The Psychology of your 20s - 440. 7 psychology tips to hack your productivity

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Productivity advice often tells us to push harder, wake up earlier, and squeeze more out of every hour. But in this episode, we take a different approach. Instead of treating productivity like a test of willpower, we look at the psychology behind focus, procrastination, energy, motivation, and rest - and why working with your brain is usually more effective than trying to bully it into action. We explore 7 tips for productivity, including:• How small wins can create momentum• Why the hardest task often needs to come first• How to work with your natural energy patterns• Habit stacking for boring tasks• Why 20 focused minutes can be more useful than waiting for the perfect window• How ‘shoot your shot’ days can move you closer to the life you want• Why real rest is essential for sustainable productivity Watch on Netflix: HERE Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [e-mail]  Our favourite sources: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295X.84.2.191 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674 https://www.ted.com/talks/saundra_dalton_smith_the_real_reason_why_we_are_tired_and_what_to_do_about_it The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Spike, and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s. podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. If you're watching on Netflix, I promise you I'm not wearing my pajamas. I just need

to say that I've just looked at my outfit and realized that it looks very pajama-like, but it's not and considering we're talking about productivity today, it's kind of ironic. But yes, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about productivity. Specifically, I wanted to share seven of the best, most underrated least spoken about tips to just get more stuff done by doing less. I love these episodes. I love doing them sometimes.

And I feel like so many of us in our 20s, we have these huge ambitions and these projects and these tasks that we want to undertake. And we also feel like we don't have any time when we're working really hard. and like anything that can help us a little bit, anything that can like psychologically nudge us in the right direction, especially when those tips are back by science, are great. And I thought, you know what, let's do an easy episode today. One that's just, let's just do a little list episode. Let's just go through the science, find what works best.

I'm going to deliver it to you guys in a simple package form. And I just sincerely hope it helps you be more productive, be more efficient, but also enjoy your life. as well. Let's get into it. So I think one of the biggest lies about productivity that we've been sold is that discipline is like the singular most important ingredient or factor that is driving productivity. The people who you admire, who get stuff done, they just have this inherent trait that you don't. And although they may have it inherently, although they didn't really have to do anything to get it, your inability to access it yourself, that though is a personal character floor or a fault. And until you can unlock or access your discipline, it's not happening for you.

Good luck. Like, it's just not happening. You need to be disciplined or nothing else. I think this is a rather kind of narrow, unfair, like psychologically inaccurate way to think about productivity that really just tries to shame us for what we haven't been able to do without thinking about why we haven't been able to do it. Here is the thing. Our productivity is not to reliant on discipline alone. In fact, discipline is only about 25 to 30 percent of the equation and it's actually what we would call a spark. It is a cognitive spark, not a cognitive fuel source. Discipline is incredibly finite. It's incredibly influenced by so many other factors we often ignore like our sleep, our hormones, our stress, the difficulty of the task, the environment you're in, you're established,

habits, your past experiences, your confidence in yourself that this is stuff that we don't always seem to like consciously think of as a factor. It's so easy for us to like put it all down to this one thing alone, this neat discipline explanation and just kind of ignore the rest. And it's, you can't ignore the rest. That is an equal part. In fact, there's a really notable meta-analysis that was conducted by the psychologist Pierce Steele, in which he describes procrastination, not as a discipline problem, but a form of self-regulatory failure.

Importantly, what the paper does not say is that procrastination is about laziness. He actually found that procrastination was primarily shaped by emotional regulation and how unpleasant the task was, that a mental state that you were in, how impulsive you were, whether we believe we could do it, how capable we were feeling, our mental health, like our inability to do certain things is not about mental fortitude.

It's about, yeah, your emotional state and your emotional gooniness and how you're feeling. We also know that willpower and discipline are, firstly, don't always factor in those things. they're also mentally very exhausting, and that actually lessens our performance on other tasks afterwards. There is this finding that came from a 1988 study by Beaumister and colleagues where they put people in a room, they put them in front of a plate of cookies and a bowl of radishes, both on the table, and they asked half the participants to not have a cookie. You can have a radish, you can't have a cookie. And they told the other half, you can have one cookie, you can have a cookie. and then they left the room and they just kind of were like, just don't do it.

