Bursts of focussed work | Daily #131

The best work that I do, is usually done in small bursts of repetitive focus and energy.

No human can focus eight hours or more straight. Even marathon athletes turn their brains off during their marathon for a duration or have a slower pace eventually.

The mind is different than the physical body.

What I think and truly believe is that bursts of work during the day is the way to go. How does that look like? It depends on how well your focus is, but it is similar to the Pomodoro timer technique.

Let’s say you have several tasks on your TODO list. So at the start of the day, you pick up one. When you complete the task of let’s say around 30-60 minutes, then get free time to do whatever you want. You can watch some YouTube videos, read a book, browse around Twitter, or whatever. Then when you are ready, you pick the next task and repeat the same process.

In theory, you want to chain all the tasks together consecutively. But in my experience, eventually, that tires your brain down during the week. In a work-week for example, you may be extremely productive on Monday and Tuesday. But because you worked all those days without proper intervals and rest, you will not perform on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. This means in the long run you won’t have as much output during the whole week.

Similar to some exercising philosophy. If you run 5km three days a week, you will have ran 15km at the end of the week. There is an interval between the three runs where you could have a rest day for example. But if you run 3km for six days a week, you would have ran 18km at the end of the week. You also didn’t need to rest between the days because your body recovers more easily with a 3km run every day.

What I’m trying to reach is to perform consistently every day and that can only be done by small bursts of focussed work.