3 Pillars for Sustained Productivity
Elon Musk and his AI team doubled their impressive data center from 100,000 to 200,000 GPUs in just three months, as showcased in a recent YouTube video about the release of Grok 3. All these GPUs operate synchronously to process massive amounts of training data, allowing Grok 3 to secure a strong leadership position among its competitors.
In contrast, the human brain's capacity is fixed, with roughly 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. Although the brain is highly energy-efficient in achieving various tasks that AI can’t do, it can’t be rushed by adding more biological hardware and power, as in the case of Elon Musk’s Colussus data center.
The brain’s capacity is also limited by the human lifespan. On average, each of us has only 4,000 weeks to accomplish the projects and tasks we want to achieve in our lives. Moreover, the brain is not a machine that can be dedicated to one task 24 hours a day. It has many more responsibilities, including maintaining body and mental health, socializing and maintaining relationships, and adapting to changes in the external world.
Technological advances in recent decades have led to the expectation that individuals should be much more productive than ever, as they are now freed from countless hours of mundane and tedious tasks and labor. Yet, humans have become busier than ever and desperately seek ways to increase their productivity. If we look at social media and published content, how to increase productivity is among the top interests in the self-help category with a large number of followers and readers.
One common reason the productivity problem is seemingly complex to solve is that the brain has been treated as a machine with inspiration drawn from industrial practices. Productivity advice is often presented in the form of protocols or techniques as if they are applied by engineers to the machines and are guaranteed to fix the problem.
In reality, our brain is an organism, shaped by millions of years of evolution, that accomplishes highly sophisticated tasks in its own efficient way. Ignoring or interfering with its inner biological workings can only reduce productivity in the long run and likely introduce side effects that adversely impact our lives.
That said, we will first review the neuroscience of how the brain works efficiently. Then, we will examine the three science-backed principles on which any productivity tips should be based. The goal is to understand why some tips work or do not work and empower you to make educated decisions about which ones work best for you.
The Neuroscience of Brain Productivity
The brain is the organ that consumes the most energy.
Unlike most other organs with specific and local functions, the brain is the commander-in-chief in charge of everything the body needs to interact with the world. As such, it constantly consumes 20% of the total body energy, even though it is only 2% of the total body weight.
The brain is keen on staying alert to environmental stimuli and adapting to the changes that are critical for survival. The former ensures we should be distracted if any novel or abnormal signal arises, and the latter requires some filter mechanisms to ensure the brain changes for the right reason.
As from our ancestors of hunter-gatherer tribes, the original function of the brain was not built for highly sustained mental work such as reading, writing, thinking, and programming. Staying alert and fit for existence and ensuring survival have always kept our brains occupied. Modern intense knowledge and technological work put an extra toil on the survival-oriented mind.
The brain can focus on one task at a time.
The brain is capable of concentrating on only one task at a time since it has just one attention system.
You might want to say that’s not true; we can multitask—I could listen to an audiobook while walking or cleaning the kitchen floor. This is because one task is entirely autonomous and does not require your attention. If you have to walk across an intersection or scrub a dirty spot on the floor, your attention has to shift, causing you to ignore the content coming to your ears.
To focus on one task, the brain has to provision many resources, including attention, working memory, memory retrievals, contextual information processing, and a neural network to execute. When the brain disengages from the task, it must unload existing information and shift its attention, which takes time before it can focus on a new one.
Staying focused on a single task for as long as possible is, therefore, the most efficient way for the brain to function. Frequent context switching requires extra energy in transitions, draining the brain's energy more quickly and causing low productivity for the following tasks.
Neural modulators can drastically increase (or decrease) the network efficiency.
As stated in one of my previous articles, the synaptic connections between neurons in the brain can be strengthened (or weakened) by human learning experiences. This changeability is also called neuroplasticity, which is the core characteristic of the brain that allows for learning (Artificial neural networks operate on the same principle via numerical weight parameter adjustments during training).