You guys be in charge of correcting or following through this action. They then made people do a geometric puzzle. People who had the cookie, they did the puzzle for 19 minutes. Those who had the radish, eight minutes. And it wasn't just the sugar rush. It was the fact that they had to draw on all this willpower to resist the cookie. And it's assumed that that kind of drained their self-control for all subsequent situations. So when you are constantly only relying on willpower and discipline to get stuff done,

you know, to help you study harder, to help you avoid temptation, to help you, I don't know, lose weight, the effort that you have for other areas of your life and the discipline or the motivation you have for other things declines. This is why relying on discipline is an incomplete way to look at our productivity. What we actually need to be addressing is that emotional thing, that we're reducing the emotional resistance of the task or the goal in question and also setting up our structures and our behaviors and our surroundings so that the easier thing is the easier thing. Like the thing we want to do has the least resistance. So that really informs, I think it's important to say this because this informs what we're going to talk about next,

which is the seven best things that you can do based on that knowledge of discipline. And now, of course, this isn't going to turn you into like a 12 hour a day working machine. To be honest, I don't think you guys know me by now. I really don't care about that. Like I really think that hustle culture and like the girl boss 5,000 work all day, sleep on your dead archetype is dead and should be left there. But I also believe in in devotion and being able to prove to yourself what you're capable of. And I think this stuff takes us to that space and gets us into that mindset in a much more healthy and sustainable way, rather than this like alternative that seems to be the only alternative, which is if you are not actively suffering for what you want, and if you are not actively in a

constant state of exhaustion, you must not want it that much. This is the middle ground. This is the middle ground where you get stuff done, but you also can enjoy your life. So productivity hack number one is the three to one equation. This is a method of structuring your to-do list so that your day is both focused and varied and therefore productive. Every day, if you want to feel accomplished, your to-do list should contain three chores, two small tasks, and one big task. That might look like your three chores are wash your bedding, like vacuum your room, take the bins out, pay your parking fine, like those kind of things. Things that are like admini, they're a little bit annoying, but like you know you need to get done. The two smaller

tasks are things like, okay, clear out my email inbox from like the night, from the day before. Every little email that I've been avoiding, I'm going to get that done today. I'm going to write my project update. I'm going to send out that important document. There's a meeting I've been putting up. I'm going to do that important meeting. I'm going to do the first two hours of planning for that trip, that event, that important work thing.

And then you have the one big task. This is like the meat of the sandwich. So this is the thing that you can expect to spend three to four hours. on or longer. Mine is always the same writing scripts, but for you, it may be writing large sections of a report or an essay, a concentrated study for an exam, doing complex equations, making a major headway on a project. Again, it is the meat in the sandwich, or if you're a vegetarian, it's, I don't know, the tofu in a sandwich. The reason this works is that it gives your brain a balanced sense of progress. Notice how the big task is still really sizable,

but it doesn't take over your entire day. A lot of us either overload our day with a lot of those tiny tasks that make us feel busy but not meaningfully fulfilled. All what we do is we do is we put one absolutely huge intimidating task on the list and then we feel like a failure if we don't complete the entire thing. Again, we are looking for balance. The 3-2-1 method gives you both momentum and cognitive diversity. And that cognitive diversity is so important for your brain so that it can be challenged by different things

so that it experiences the refreshing and the important power of novelty. You know, the three chores, the two small tasks, visible progress. but they also, and you know, they reduce like a lot of the menial stuff as well, they give you progress. They also clear out the clutter of maybe things that you've been putting off. And then the one big task sits in the middle. And it means that you actually feel a meaningful sense of accomplishment at the day, at the end of the day, whilst actually still having done stuff. The other reason this benefits long-term productivity besides helping you not get bored with your kind of larger goals is that it builds self-efficacy, probably our favorite term on the podcast.

