Energy and focus: sleep, breaks and concentration

1. How to keep your energy up through the day

Energy rests on three pillars: 7–8 hours of sleep, movement every 90 minutes, and water — at least 2 litres a day. Everything else, including the cleverest planning technique you know, is built on top of those.

Briefly, what each pillar means in practice:

• Sleep. The hours matter, but so does regularity: go to bed and get up at roughly the same time. Your body rewards predictability far more than heroic catching-up.
• Movement. Stand up every 90 minutes — even a five-minute walk changes your state. This isn't exercise you have to schedule; it's simply not sitting in one position for three hours straight.
• Water. At least 2 litres a day. We usually notice thirst only once it has already turned into tiredness or a heavy head, which is to say far too late.

And one thing that undoes all of the above: a big lunch. It brings on the afternoon coma, and two hours disappear into nothing. A few smaller snacks through the day give you a steadier baseline without the three o'clock crater.

None of this is exciting. But it's the one part of productivity that no method compensates for: no amount of time blocking will make up for three nights of five hours' sleep.

2. What role sleep plays in productivity

Sleep is not the budget line to cut when you're short of time. One night of bad sleep, under six hours, lowers your cognitive ability about as much as a 0.05% blood alcohol level. You don't feel drunk — you just think more slowly, phrase things worse and make more mistakes, and the unpleasant part is that you don't notice it happening.

The second thing worth knowing is the 90-minute rule. Sleep runs in cycles of roughly an hour and a half, which makes 6, 7.5 or 9 hours the convenient lengths. Waking in the middle of a cycle is harder than waking at the end of one, even if you technically slept longer.

Add 10–15 minutes for actually falling asleep, and you get the real time you need to be in bed — rather than the time you're still finishing the washing-up.

Two simple levers improve the sleep itself: no screens for an hour before bed and a cool room, 18–20°C. The screen-free hour is the hardest item on the whole list, so don't fight yourself over it — set a reminder and leave the phone charging in another room.

3. The afternoon slump and what to do with it

The afternoon slump is a normal part of the day, and the right response is not to push through it but to rearrange the day around it. An hour spent on a difficult piece of writing in the dip costs more than the same hour in the morning, and the result is worse.

What works in practice:

1. Make lunch smaller. A large portion is the most common cause of the coma. Several smaller snacks hold a steadier line.
2. Stand up and walk for five minutes. If you're moving every 90 minutes anyway, the slot after lunch is the one that matters most.
3. Drink water. Quite often "I'm falling asleep" is simply dehydration after a morning that consisted of coffee.
4. Give the dip the right kind of work. Calls, routine, email, tidying your lists. Talking to people in the dip is easier than analysing anything.

And the important part: a slump doesn't mean something is wrong with you or that you need more discipline. It only means that this particular hour is a bad place to put the hardest job of the day.

4. A break that actually restores you

A break restores you when it changes two things: the position of your body and where your attention is pointed. If you haven't left the desk and you're still looking at a screen, you didn't take a break — you changed the picture.

Which gives a short checklist for a real one:

• stand up and walk — five minutes, or just to the kitchen and back;
• drink some water;
• look into the distance, out of a window — it takes the strain off your eyes;
• don't pick up the phone.

That last one is the least welcome, and without it the rest doesn't work. A social feed or a work chat isn't rest for your attention — it's another stream of information, just a more colourful one. After a break like that you come back to the task not refreshed but slightly more scattered than you were.

The thing worth internalising: regular breaks aren't laziness, they're an investment in productivity. Five minutes every ninety adds up to roughly half an hour across a working day. An hour spent trying to run on willpower while completely depleted costs you considerably more than that.

5. How to deal with stress and burnout

The most reliable strategy is not getting there: burnout is far easier to prevent than to treat. It doesn't arrive overnight — it accumulates across months in which no single day was work-free.

Three things that genuinely keep stress in bounds:

1. Regular breaks. Yes, them again — because they're the only item on the list that happens daily rather than once a year on holiday.
2. 4-7-8 breathing. Inhale for 4 seconds → hold for 7 → exhale for 8. A few rounds before a difficult conversation, after an unpleasant email, or when you can't fall asleep. Its advantage is that you can do it anywhere and nobody notices.
3. At least one day a week completely free of work. No "I'll just glance at my inbox" — five minutes of email puts your head back in work mode for the rest of the day.

One honest note: if the exhaustion lasts for weeks and doesn't lift after a weekend off, that's no longer a question of finding the right productivity technique — it's worth talking to a doctor rather than hunting for another method.

6. How to improve your concentration

Concentration comes down to three things: trained attention, a phone out of sight, and a background without words. None of them is about willpower; all of them are about the conditions you set up before you start.

Ten minutes of meditation each morning trains the "attention muscle". The point isn't spiritual practice, it's a plain exercise: noticing that your attention has wandered and bringing it back. That's exactly what you then do a hundred times a day at your desk.

Get the phone out of sight. Not face down — away: in a bag, in a drawer, in another room. Research from the University of Texas found that even a switched-off phone on the desk lowers your IQ by 10 points, because part of your attention is permanently occupied with not reaching for it.

Give yourself a background without words. White noise or lo-fi music works because it doesn't compete for your language centre. Songs with lyrics, a podcast or a conversation nearby do compete, even when you're convinced you aren't listening.