3 Science-Backed Workflow Hacks To Cancel Midday Slump and Make Your Daily Productivity Last Longer.

TOP advice from Hormozi Couple, Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman.

7 min readFeb 14, 2023

I hate feeling unproductive!

Like I have all the motivation and drive to get things done and get things moving and my brain just isn’t cooperating! It’s only 1–2 pm in the afternoon and there’s a whole half of the day ahead when I could be working on the next steps to grow my business or study to improve my craft as a coach but my brain is not there! I want to sleep, to eat, to browse the net — anything but the deep work on my calendar.

Does it sound familiar?

I’m writing to my fellow start-the-day-early entrepreneurs and self-starters on a mission to advance in a chosen arena.

We start our day early and get a lot done.

We work out early.

We go to bed early.

And we also don’t want to stop the day by 1 PM. We often want to continue making progress with a short break for lunch and perhaps a nap.

How do we work around this dilemma?

So that we aren’t productive only in the morning but we also get quite a lot of quality work done in the afternoon and evening too?

There’s no magic folks.

None.

This post isn’t about smart drugs and over-caffeinating yourself to prolong productivity on a way to burnout and poor sleep daily. Here, I’m gonna share with you what I learned from TOP neuroscience and productivity researchers and practitioners, and some dope leaders and entrepreneurs who have a track record of getting a lot more done, having achieved their personal one-in-a-million kind of success.

I’m applying these strategies in my life regularly now, I teach these to my clients and the results are consistent and worthy! (Science works!)

Instead of struggling through the second part of the day, we keep getting things done, AND I even have the brain power to put in a couple of hours of studying and reading every night to keep getting better.

Neuroscience-Research Based Report

PRODUCTIVE AFTERNOONS

3-Step Action Plan

First, let’s address one question that everyone asks me when we talk about the afternoon slump.

Am I lazy or is it normal?

MIDDAY-AFTERNOON SLOWDOWN IS NORMAL

1–2 pm it’s when early birds and early starters like us get their dip in performance — totally normal.

BUT YOU CAN OPTIMIZE IT

You can optimize your schedule and your workflow to reduce loss of productivity without long-term compromise.

It has to do with putting in place processes to change the state of your nervous system to produce certain neurotransmitters that keep you awake, alert and focused when you usually would feel sleepy.

It has to do with taking certain science-backed breaks regularly to restore the capacity of your nervous system to deliver productive outputs.

It also has to do with preventing unnecessary productivity “spillage” as a result of task switching, which metabolically is more costly than doing similar work in batches.

It’s like training for the Olympics.

World-class athletes aren’t superhuman.

They simply optimized the processes so well (for example the running technique and how their body and nervous system function due to training) that they waste very little potential compared to a weekend jogger whose inefficiency is off the charts.

Or another analogy you might relate to — it’s like having a solar panel that loses a lot of that stored resource in the process of getting and releasing the energy for use. (Solar has been booming since that efficiency has been increasing)

And now let’s get to practice!

THE RIGHT KIND OF BREAKS WITH THE CEO OF GOOGLE SUNDAR PICHAI AND ANDREW HUBERMAN

WHAT: Take short breaks every 60–90 minutes (ultradian cycles), for 10–20 minutes (completely disconnected). Go for walks (especially in nature, urban parks or any trees work too), listen to some chill music, meditate, take power naps, do breathwork. Allow your nervous system to recover, just like you’d let your muscles to recover between sprints.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Andrew Huberman (beloved, now officially famous, Stanford neuroscientist) are fans of yoga nidra, or a body scan, short free protocol you can find HERE and the one by Andrew Huberman himself HERE.

The practices are supposed to restore the pool of neurotransmitters (messenger molecules neurons use to change their state, to communicate) among other things, that will delay your mental fatigue and prolong cognitive productivity later into the day.

We all go through days and weeks when we have to challenge our resources to move things forward in business and life — these have been life savers that allowed me to get things done whether I felt like it or not.

Consistent effort is the key to success.

Consistently good enough VS occasionally great is what puts people ahead.

“Relying on how you feel is for amateurs.” ~ Steven Pressfield

Use science not coffee to make work happen without burning yourself out. Sustainable productivity is what we are about here.

WORK-FIRST MENTALITY WITH HORMOZI COUPLE

WHAT: Take a long break (about 60–90 minutes), and shift workouts to the afternoon. WORK-FIRST MENTALITY.

This has to do with your most productive, your brain’s peak performance time.

We are our best earlier in the day when focused-work neurotransmitters peak — dopamine, adrenaline among others.

Starting your day with getting important things done — like putting this post together — and shifting your workout time for later does 2 things.

You use your peak focus time for your most important work and you get a lot more done more effectively (and of a better quality) — I assume here you aren’t a professional athlete whose most important work is to train.

Working out after 3–5 hours of work gives your brain so much needed break and you get a natural boost of dopamine, adrenaline, alertness and drive (unless you totally killed yourself during that workout) — all your cognitive capacities will recharge after that afternoon training, and you’ll be more awake than after any coffee. Hormozi couple and many other hustlers-entrepreneurs are fans of the work-first mentality.

Priorities.

Use resources where they matter the most.

We aren’t machines.

We are biological systems with limits on our capacities to perform. Hard workouts also load your nervous system and brain, not just your muscles. And then, you have fewer resources available for the brain and getting things done.

BATCHING TASKS AND UNITASKING WITH THE KING OF EFFECTIVE PRODUCTIVITY — Tim Ferriss

WHAT: Batch tasks and avoid task-switching (removing all social media and phone/app notifications and other distractions)

BATCH TASKS, BATCH DAYS

This helps to make nerve energy (one of the major causes of fatigue) last longer. Do unitasking.

Perhaps, do one type of task ONLY on any given day. Task switching is more expensive than doing one type of work till the end. Tim Ferriss popularized the idea of batching one kind of work for certain days — podcasting days, email days, writing days — which allows the brain to increase efficiency and you get more done in less hours. This workflow fatigues your brain less due to no waste of resources on task-switching.

“studies find that when we multitask, we make 50 percent more mistakes and take 50 percent longer to complete a task.”

~ Friederike Fabritius. “The Brain-Friendly Workplace”

YOU ARE A MACHINE OF A DIFFERENT KIND

I’d argue even computers get tired.

After a day of work, my computer seems to be slower with tasks taking more time to complete.

Our bodies and brain are biological systems “designed” to go through periods of work and recovery, usually proportional to each other — the more intense the work is, the more intense the recovery has to be.

Our bodies and brains have their “rules” of function that scientists are constantly researching.

Our bodies and brains work better on some protocols and worse on others.

Just today I watched this video by Andrew Huberman about how regularity of sleep makes you release more GH (growth hormone). By sleeping the same amount of hours AND on the same schedule VS having sleep time +- 2–3h every other night you will be getting better recovery and results in training (among other things), again, by not changing anything but the timing.

And the same is true for the protocols described above — they aren’t magic, they just show you how to use your resources according to the best practices rooted in science to maximize efficiency of the system.

Sustainable Productivity and Human Potential.

That’s what my blog and work are all about.

TO DO NOW:

▶️Here’s this report, “PRODUCTIVE AFTERNOONS IN 3 STEPS” shortened in a PDF format. Download it, share, and subscribe to never miss science-based self-optimization tools that will help you create and experience more.

▶️Like and Share this post to help me reach more people, to help others together to do and live better.

😃Thank you for reading! Brought to you by your brain’s coach — Angela Shurina — Health, Nutrition, Focus for Nomads, committed to sustainable productivity and human potential.

www.BrainBreakthroughCoach.com