The Only 4 Things You Need to Do to Keep Producing All Day

Photo by Ruffa Jane Reyes on Unsplash

You start every day with the best intentions. Get out of bed early, get through your morning routine. Have a good breakfast. Get in a workout. And arrive at your job feeling energized and ready to take on the day.

You fly through the morning, checking off your tasks like a fiend, rule the meetings, hit inbox zero, and clear every hurdle. Wanting to keep the momentum going, you work through lunch, munching on an energy bar and tossing down another pot of coffee.

The afternoon starts great, and you continue to conquer your day.

Until you don’t. Mid-afternoon, your energy wanes, and your attention wanders. You check your personal email and click on a link for a sale at your favorite store. Half an hour later, you realize you have been mindlessly scrolling through websites, and now it’s time just to watch the clock, praying for five to arrive.

What happened to that person that came into work this morning? Where did all that energy go, and how do you get it back?

Sorry, it’s too late.

I use to be a runner. I ran distances from 10K up to a marathon’s distance. And if I learned one thing from running marathons, it’s how to manage my energy. If you get to the equivalent of the afternoon of a marathon and run out of energy, you’re toast. Take off your shoes and go home. It’s over.

But endless weeks and months of training, taught me four essential lessons that carried over into my work life.

• Stay Hydrated
• Don’t Run Out of Fuel
• Pace Yourself
• Rest Before You Need to Rest

Stay Hydrated

Trust me; coffee is the fuel that gets me going in the mornings. I don’t drink a pot of coffee like I used to, but my day still starts early with at least four pods in the Kuerig.

But after that, it’s water. All day and plenty of it. Every cell in your body thrives on it. You can’t do without it, so why would you limit your intake.

Coffee, tea, soda, even fruit juice is better than nothing.

But none of them are as good as plain, clear water. It doesn’t need to be $5 a liter stuff in a fancy bottle with a cool name. But it does need to be water.

In a marathon, I learned to stop at every water station and grab a cup. Even if it was at the one-mile mark. It is technically possible to drink too much water, but it’s not easy, and I’ve never done so personally.

By the time you feel thirsty, it’s almost too late. Not that you’re going to keel over immediately, but your cells are running low. Thirst is your body’s way of saying to get some water before it is too late. Water in your body is like oil in your car. You can run a bit low, but your engine will work harder and not produce as much power.

Keep a water bottle handy and drink from it all day.

Don’t Run Out of Fuel

That’s the other thing your body needs; fuel. Water is the oil, and food is the gas. Run out of either, and the engine shuts down. You ate a good healthy breakfast, and you were productive all morning. You skimped on lunch, and your productivity faltered.

Do the math. Skip lunch = Run out of energy.

It always amazes me how people can do the same thing and get the same results over and over and then wonder why they get the same results.

“I don’t have time for lunch.”

You don’t have time to skip lunch. It’s a refueling stop. It’s time to replenish the protein, carbs, and fat that keeps your body going.

It is entirely possible to train your body to complete a marathon without eating anything along the way.

But why would you want to?

I either had a Power Bar in my pocket or arranged for someone to meet me with one. For you kids out there, you know the shelf in the grocery store with 147 different kinds of bars? There used to be just one. They tasted like plastic and could be used to patch a tire. But they worked.

And if you have to skip lunch, something similar can get you by. Once. Not every day and not potato chips or popcorn. My go-to snack if I needed mid-day fuel at work was trail mix. Nuts, raisins, and M&Ms. Carbs, protein, and fat. Plus sugar and chocolate.

But that was the rare exception. As everyone that ever worked with me knows, I didn’t skip lunch. And I didn’t wait until noon to eat. You know when I ate? When I got hungry.

An just like with the Power Bars and trail mix, you have to think about what you have for lunch. Lean protein with a few carbs and a touch of fat are just perfect. You go and get a vast carb and fat-laden lunch, and your afternoon will be spent napping.

If you are used to skipping lunch and then being unproductive in the afternoon, try this for a week. Go to lunch every day and then measure how much you get done versus skipping lunch. I guarantee you will more than make up for that hour.

Pace Yourself

Going back to my marathon days, I wrote an article called Thirty-eight Seconds. It tells how I missed qualifying for the Boston Marathon, and my Olympic hopes by 38 seconds out of three hours.