The sense self-efficacy is the sense that we can meaningfully change outcomes through our actions, our own actions and behaviors. Small accomplishments are just as important as big accomplishments for self-efficacy because it gives us a daily reminder that mental, emotional, cognitive input, our input is creating physical output and progress, even on days when the big goal feels very, very far away, even on days when, you know, we don't have 12 hours to do stuff. It just makes you feel good. It makes you feel like, okay, at the end of the day, I have done my, oh my God, now I can't remember how many it is, six things. I've done my six things. I feel accomplished. I've done a little bit of everything. I'm good. I can rest now.

Okay, tip number two, I think we've all heard the term like, eat the frog, right? This was always something my dad said to me when I was growing up, like eat the frog. Basically, always do the hard thing first. When you look at that list, the three, two, one list, the biggest thing, the most unpleasant, difficult, annoying thing, the thing you are most reluctant to do, the one that you are most likely to procrastinate on, that's the one you go for at the beginning. I think we have this tendency to think that we should ease ourselves into things or warm up for the day or warm up for the hard stuff. Obviously, like, if you're big task, like if you're exercising like a warm up, but don't leave the workout to the end of the day. Don't leave the most important email till 5pm. Don't leave the tiring conversation or the riding push till the point where you are exhausted.

Even if your motivation improves throughout the day, your focus probably doesn't. There is probably a specific time, likely when you first start, where you are going to have the most cognitive resources available. Not using those resources is avoidance. You're avoiding it. When you avoid the hard task, you get the momentary feeling of relief, the momentary feeling of hope, but surprise, surprise, the task is still there. It stays on your mind. It follows you throughout the day. it makes any break or sense of achievement like from other tasks it always feels like it's slightly contaminated because you're like yay i did that but oh that thing is still there like that thing i've been avoiding i still haven't done it until it's done the rest of the day feels half it feels like a

distraction so before you give your brain the day to negotiate to rationalize to delay catastrophes overthink just decide to begin and begin is the key word here. Doing the hard thing first doesn't mean that it needs to be done perfectly. Doesn't mean you need to finish the whole hard thing at 8 a.m. It just means give your freshest, fullest attention to the task that would otherwise drain your emotional energy all day. And as we said, a lot of productivity is just emotional regulation, is just seeing the hard thing that's going to linger and pushing through it from like our one. To add to this, research is from New York University in a 2006 paper highlighted the concept of implementation intentions and this

plays a really important role for this tip. Basically, it's specific plans about when, where, and how you will act. They suggested using these implementation intentions for goals that you want to avoid because they significantly improve your chances of achieving them. In other words, if you build out how exactly you're going to go about doing something, you're more likely to do it. So instead of just, I'm going to work on this in the morning, if you say, okay, after breakfast, I'm going to sit at my desk and I'm going to write 300 words before checking my phone, that's going to be more effective. Like, that's going to be much better.

So yes, do the hard thing first, but also to cement this into action, define the hard thing clearly enough, to find it with a timestamp, define it with an endpoint, a progress point, a location, even, because it's harder to argue with a plan than a wish. I'll give you some other examples, just to help you out with this. Instead of saying,

I'm going to sort my finances, try, you know, before I start anything else, I will open my banking app and make a list of every subscription service I'm paying for. Instead of, I'm going to work on my dissertation, try, okay, at 11 a.m., I'm going to have done these things, and I will go to the library, and I will write it to the first 300 rough words of my literature review. Instead of saying, I'm going to get my life together, try right after lunch.

I'm going to spend 25 minutes replying to emails that have been sitting in my inbox and going through all of my text messages from my parents and my family and just answer them. The hard thing becomes less threatening. the thing we procrastinate about the most becomes less threatening when it becomes concrete. A lot of productivity advice focuses on time management. We are focused on emotion management. Can you tolerate the discomfort of starting? Can you tolerate the task being imperfect?

Can you act before you feel fully ready? What is going to make you feel more emotionally capable of starting right now? Think of doing the hard thing first. It's not about punishing yourself. it's about freeing yourself from the emotional burden and tax of avoidance that is going to follow you for the rest of the day if you don't just buy the bullet. Okay, let's take a short break here. Then we will return with a bunch more advice.

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Tony and Candid. Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.

