for our students, when we think about prioritization, our students are often working, they might have kids, they might also be studying at the same time. How important is prioritization and how does that feed into productivity as well?

12:44Dean Burnett:Yeah, prioritization of task is obviously going to be a big part of productivity because if something needs to be done in the next hour as opposed to something which needs to be done next week, obviously prioritize the imminent deadline. What's more important right now? How much work does it take? What is the rewards it'll offer me if I do do it right now? And those will obviously factor into your productivity. You think, okay, so what am I going to focus on at this point in time? And your brain that sometimes gets things wrong.

13:11Dean Burnett:Okay, we have procrastination for that.

13:13Krutika Adatia:Sounds like the sort of thing our students would do as well, focusing on a task that is not related to their studying at all.

13:19Dean Burnett:It's like my office, when I got deadline, it's the cleanest you'll ever see it. It's just like spotless. I'm demolding these walls for a while. That's not even a thing, but I'm going to do it now.

13:27Krutika Adatia:Let's do it now.

13:27Dean Burnett:Exactly. It must be due then, obviously. It's one of those things that your brain's going, " Oh, that's a demanding thing which I don't want to do. If I do this, I'll have immediate results and that'll be quite satisfying." I'm going to hoover, that way that'll be finished. That's a task, that's clear parameters is like an endpoint. So could have done that. Now I feel like I've done something. I've been productive, which you have, but you would've been more productive perhaps in the long term by revising.

13:53Krutika Adatia:Yeah. Just thinking whilst you were talking there, would a solution for our students there, you mentioned that we like kind of getting a task completed. So I'm thinking back to when I was a student and making a task list of topics that I wanted to cover during the hour that I was studying. So would you say it would be helpful if a student made themselves almost like a task list and was like, " Okay, I'm going to complete that in an hour, I can then tick it off." And there's some kind of something happening in your brain that goes, " Oh yeah, I've completed that." Is there benefit to that then to try and be productive?

14:25Dean Burnett:Yeah, that'd be a helpful approach because you give yourself some chunks of things you can say, " I have done that." Be able to say, " I have done that." I can see I set myself an assignment, a goal, a sort of deadline, a limit, whatever it was, a target and I reached it. Therefore, your brain goes, " Okay, good. I could tick that box." And I find the same with my writing, because obviously when you write a book, obviously it's a long process. I started as a blogger. So you start off then like, okay, there's a start, there's the end, I've done it. Therefore, that was how my brain sort of became adapted to writing things. Then I start setting myself targets. Okay, so rather than saying, " I must do writing today. I must write for three hours." " Today, I need to get 2,000 words." I aim for 2,000 words. Now I've done 2, 000 words, anything after this is a bonus.

15:11Krutika Adatia:Yeah, that's a really good hat for our students. I mean, coming onto just how our students might be feeling, often, it can be quite stressful studying for these exams.

15:22Dean Burnett:Totally, yeah.

15:23Krutika Adatia:Could you talk to us a little bit about how stress and productivity are kind of related or maybe not related or what the impact of stress is on productivity?

15:33Dean Burnett:Yeah. Stress is one of those things which it's talked about so much and it's a reference so often that we think we don't really appreciate how significant it is. Modern life is stressful, no one's arguing that. And you can sort of even see that in the psychiatric diagnostic criteria in that for a diagnosis of depression, for example, the classic sign is flat, unchanging mood, not necessarily sad, but it's like maybe no emotion whatsoever for two weeks consistently.

16:01Dean Burnett:You get angry, upset, or your mood changes. When it doesn't change, then there's a problem. For a generalized anxiety disorder, you need to have constant anxiety for six months. So when it comes to like half a year, okay, that's a bit excessive. Even if you've got something coming up like an exam, you'd be stressed for two or three months at a time, that's normal, you would be. So because this big thing's going to happen and you know it's coming. So yeah, that can impact on productivity.

16:26Dean Burnett:It can sort of distract you from other things if you're constantly dwelling on that. But stress is like the first stage of the fight or flight response or the fear response, as we call it sometimes. That's sort of that panic response you get. So stress is like the very first stage of that. Your brain and body is getting sort of warmed up to deal with something. Chronic stress is something the human brain hasn't really evolved to deal with because when you think of a primitive creature like we were when we evolved, something which caused stress or the fight or flight response was something very dangerous right in front of you. There's a tiger, fight or flight. You run away or you fight it, you win or you die. Either way, the stress is gone, but constant chronic stress, something that's a consequence of our intellect and stuff. So we can be easily sort of distracted by stress. But when we are stressed because it's triggered that sort of fear response or negative response, it tends to affect how your brain works. So you tend to focus more on the negative stuff that's stressing you out, which is not good

17:25Dean Burnett:for mood and mental wellbeing, but it can be, I'm much allowed to say it can be sort of helpful with productivity because it's something we have discovered called the Yerkes- Dodson curve or the Yerkes- Dodson rule. The more stressed you are about something, the more productive you tend to be because back to the talking about prioritization, as it becomes more imminent, stress goes up, you go, " Okay, well, I can't put this off anymore. I've got to do it now."

