Don’t Let These Energy Vampires Suck Your Productivity Dry

How to recognize and defeat them — no stakes required

You know what this is like: You’re on a roll, pumping out work, maximizing productivity, checking off items on your to-do list, then suddenly, you’re fried. Done. Your energy has tanked. It takes effort to just close your laptop. Nothing more is going to get done that day.

What happened? How can you go from maximum output to zero in a single moment?

The solution is to discover the energy vampires that slowly, insidiously suck away your productivity and find ways of defeating them.

“There is a reason why all things are as they are.” — Bram Stoker

The hypnotic allure of flow states

Flow states are good. When you are in flow, your focus improves, and you see associations, connections, and possibilities more easily. This leads to greater creativity, improved innovation, and increased productivity and effectiveness. That’s all good.

But there’s a downside to flow states. That euphoric sense of being out of time and space that characterizes flow means that you can work for hours without noticing that time has passed. Leaving flow states can be physically painful since you very likely haven’t moved your body the entire time. You’re stiff, sore, thirsty, exhausted, and close to brain dead. Also, according to the Mayo Clinic, all that time sitting and being relatively motionless is bad for your physical health and well-being.

Flow states feel good because they flood your system with all those feel-good neurochemicals like dopamine, which means that desiring flow can become addictive. It can tempt you to avoid necessary tasks to work on less important and more pleasurable ones that more easily lead to flow. Personally, I’d rather work on crafting an article on a topic I enjoy and that triggers flow than organize my tax documents.

Flow is good, but you want to impose some boundaries about it, so it doesn’t leave you depleted or tempt you to avoid other, necessary tasks.

What to do

Set a timer for no more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted flow and when it goes off, make yourself take a short break. It should be easy to get back into the flow state since what you’re working on is conducive to flow. If you find yourself ignoring or giving less attention to more important tasks for your business, use the more enjoyable work as a reward for having completed the more boring ones.

“Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

The drain of disorganization

Some people are naturally highly organized. Everything has a place and is kept in its place. They typically work on one thing at a time, put it away, and then take out the next thing to work on. Other people are “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” people. If it’s not in front of them, they forget about it. They have multiple documents and pages open and hop from one to the other. If you’re organizationally challenged, take heart.

Data show that “the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information.” Hopping from one thing to another like a drunken butterfly and having to search for what you need can drain your energy. In addition to your productivity suffering, your self-esteem also is damaged. You feel like you’re working hard, you’re tired, but you’re not getting anywhere. This is demotivating and demoralizing.

What to do

You don’t have to be a Marie Kondo devotee to be more organized, but you do need to create some order in your physical and virtual workspaces. Taking the time now to become more organized later is an investment that saves energy and improves productivity in the future.

• Establish a physical space all around you as your most productive work area. It includes your computer, any files or documents you need every day, and anything you use frequently. The goal is to have most of what you use within comfortable arms’ reach.
• Transfer that same concept to your computer desktop, tablet, and email inbox. What you see when you open electronic devices is your most productive work area. Here’s where you want shortcuts to applications, files, projects, and so on.
• Don’t forget your phone since it can drain your energy and productivity. Set notificatons so only the most important ones come through and organize your apps for maximum efficiency. Stop checking it every few minutes since this breaks your concentration and can become a time-sucking habit.
• Use sure labeling and color-coding formatting consistently across all media — paper, electronic, email, and the calendar.

Check out this article for more detail on how to get organized.

“Clutter is nothing more than postponed decisions.”— Barbara Hemphill

The lurking danger of working too fast for your own good

I grew up in a household where efficiency reigned. You did it fast and moved on to the next thing, so I tend to do this with my work. However, working too fast can lead to mistakes and the need to redo tasks. These mistakes can also be embarrassing, damage credibility, and lead to undesirable consequences.

More than once I quickly responded to an email request and realized only after it was too late to stop it that I had agreed to some activity I had wanted to avoid. My response was missing the word, not. I wrote “I will attend” instead of “I will not attend.”

Impatience and the need to check off another line on the to-do lists is a stress response to what is happening in your life. The more you feel the need to hurry up, the more stressed you become, and stress is the nemesis of productivity and energy.

In the seminal book, Type A Behavior and Your Heart, the authors Martin Friedman, M.D. and Ray Rosenman, M.D. defined “hurry sickness” as “a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.”

Bottom line: You’re less productive the more you hurry.

What to do

When you find yourself sprinting from one thing to another with completing anything satisfactorily, the solution is to stop, take a breather, and gather your thoughts. This is a good time to make a list and establish priorities.

The goal is not to get things done, but to get the right things done. This activity takes you out of sprint mode and stops the drain on your productivity and energy. Stop worrying about everything you have to get done, and instead, focus on the next thing you need to do.

Stop interrupting your work to handle phone calls, email, and text messages as they arrive. Start thinking of these activities as interruptions, ignore them when they pop up, and set specific blocks of times during the day to manage them. This saves time, reins in scattered concentration, and improves efficiency.

“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” — Tim Ferriss

Go after energy vampires that sap your productivity with the zeal of a Van Helsing

While it can seem as if you suddenly lose all your energy and momentum, the process is slow and insidious. Over time, your energy slowly depletes a bit at a time without your noticing until you hit bottom. If this happens too often, you lose momentum and motivation and become more and more dissatisfied with your work — and even your life.

The solution is to hunt down energy vampires where they hide and ruthlessly eliminate them.

“If you get the chance, make like Buffy.” — Jim Butcher, Blood Rites