Is it a Distraction or an Accelerant?

The most common response people give to the question of 'how has life been going?', 'how are you', 'what's been going on' is 'I've been really .....busy'.

Being busy is the new badge of honour we proudly display to demonstrate how productive we are. 'Busy-ness', however, doesn't necessarily translate to productivity, achieving outcomes and making progress.

A recent productivity study found that distractions cause people to lose just over 2 hours per day, averaging a total loss of about 10.5 hours per week. [1]. We can be 'busy being busy' without being dollar productive.

Pressure has a fascinating impact on productivity.

For some, pressure serves as a lens that hyper focuses your attention and blocks out distractions. Much like having tunnel vision, exposure with pressure can cause your brain to narrow its focus on a few specific tasks and block out the surrounding noise, demands, questions and notifications so that you can deal with the task at hand.

For others, pressure widens the lens of focus allowing you to take in more data from multiple sources. Your attention becomes shared across several conversations and perspectives allowing you to make faster decisions and create clarity from confusion (try saying that line three times quickly).

On the flip side, pressure can also heighten your emotional sensitivity, causing you to make impulsive and short term decisions, have irrational responses or just 'get it done quickly' without concern for quality.

Pressure can also lead you to seek out more pleasure seeking activity, prioritising 'feel good' tasks, and getting caught up in non-essential activity. These activities create a quick dopamine hit that makes you feel good by achieving little things, such as returning an email, watching a video, sending a text or liking a post. All of these activities will keep you busy, and feel like you are doing a lot, jumping from distraction to distraction, but not achieving much.

Alternatively, pressure can also make you pensive, overly cautious and indecisive. This results in taking way too much time to respond to people, stewing over decisions, procrastinating difficult dilemmas and reworking solutions in the attempt to 'get it right'.

The resilience you need to draw out high-performance in yourself and your team requires a self-awareness to understand what your natural response is to pressure. Embrace your style and make it work for you. Repurpose pressure to serve you.

Recognise that you may have a need for hyper focus, so structure the way you work to allow for that. Resist the temptation to multitask and allow yourself to focus on a single series of tasks.

Alternatively, embrace the fact that pressure leads to widening your lens, making you seek out distractions and quick wins. So, structure your work into shorter chunks and give yourself permission to jump between a select number of tasks.

Final Thoughts...

The goal is then not to try to 'squeeze a round peg into a square hole' and discipline yourself into structure or force yourself to be less emotional. That only leads to feeling tense and defeated. Work out how pressure impacts you, embrace your style and use it as an accelerant.

I remember hearing Matt Church once say that 'we should treat our time with the same priority that a drowning person would treat oxygen'. Pressure can be your productivity fuel if you know how to harness it.