Why?

I didn’t pace myself.

This was way before cellphones, smartwatches, and GPS systems. I think we used a sundial and an azimuth, but I don’t remember. You had to rely on your training to keep the correct pace. In a marathon, they would call splits every five miles. Then you had to do the math and self-correct. And I can tell you that at fifteen miles and later, doing math in your head isn’t going to happen.

So, I needed a 6:30 pace to meet my goal. Before I got to the five-mile mark, I was told by someone who knew better that I was running at a 5:30 speed. Not good. It felt good, though. Of course, it felt good. I could run a 5:30 pace for five miles, easy. My 10K pace was a sub-5:00. But twenty-six miles? Not so much.

TL;DR I crashed and burned. Badly.

Think of your day as a marathon. Or two 10K races, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. If your best time for a 10K is 36 minutes, you can’t do two of those in a day. You’re going to have to run the first one slower to do a good time in the second one.

You can’t hit the ground running in the morning and work at a frenzied pace, hoping it will last all day.

It won’t.

It didn’t work yesterday. It didn’t last week. I won’t today.

Slow the hell down.

Pace yourself. Think. Go slow and steady. You don’t need to be the tortoise, but you can’t be the hare either.

If you are used to a fast pace in the morning, it’s going to take some effort to slow down. You will feel like you are moving at a snail’s pace. But your afternoon will more than make up for it.

Late in my running days, heart monitors became a thing. It was this big clunky strap that went around your chest and fed to a watch. I have no idea what the tech was; this was way before Bluetooth.

Anyway, using the heart monitor, you would go out on a hard fast run and learn your maximum heart rate. Mine was around 200. You would then use some calculations made up by people way smarter than me to figure out what percentage of your max you could sustain for different distances. I think for a 10K, it was something like 70%.

I can tell you that starting a 10K at 70% of my max heart rate felt like I was walking. The entire field passed by me, giving me a look, like, ‘what’s this guy doing?”

For about half the race. Then I began passing them. All of them. And I would finish the race at close to my best time. And here’s the good part: I didn’t feel beat up. I didn’t feel like I just ran a 10K race.

Pacing yourself takes effort and practice, but it will pay off at the proverbial end of the day.

Rest Before You Need to Rest

And finally, we get to the trick, as mentioned earlier. The final weapon in our arsenal against mid-afternoon burnout.

If you aren’t getting enough done, stop doing anything.

It’s mid-afternoon, and you start your daily slump. Why does this happen?

You tell yourself that you’re tired.

From what? You’ve been sitting at a desk all day. It’s not your body that ‘s tired; it’s your brain. Maybe it hasn’t gotten enough water. Perhaps it hasn’t gotten enough fuel. And maybe, you didn’t pace yourself.

But, just maybe, it needs a break. Take one. It’s easy. Just get up and walk away. Roam the halls for five minutes. I used to disappear into the stairwell. Five flights up to the top, then ten back down to the bottom. Exit into the lobby, grab a bottle of water and head back to my office.

Refreshed and ready to go the distance.

I bet you think I’m heading back to my running metaphor, don’t you?

Well, you’re right. In that failed marathon, if you were paying attention, I ran most of the first five miles a minute per mile faster than I needed to.

What should I have done?

Taken a break.

Do the math. At five miles, I had five minutes to burn. A five-minute break would seem like an eternity after running that far, but I should have taken at least a couple. Then I could have spread the rest over the next five or ten miles and run at a leisurely pace.

I didn’t do either.

During this same period, I ran a weekly four-miler at a local running gear store. I usually won. It was a very hilly, out and back course with the second and fourth mile uphill. One day, I noticed this new guy gaining on me in that last mile. I had gone all out and didn’t have a kick left in me. If I kept on the way I was going, I was going to lose. What did I do?

I stopped.

I walked for about 50 yards. Looking back over my shoulder, I let him gain about three-quarters of the distance between us, and then I took off again. Rested. He never had a chance.

And if you want to finish your day strong, take a break. Take one before you need one. Once you know this will work, you don’t need to wait until you are ‘tired’ to take a break. Take one before you reach that point. And come back rested, refreshed, and ready to run the last mile.

If you want to make your afternoons as productive as your mornings, follow these four tips.

Every day.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a nap.

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