How did any of this get made? Why do you think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.

Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Paris Hilton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin, Samira and Gracie. I'm so excited on the bouncy bed. You have surprises?

Many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305 where the group chat comes to life. What up! It's like a way to say like, Oh, my friend, hello, my friend, oh, my brother. What a... Look, never I've ever been to have to have to be about. Except with my kids.

My kids, if you know. Yes. Yes. C. My Amant. Oof. Punch. That's incredible.

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maybe my favorite, so much so that I wrote about it in my book. Not once but twice. I literally wrote about it twice and I didn't even realize until after the book came out and somebody DM'd me and was like, okay, we get it. Give it a rest. Like you like this, you like this tip. Okay. And I was like, oops, didn't even realize I'd done it. But my third productivity hack is to stop copying somebody else's schedule and start studying your own rhythm. We are told the only way to be productive is to get up at 5 a.m. and journal and drink lemon water and work out and do all these things before you do eight hours of work and you should be totally switched on for those eight hours of work as well. And yeah, for some people the morning into the nine to five routine is where they feel most

productive, but just because it's what's fed to us generally doesn't mean it works for everybody. It's this myth that just because something is normal must mean it's the best. For you, it might not be. This is where I want to introduce the idea of your chronotype. Your chronotype is basically your natural genetically determined preference for your sleep, wake timing. And that is, it reflects our circadian rhythm. It's just like the layer below.

There was a 2020 review in chronobiology that discussed how cognitive performance can be really affected by the interaction between the time of day that you are working and your individual chronotype. So whether you are a morning person, a night person, a midday person. And these findings have even been reflected more recently in 2025. They did another review. What this means is that people, you, may perform. differently depending on whether you are working in sync with your natural rhythm or not,

it's not just dependent on discipline. You know, someone working at 6pm can be more productive than someone working at 9 a.m. But if your work only allows you to do work at 9 a.m. It must make you start at 9 a.m. Of course, you're going to feel lazy. You're not working in accordance with your chronotype. Same with like, you know, maybe your most productive hour is hours at like 1am to 5am. but if that is your natural rhythm, but if your system and your environment doesn't allow you to operate them,

you're not going to be as productive. Knowing this, you need to work to figure out what this may be for you. Because you might be constantly sabotaging yourself by scheduling hard work for a time of day when your brain has already checked out. I know I said swallow the frog. But if the best time to swallow the frog is at 7pm and instead of 9 a.m., you should be working at 7 p.m. Some ways of identifying your chronotype, what sleep pattern, sleep weight pattern, I should say, do you typically follow on holidays or when you don't have to work? When does your body naturally feel sleepy?

When does it naturally feel alert? When do you feel your sharpest? When do you get most easily distracted? When do you feel most creative or in a state of flow? When do you feel most excited by admin tasks? as you go along, you can kind of match your rhythm to your natural energy levels. And I know this isn't possible for everybody. I know it's so difficult when you do work a nine to five or you do work shift work, but try and schedule, try as much as you can to even match your kind of daily life

to this as well. I know my chronotype is like, I actually don't know what the name for it is, but it's like 3D7 and then 9 till midnight. when I am like, no, I'm going to be most alert, which is at like 6pm or later, that's when I do all my planning, all my editing, all my high energy things. My low energy window, which is normally like in the morning kind of, is like when I focus on more shallow tasks like formatting, tidying, basic admin, still things that need to be done, but not things that require like deep, deep thinking. this is the thing about productivity, the most productive people are actually probably some of the most self-aware mentally because they know that abiding by what everybody else is telling them to do

and how their day should operate isn't going to work for them. They stagger their workload and work when works best for them. Obviously it's also a lifestyle thing. So we're not going to say like, oh, these people who don't work a nine to five must be the most emotionally aware because they can work whenever they want. No, it's just that I think people who understand that and understand the role that their chronotype plays, which is not 100%, but it is a large, a large factor, are able to be more productive, both within and outside of a typical work structure. Because even if you have a nine to five, your chronotype is still going to be active, like your chronotype window is still going to be active for some part of that. I'm just saying it might not be

9 a.m. when everybody expects you to do all the hard work. It might be like 5 or 6 p.m. And so how can you think about your day that maximizes that peak productivity window best for you? Okay, tip number four is habit stacking. And it is one I added to this list specifically for the boring things. Habit stacking. At its moment online, a few years ago after James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, made it very, very popular, made it go, I guess, viral. I don't know if it was viral, but everybody seems to know it. It is when you attach a new behavior to an existing cue you already have. So, after I brush my teeth, I take my vitamins. They're in the same place, same time.