When facing an environment that constantly changes, excessive plasticity can result in an unstable neural network, causing the loss of previously acquired skills. Conversely, insufficient plasticity will cause rigidity and failure to adapt.
AI does not have this challenge because engineers control what the machine should learn. The biological brain uses neural modulators, particularly dopamine and serotonin, to determine when and what is the most relevant the brain should learn, while effectively ignoring the majority of the information in constant flux in the environment.
At the behavior level, it manifests through motivation, joy when receiving a reward, and happiness when imagining the potential outcome when achieving a future goal.
At a more micro level, neural modulators adjust internal states across various brain regions by significantly enhancing neuroplasticity, memory retention, learning speed, and habit formation.
In contrast, negative emotions like anxiety, stress, and depression lower dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain, leading to a decline in brain efficiency.
Sleep is essential for forming long-lasting memories.
Neuroscience has long discovered that our brain stores short-term (lasting hours through days) and long-term (lasting weeks or years) memories differently. When we rest or sleep, the internal neural networks continue to transfer and consolidate what they have learned across brain regions. Notably, the deep sleep stages play an essential role in transferring short-term memory from the Hippocampus to long-lasting memory in the neocortex.
Additionally, sleep enables the brain to maintain and restore its healthy baseline without interference from external stimuli. This process includes replenishing neural modulators that become depleted by daily activities.
Now equipped with the neuroscience knowledge summarized above, we are ready to examine the three key pillars of improving productivity in our work, study, and daily life.
3 Productivity Pillars Backed by Neuroscience
1. Relentless prioritization of not doing most of the things you want to do.
You might say, I already knew that. I’ve cut out distractions like social media, learned to say no more often, and carefully considered what goes on my to-do list.
Yet, these techniques just scratch the surface unless you prioritize with enough clarity and intensity to align your goals with the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. This principle states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. Initially discovered by economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1906, this principle has been applied across many disciplines, from business and economics to personal effectiveness.
Regarding productivity, this means identifying the few activities that yield the most significant results for your goals. Since our brains can only focus on one thing at a time and each of us has the same number of hours in a day, the key to getting more done is to focus on the 20% of tasks that drive 80% of the results.
Study guru Justin Jung discusses this in one of his YouTube videos, “How To Be So Productive That It Feels ILLEGAL.” He gives three tips: The first is to do the 20%, which yields 80% of the results. The second tip involves breaking the selected 20% into sub-components and doing only the 20% again, ignoring the remaining 80%. The net is to do only 4% but ignore the remaining 96%.
Productivity is all about doing less––no wonder Jung feels it “illegal”!
When this is translated into more practical advice, a common recommendation is to ensure that you have at most three things in progress and that you work on one at a time. It will ensure you spend enough time focusing on each and doing deep work during the day, minimizing context switching and spending time on useless tasks.
The problem most people face is that they do not prioritize enough. They have too many priorities to juggle in their daily lives, and they constantly feel like they are running behind. Letting go of some of them with blank slots on the calendar can make them uncomfortable and even feel counterproductive.
Effective prioritization requires a mental shift. It is probably the hardest thing for many of us to do because society and culture have taught us the opposite since childhood. In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman advocates we should accept and embrace the reality that no one can achieve all their desires. Rather than living for the future by obsessing over mastering every minute, focusing on the present and pursuing a more meaningful life can resolve most productivity issues.
Productivity isn’t just about career goals but encompasses your entire life. Focusing on fewer things while achieving others later is more productive than trying to accomplish everything during the same period. For instance, you might decide to prioritize your relationships or raising children, while feeling comfortable with the expectation of not being promoted at work. Another example is breaking down a big goal into smaller goals to achieve one at a time before moving on to the next.
Additionally, effective prioritization involves ensuring that your main goals support or complement each other rather than compete. If you neglect your health or family in the pursuit of work success, your overall productivity will ultimately decline.