17:49Dean Burnett:And because your brain's thinking this is the important thing which is causing me stress, I'm going to do it, I'm going to deal with it. A lot of studies show that a certain amount of stress makes you more productive, makes people more better performers at tasks and stuff. So people find deadlines really helpful, but up to a certain point, because up to a point when stress becomes too much, deadline's too imminent, then you start panicking and it's sort of like, oh, you start getting all the anxiety and all the distractions of what will happen if I don't do this. And then your productivity goes down because your brain's overwhelmed by the stress and it can't function in a sort of productive, useful way. So there's a very sort of narrow window of just stressed enough to be useful, but not too stressed that you can't actually function. That'll differ from person to person. How much stress works for you will not be the same as someone else. Some people do things months in advance because they can't even face the idea of a deadline whereas some people are going, " I'll do it. I'll just pull all nighter, I'll be fine."

18:47Dean Burnett:Because I know plenty of people who did that in university.

18:49Krutika Adatia:The cramming approach isn't it?

18:49Dean Burnett:The cramming, exactly. That's what that is. Yeah.

18:51Krutika Adatia:Yeah. So many interesting points you've said there. Are there any strategies or approaches that we could be thinking about just to make sure we don't tip into that territory, I suppose?

19:05Dean Burnett:Yeah, I think it is a tightrope to be able to sort of do enough to avoid the stress or avoid the negative consequences that the stress is motivating you to work towards, whilst also not taking too much on to overwhelm yourself. I think like we said earlier on, if you can quantify your responsibilities or your obligations into sort of more manageable chunks, that tends to help. So I've got to do 30 different things before this meeting, that's a lot.

19:37Dean Burnett:Okay, let's put these in order of importance. " Can I afford to lose or merge any of these together?" If you can put some sort of metric in place so you can say, " Okay, what do I need to do? How do I quantify it?" And obviously something, obviously I imagine accountants quite adept at, because obviously quantifying things and counting things is a whole part of the process and that just takes a lot of the uncertainty out of it and your brain becomes less stressed as a result and more productive.

20:04Krutika Adatia:What about students that they come into the accountancy profession and there is this whole myth about accountancy being heavy on numbers and yeah, there are numbers, but some people experience anxiety around the maths that might be involved. Have you got any sort of thoughts around that and managing that?

20:25Dean Burnett:Yeah, there is something called maths anxiety. It's a well known phenomenon. This country we have a sort of low- key, almost like pride in not being good at maths. People say, " Oh, I was never good at maths, I wasn't." Yeah, don't boast about that. I wouldn't say that's an achievement, you just didn't learn it. All right, maybe it was hard. I always struggled with maths, but me personally, I was always very good at mechanics. I did physics A level, but didn't do maths. But because of mechanics, because again, to me, that was more tangible. I was always struggling with statistics, which is like just numbers dancing around in my head, whereas like mechanics, " Oh, so if you put a force there." And then that made more sense to me because it had a sort of tangible impact, but that's a big part of why it causes a lot of anxiety in a lot of people. But in Western cultures, we have this low- key anxiety and a big part is because maths is very abstract. It's basically numbers, you have to manipulate numerical information in your head, which is a recently acquired skill for the human brain in

21:25Dean Burnett:evolutionary terms. We have this sort of working memory where we can hold abstract information and manipulate it, it's thinking essentially and that is an impressive ability, but it's something the human brain only evolved ability to do somewhere between a million and a half million years ago. And most of the other stuff our brain does has some sort of tangible or emotional or perceptual component. So we enjoy reading because of fancy stories that cause emotional reactions. We like seeing things and tasting things and smelling things because those parts of our brain are active like language because we like to communicate. We have all that going on.

22:00Dean Burnett:Whereas mathematical thinking like calculations, it's an entirely conscious part of your brain, which a lot of things aren't. And every other sort of discipline or subject or any sort of task involves other parts of your brain and it does require a lot of mental processing. It does require cognitive effort and that can be daunting. Obviously it doesn't strike any emotional resonance or therefore your brain doesn't like it. It doesn't feel like there's any sort of reward for it sometimes. And the thought of doing that makes people anxious as in subconscious thinking, " I've got to go and do this thing which has no resonance in any other part of my brain and that's slightly stressful."