And after I finish, I don't know, brushing my teeth, I automatically wash my face. Whilst I make my coffee, I am going to write my to-do list. The same habits are paired up every day. Whilst I drive to work, I call somebody in my life who I need to catch up with. Like, every single day, those two things, something that I know I'm always going to do, is paired with something that I really want to do, that I know is important that I know I'm finding hard. and finding it hard to do. There was a 2010 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology

that looked into the science behind habit stacking. They had 96 participants to choose an activity behavior to carry out daily, so basically a chore to carry out daily in the same context for 12 weeks. They found that when participants paired that behavior with something that was already happening, the time it took for that behavior to reach a level of automaticity. So basically, this is the highest level of habit formation where you don't actually even have to think consciously about doing something. You just do it.

The more people who paired, like if you were somebody who paired the new behavior with an old behavior, you got to that level of automatic processing and automatic habit, stacking automatic habit processing much faster. A further 2019 paper from researchers at the University of Bath actually suggested that habits rather than intentions or goals are the vehicles for self-control because they reduce the need to constantly deliberate and decide. A goal is kind of something you have to decide on every day. A habit is not. This is exactly why meal prepping, gym plans, automatically saving sums of money, those kind of goals are so effective because a habit is something that

reduces choice. And when we have to make less choices, that is when we are our most productive because the cognitive friction of having to decide every single day, am I going to do this or this or this or this in pursuit of my goal is removed? The goals should not inform your habits every single day. Your habits should be the thing that is the basis for your goal. Next, I think it's number five. Are you up to number five? I always get off track when I do these list episodes, but get rid of of all or nothing thinking. I've been very guilty of thinking, well, you know, I don't have an hour to go to the gym today, so I'm just not going to bother. Or, you know, I know I'm going to be drinking at my friend's birthday. So why not drink on Thursday and Friday as well? But this kind of

thinking eliminates the minor progress that builds into major progress. I think one of the biggest traps we fall into with productivity is waiting for the perfect time, waiting for the perfect environment, waiting for the perfect moment and equation and for everything to go right in order to act because we want to give ourselves the greatest chance of success. You know, we tell ourselves, well, if I'm going to work out, I may as well, I need to have the full hour so I do it perfectly. If I'm going to clean the house, I have to have the whole afternoon because I don't want to do it half-assed. I'm going to sort out my emails the next time I can sit down and really give them my full attention. I'll start writing that book when I really have the perfect quiet morning. I'm in the

right mood. The desk is clear. The sunshine was great. But then life is always going to be too busy for that. Life is never going to give you perfect conditions. And so we do nothing and we blame the conditions not being perfect and not ourselves for operating regardless. The other thing is, If we know we have that extra time unfilled, that 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, the other work we need to do or procrastination is always going to end up filling that time. Anyways, this links really nicely to something called Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law is not about the disease. It comes from the British historian Cyril Northgate Parkinson.

And he introduced this idea in an essay he wrote in the 1950s in the economist, where he basically said, work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. He was kind of writing satirically, actually, when he wrote this essay, he was talking about how, like, he was actually talking about the political system and, like, the public service system and how these administrative systems can grow and create more work for themselves, even when the actual workload does not increase. But it applies to my life, it applies to your life as well. If you give yourself all day to clean your house, the task is going to take all day.