Lastly, spending time to prioritize at the front eliminates frequent context-switching. Mastering time by obsession over routines and protocols, in fact, introduces numerous context transitions during the day, which puts a cognitive load on our brain, adversely impacting overall productivity.
2. Do the things that motivate and inspire you.
Now that we must be highly selective about what we do to achieve high productivity, the importance of doing something meaningful in our lives is self-evident. No wonder Ali Abdaal devotes the whole book Feel Good Productivity to this topic.
Being grumpy and unhappy certainly decreases productivity because a negative mood decreases the release of dopamine and serotonin, which in turn makes the brain less plastic to absorb new information. It also reduces attention span, making people more prone to distractions, particularly from those in whom they are intuitively interested.
On the contrary, feeling good and highly motivated can make you fully immersed in your task, forgetting the passage of time and ignoring any distractions. In the recent podcast, The Diary of a CEO, Mr. Beast mentioned that he had been obsessed with making high-quality videos from the beginning. His firm, consistent motivation has made him extraordinarily focused and highly productive.
I am sure Mr. Beast did not need to worry about silencing his cell phone, carefully choosing a morning routine, or ensuring he checks his emails once per day. His motivation-driven nature makes him innately resist those distractions that normal people are challenged to overcome. In other words, if you find an enterprise in which you are genuinely interested and devoted, your brain will equip you to ignore the distractions happening around you.
By the same token, productivity tips leaning on one's human nature work much better than those against it. For example, finding novelty in a tedious task or rewarding oneself often for achieving smaller goals pumps a healthy dose of dopamine through progress and makes one less distractible. Adopting a positive mindset (e.g., through journaling or meditation) is another effective way to optimize one's brain for efficient work.
3. A healthy body is the foundation of sustained productivity
No one would argue against the importance of a healthy body for brain productivity. The problem is that we often don’t give our brain enough attention to stay healthy, assuming the brain-machine can work as much as we want.
Even worse, your brain is the last organ to complain in the body. Keeping it healthy and functioning optimally requires consistent commitment of time and effort, which we often neglect until it is too late.
First, a balanced diet rich in vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, lutein, proteins, and antioxidants provides the necessary nutrients for healthy cell functioning and growth and replenishes neural modulators and transmitters. Eating junk food or skipping meals may temporarily buy you time to work more, but you will eventually have to pay the debt by taking time off to rejuvenate your body.
Second, exercise is the best medicine for a healthy brain. Energy molecules (glucose and oxygen) and nutrients are transported to the brain through blood flow, and exercise enhances this delivery to ensure the brain has sufficient supplies. Numerous studies have shown the many profound benefits of regular exercise for improving productivity and mental well-being. It is out of the scope to go deeper into each one.
Getting enough sleep is also essential for boosting productivity. While a temporary lack of sleep may be acceptable for meeting a deadline, a solid sleep-wake routine ensuring a high quality of sleep will provide consistent productivity and help you overcome procrastination. Furthermore, sleep regulates your daily mood, which is another positive impact on sustained productivity that goes a long way.
Millions of years of evolution have made the brain a unique organ with its own way of regulations for efficiency. It’s simply a matter of how much you can leverage it. Your motivation, somewhat obsessiveness, or sheer enjoyment enables you to focus by blocking out other distractions, as they trigger the release of neural modulators that subsequently enhance the productivity of the biological neural network.
Distinct from modern machines, the brain has limited capacity and is built to do one thing at a time. Therefore, a paradox for human productivity is to refrain from doing most of what we might want to do, given the many allures of shiny opportunities and conventional obligations that society and culture have bestowed on us. Juggling many things at once is against human nature and is doomed to failure.
Ultimately, the best approach to improving productivity is to accept the brain’s limits and leverage its optimal neural network plasticity and regulatory states. From a holistic perspective, this would also improve your quality of life by decluttering your busy life, clarifying what you really want to accomplish, and nurturing the health of your body and mind.