22:40Krutika Adatia:Yeah. And I'm sure that'll be really comforting to students that are listening to this thinking, " Oh yeah, the maths element is what I struggle with." I mean, just related to this, is there any way we could hack our brains to give ourselves some sort of reward for the abstract mats? I don't know if you have any advice on that (inaudible) .

22:59Dean Burnett:Well, there's obviously very direct approach is like, do your calculation and have a sweet like, " That's good." That's basic conditioning, but your brain also likes proficiency and competence, feeling I'm competent at something, that could be rewarding. So people like to be able to say, " I did that. I achieved that." That's something like the most rewarding careers tend to be those where people have a tangible result of what they're doing, which you can have with accountancy. Like, "Oh, I did all that. Look at that. That's something I did." And your brain goes, "

23:27Dean Burnett:Good. Yeah, cool. I'm good at that."

23:28Krutika Adatia:I now understand why I used to love it when my balance sheet used to balance, because I'm like, " Yes, the numbers match."

23:34Dean Burnett:" Yeah, I did that." It sounds challenging. It's not like... Some of the more rewarding careers, people are like doctors and teachers, very stressful, very demanding, often not paid well enough, but you can see at the end of the day, " I did this work, look at the results. There, that patient is healed. This child has learned." Being able to see the tangible results of your efforts is a big part of satisfaction. And no, you can have that with accountancy because you can see the numbers dancing right in front of you and you can see what you've done, whereas other places don't necessarily offer that.

24:04Krutika Adatia:Just in the interest of time, a final question around what we spoke about at the very beginning, that kind of toxic productivity culture that can be quite rife, especially if you're consuming a lot of content like I am from various successful CEOs. I mean, how can we spot the signs of unhealthy productivity?

24:24Dean Burnett:There's lots of indications of this. It dovetails into the modern phenomenon like toxic positivity in that the idea that you have to be happy all the time, otherwise something's gone wrong. That isn't how your brain works. We can't be happy all the time. Happiness is a reward state, satisfaction for having done something correctly and properly. So if happy all the time, it isn't sustainable. The idea that you have to be working all the time, be productive all the time and anytime which isn't productive is wasted, is a very unhealthy one. The whole grind, grind culture, it's a status thing. Some people seem to take pride in the fact that, " I'm working all the time. I'm advancing, you're not, therefore I'm better than you." Well, there's a lot of danger to that that can be very, very unhealthy and unhelpful. I'd say there's a big online culture, the idea that you have to be a successful as possible, otherwise you're not worthwhile. That's deeply unhelpful as well. And yeah, it comes from a sort of, like I said, I think a lot of it's reverse engineered because people, the human brain's very, very sensitive to status, social status.

25:29Dean Burnett:Am I better than others? Am I valued? Am I looked up to? Am I admired? We all want that at some sort of fundamental level. And in modern culture, that's heavily tied to wealth and sort of prominence. Or like online now you have the influencers and people like that who have massive follow accounts. The brain sort of processes that kind of similar to wealth as in a quantifiable metric of success. The idea that as long as you work hard and constantly keep you productive, you will be rich and successful. You'll probably be fine, but you won't be this prominent wealthy billionaire because that involves a lot of luck and always does and there's no way to circumvent that.

26:08Dean Burnett:But we can't control that, but that's not a satisfying narrative and therefore the whole idea of constant productivity is what it takes is popular but unrealistic. And I think people get caught up in that rather too readily.

26:23Krutika Adatia:Yeah. Really well said. I mean, you've shared so many great tips and bits of advice throughout this entire conversation, but if you had to summarize it as three tips for improving productivity, what would you say?

26:36Dean Burnett:Get enough sleep, doesn't matter when. Be aware of your productive time, don't force it. And quantify your demands, your requirements, so in ways your brains can understand and manage rather than leave some sort of big, nebulous, scary thing which is off- putting.

26:52Krutika Adatia:Thank you so much, Dean. I've learned so much from this conversation.

26:55Dean Burnett:No problem. Thank you.

26:57Krutika Adatia:That's it from this episode of On Your Marks. Thank you, Dean, for chatting with me today. For more information about ACCA exams, you can go to www. accaglobal.com/ exams. And to watch the video version of this podcast, check out the link in the show notes. See you next time. I'm Krutika Adatia and this has been On Your Marks. On Your Marks is a Fresh Air Production for ACCA. Its producers are Eva Higginbotham, Annie Day and Finlay Macrae. It's edited by Helen Quigley.