But if you give yourself 30 minutes, you're probably going to get a lot more done. If you give yourself three hours at the gym, chances are you're probably going to do about as much exercising as you would only do if you had 45 minutes. Do you see what I mean? Like the task expands to kind of fill the time we give it. Like, there is a sprawl. Parkinson's Law gives language to that sprawl. You need to stop giving yourself such big containers to act in or so much space to act with. Now, I have to say, this is a psychology podcast. Parkinson's Law did not begin as a psychological theory about personal productivity, but I think we can take a lot from this idea because it captures something many of us

recognize in our everyday life, which is that we often overestimate how much time things are going to take, and we underestimate how well we will rise to the occasion. But also, we forget that, I think on top of that, we forget that when we have less time, we will push and we will be more productive in that case as well. The problem isn't that we have no time, is that we dismiss the time we do have because it doesn't feel ideal and we kind of also self-sabotaged and think we're less capable. If you only have 20 minutes, 20 minutes compared to zero is already better, even if it's not an hour. What happens if you do two 20-minute workouts, let's say, every two weeks? That's 140 minutes. You know, seven days a week, if you just did 20 minutes compared to

still zero. Your all or nothing thinking is keeping you from the power of cumulative or compound growth, right? Respect the time you have, even if you believe it's not enough. Respect your capacity to actually work your butt off and to be motivated and to be inspired by urgency. Okay, I realize I total of it because I said tip number four was my favorite. That's a lie. This one here is my favorite tip, most certainly. And it's probably my most personally relevant tip I'm going to give you guys on this list. If you watched our last episode, I think, on Netflix with Grace Beverly, you'll know I spoke about how I've been doing something that doesn't sound particularly productive, but is. And that has been that I've been sending off the most outlandish emails to the most insanely out of reach people asking them

to be guests on the psychology of your 20s. The example I gave was Simone Biles and I talked about how she was like one of the only people to say no instead of just say nothing. This may not sound relevant but the reason I've been doing this is part of something that I've been calling shoot your shot Wednesdays. Shoot your shot Wednesdays is where every Wednesday I dedicate two hours of my day to just testing my luck. Every week I will like send out some of the most insane Hail Mary emails. I reach out to like the most amazing people who are probably never going to see it. I like blindly ask for things. I reach out to brands. I pitch articles because why not? Why not like you don't ask? And the answer is no. I'm really just trying to increase my surface area for luck. And although that

may sound spontaneous, it is still productive. This is why I believe this tip deserves its place on this list, even if it is a bit atypical. As well as clearing tasks, getting work done, productivity also deserves a reframe in that it creates possibility. I don't think we should just be using it for things that are boring or things that are a slog. I think it should be utilized for expanding as well. You might have a perfectly organized inbox. You might complete every small task that is required of you every day, but still be no closer to the life that you really crave because your productivity doesn't also include audacity. The psychology here is really around agency. And if we revisit that self-efficacy theory, again, self-efficacy is our belief that we

can change an outcome. And our belief is built partly through our confidence and our mastery of experiences. So moments like this where we say, hey, I really want something. I'm responsible for that. I'm not going to wait for somebody else to give it to me. I'm going to go out and get it. Like, I'm going to open myself up to the opportunity because who's to say the answer is going to be no. I'm just, I'm open to the next great opportunity that comes along. I'm producing those opportunities for myself, right? I'm being productive in a way that may not seem structured and organized, but is definitely worthy of output. I would highly, highly recommend carving out space in your week for this. It doesn't have to be a full day. For me, sometimes it's just an hour or two

where it is something that I have on my agenda constantly. I'm going to push, my luck. I'm going to see how far opportunities can take me. I'm going to see how far just asking for something can take me. And to me, that is a productive endeavor. Okay, we're going to take one more short break, I know, but we'll be right back very, very soon. I like to eat well. But after work, after errands, after everything else, cooking just doesn't happen. That's why I started using Factor. Factor delivers fresh, never frozen, ready to eat meals. designed by dietitians for balanced nutrition that actually fits my life. No prep, no cleanup.

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You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish, right inside the free IHard Radio app. Make some noise. Catch every laugh and eye roll On shows like Bestie Listen

Hey Jonas and Las Coltracias Now with full video It's the same hosts and the same chemistry With all the hilarious moments you've been missing Right on your screen Open the free IHard Radio app Search video podcasts and tap watch What's up fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers

Hey what's up y'all? It's your girl Sam J And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports A New Podcast from Together and IHart Women's Sports Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.

Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out She beat Sabalinka Shout out to you Naomi You get the palm Naomi! You get the palm for that

Because we're not just interested in what happened We're interested in why everyone's talking about it Because everyone watches women's sports Listen to everyone watches women's sports On the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcast

Or wherever you get your podcast Hey Portlandia fans Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen You know us or rather you know them Tony and Candice Nina and Lance Spike and yes the chicken We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast.

Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do you think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody.

Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Peres Hilton Shakira, Luke and Yerin Samira and Gracie I'm so excited

on the bouncy bed You have surprises Many surprises Welcome to Sweet 305 Where the group chat comes to life What up! It's like a way It's a way friend, hello

My God, hello, hello Myrana Look, look, never I've Never I've ever seen With my kids Except with my kids, my kids you know. Se my

Amanté Uff That's incredible! Yeah, the only person I know that loves

a yellow Starburst It's lemonade And there someone You say I'd like to collaborate

with this person This is Sweet 305 Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of

my Cultura Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever

you get your podcasts As we near the end of this episode, I have one final surprising piece of psychological advice for you. If you are looking to build that productivity muscle, that emotional productivity muscle, I'm going to introduce this with an analogy. Have you ever seen those gym bro videos from like the toughest, strongest, like men and women in the world, giving their exact routine?

These people can like crush cars. I don't, like, I don't even know what they're capable of. like so strong. I don't know. Maybe it's just my algorithm. I will occasionally get these videos and I'll watch them because I want to be able to crush a car. But something they always incorporate in their routines that I've begun to notice is rest. It's like a huge part of how they grow is how they rest. Now before you stop listening here because I feel like you know where I'm going to take this, I need to make my argument for why you should be pausing and stepping away from work more than you probably are for at least an hour or two every single day.

And I need you to be as serious about your unproductive downtime as your productive uptime. Similar to that all or nothing fallacy we end up in, we also end up in a rest is either optional or a distraction mindset. And we kind of half-ass our rest. we don't fully dedicate ourselves to having time off or to switching off. And by not doing that, we don't realize the insanely positive consequences of this for regular productivity. An article published by Berkeley in 2017, I was reading about just recently, was speaking about how even in our brain's resting state, when we are not directly focused on a task, our brain is still active. It is engaging its default network to plug away at problems,

examine and toss out possible answers, discard others, look for new information. We may not be able to control these processes completely, but by learning to rest better, we support them. We support the secondary kind of work our brain can only do when we are calm. We let our brain do the automatic stuff. If you're constantly working, that doesn't happen. Additionally, when we rest and when you're intentional about rest, it replenishes what was previously depleted by hard work, things like our attention, our focus reserves, even our eyes' ability to direct themselves, our body's ability to calm itself, our capacity for divergent thinking. This is what this means for you, when you're not working, when you're taking a break, you need to be as present in the

break as you are present in the work. Often, you know, we're not fully working, but we're not fully resting either. We kind of sit down to relax, but we like keep scanning for like, what else we should be doing. You know, we're meant to be replying to messages from friends and then suddenly we're also refreshing our email. We're like, we've told ourselves that you're going to sit and read a book and and suddenly now you're half answering the messages. Like we take a break, but we feel guilty the whole time. So we're like doing 25% of a task at any given moment. That is not a productive way of being.

You need to be able to mode switch. When you're in work mode, you're in it. When you're in relaxation mode, you're in that as well. Staying in the middle ground where you're like, I really deserve a break, but I don't deserve a break. I have to work. I really should be working, but I haven't given myself a break, so I should have a break. It just waste more of your time. Now, is there a right way to rest? Yes, I'm very

glad you asked. The author, what's her name? Sandra Dalton Smith, she did a really famous TED Talk in which she identified seven types of rest that we need to be hitting across the week to be productive. These are physical rest, emotional rest, spiritual rest, mental, social and sensory. Sounds like a lot of things, you often tick them off at the same time. The most important one, though, that she says is also the most neglected, is psychological rest. Authors of 2007 paper, I think it was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, identified that to truly recover from work stress and to be able to be productive day in and day out, yes, we need to engage in relaxation, Yes, we need to see our friends, of course.

