Time is our scarcest resource, yet we spend so much of it doing things that are unproductive — usually without meaning to.
The average person wastes 31 hours in unproductive meetings according to Atlassian. And a McKinsey study shows we spend an average of 13 hours per week reading, writing, or responding to email. That’s leaves roughly half of your time at work actually spent doing work.
While it’s true we’re being pulled into more directions than ever before these days, it’s not just the internet and our bosses and our coworkers holding us back from making the most of our time. In many cases, we are the ones responsible for our own lack of productivity.
Part of this stems from our addiction to information. Scientists have discovered that the dopamine neurons in our brains treat information as a reward. While this makes sense evolutionarily — having access to relevant information like the location of food sources means we make better decisions and are more likely to survive — it also means we’re naturally attracted to distractions outside our primary objectives.
Since most of us more successful and happy when we’re productive, we’ve all become a little obsessed with hacks and shortcuts. How can we produce more by doing less? We look over at the person who seems to get it all done while still managing to have a life, and we ask ourselves: What does she know that I don’t? Is there a secret to high productivity?
Well, there’s no secret, per se. But with some work, many of the barriers to productivity are solvable. In this post, you’ll find four of the best scientific productivity “hacks” out there. (And if you have others to add, we’d love to hear them in the comment section.)
