What Swallowed My Day? 5 Quiet Culprits
By Isaac
Often we fall short of our daily and weekly goals, even when the tasks are well within reach. Does your to-do list outlast your day? The only solution in sight seems to be one more coffee.
There is something else you can do. Here are five common reasons people slow down, and one of them might be your dragger.
1. Stress
Stress has your mind racing into unnecessary worries and anxiety as you are planning something. Of course, you have to think through loopholes and the like, but that does not need to happen every step of the way. Research finds that acute stress can impair working memory and mental flexibility. [1]
2. Fatigue
Not sleeping enough. How much is enough depends on the person, but you usually know it when there are too many unplanned late nights. If you're consistently under six hours, you're sleep deprived. [2, 3] Too little sleep hurts attention, even on a simple task, [4] and it can drain your motivation too. [5]
3. Hunger
Sometimes you have been working for hours and lunch never happened. On an empty stomach, people are generally more irritable, and an irritable mind is no better than a slow one. A conversation with a coworker goes sour, or an email misses the mark. A proper meal may do more for your focus than another cup of coffee. [6]
4. A scattered to-do list
Do you have a to-do list for the day or the week? Often that alone makes us feel organized and set for a productive day.
But when the list turns into a junk drawer of random tasks and unfinished projects, with no clear order, we start thinking about the next task before finishing the current one. Switching between tasks takes time, especially when they are complicated, and eventually little gets accomplished. [7]
Try singling out at the start of each day the most urgent tasks that you will work on before anything else. The rest of the list will thank you as well.
5. Sitting too long
With a full day of work and the eagerness to get it all done, you can end up sitting for hours with nothing but a shift in your seat. Simply standing up for a coffee, a breath of fresh air, or grabbing a Toyffice hand massager, and then sitting back down, may help. Some studies have found better attention after walking breaks during prolonged sitting. [8, 9]
Sources
1. Shields et al. 2016, acute stress and executive function: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5003767/ ↩
2. AASM & Sleep Research Society 2015, adult sleep duration recommendation: https://aasm.org/seven-or-more-hours-of-sleep-per-night-a-health-necessity-for-adults/ ↩
3. NHLBI, sleep deprivation and deficiency: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep-deprivation ↩
4. Lim & Dinges 2010, sleep deprivation and attention: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3290659/ ↩
5. Jurgelis et al. 2022, sleep restriction and cognitive motivation: https://www.dovepress.com/sleep-restriction-reduces-cognitive-but-not-physical-motivation-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-NSS ↩
6. Swami et al. 2022, hunger and mood: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35793289/ ↩
7. APA, multitasking: switching costs: https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking ↩
8. Chrismas et al. 2019, walking breaks: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0219565 ↩
9. Chueh et al. 2022, sitting interruptions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35292487/ ↩