But most important for recovery, cognitively and mentally, is psychological detachment. So being able to put emotional distance between you and a task, having a sense of closure to the work or to the productive day. Just physically relaxing is not enough, which sounds like a bummer because it's like, wow, we're already doing so much. But even if you stop working physically, sometimes your mind lingers. mentally. So you need to have some kind of ritual, some kind of interruptor, some kind of pattern shift or mode shift that can say, we're not doing that anymore. I am out of that zone. I am in this zone now. And I know that in order to be the most productive when I'm in the zone from before, I need to be all here. Like, I need to be mentally disengaged from work. And it's not helping me

switching between one and the other. I think we also need to learn how to say when a task is finished or finished enough for now. Like this is another thing I find with people who are very motivated, very ambitious. I'm sure you're one of these people. Like there's always more that can go on the to-do list. There's always more that can go on the to-do list. Like there's always going to be something else that hasn't been done. That's why all of these, I think, tasks and all of these tips kind of combine to create a productive day where, you know, you are doing enough. That three to one list, you know by the end of the day that you have completed what is required. I'm sure you've heard of this idea of hedonic adaptation where people get more and more used to pleasure until they

need more and more of it. So like it's the same with greed. Like, you know, $100 is a lot until you have $1,000 and then $100 isn't that much. And then you get a million dollars and $1,000 isn't that much anymore either. Like that happens for greed, that happens for enjoyment. It also happens for productivity. I think this is something you need to be very aware of. The more productive you become, the more productive you expect yourself to be. And so dedicating yourself to your rest and being like, all right, I'm going to switch off. Stop you from feeling like, oh my God, this whole day was a waste because it wasn't as good as the day before or the day before that. There are times to be there are times to be off. Even nature understands that. Even the cells that make up your most

basic state of being understand the flow of, I guess, creation and reproduction and then also slowness and renewal. You need to be following that as well. It's really just like a wave chart or like a wave structure of like if you want to hit the peaks of your productivity, you have to hit the lows of your rest. So that is all I have. That is my final soapbox moment for this episode. Treat your rest as important as your work. I hope that the combination of these tips was useful. I hope that you found the research helpful to summarize the seven tips so you can just go away with the basics. Implement the three to one method. So three chores, two small tasks, one big task. Eat the frog, so do the hardest task first or when you are most productive.

Speaking of when you are most productive, learn your chronotype when you are going to be the most on. Habit stack, reject all or nothing thinking, carve out some time to be productive in an enjoyable, spontaneous way, i.e. with a shoot your shot Wednesday, and take your rest seriously. That is all. If you have any further tips, so you can always leave them in the comments down below. If you are listening on Spotify, a big thank you to our researcher, Libby Cobbert for her help with today's episode. Reminder, we're on Netflix, we're on Substack, we're on Instagram. We'd love to see you over there.

And whatever it is you're working towards, whether it is your dissertation, I don't know, a big work project. Oh my God, I can only ever think in like work and school. There's like a thousand things in the middle. Maybe it's an art fair. Maybe it's a marathon. I don't know, whatever it is that you are dedicating yourself to right now. I'm just rooting for you. And I hope that this more sustainable approach to productivity and devotion and success is something that will help you get to where you want to go.

So good luck. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The dream of the 90s is a lot of. live in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch,

our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall,

the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia.

A.O. Rewatch on the IHeartRadio Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam, it's sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the hosts of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines,

the viral moments, and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. From game-changing performances to culture-shifting conversations, We'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few lasts along the way. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports.

On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.

Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jake Brennan, and on the Disgraceland podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history. These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else. Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of where that time blondeies Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bunny.

Listen to disgrace land on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Paris Hilton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin. Have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to the Sweet 305 podcast where the group chat comes to life. What on?

You're the only person I know that loves a yellow starburst. It's lemonade. This is Sweet 305. Here, oversharing is encouraged. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.