The productivity paradox

Why reducing stress and doing less can help you unlock peak performance at work

I used to believe that in order to succeed in my career, all I needed to do was work harder and smarter than those around me.

And when I went into sales, still green behind the ears, that’s exactly what I tried to do. Waking up at 5, working til 8pm or later, Monday through Friday, and working 5–10 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week.

I was in for a rude awakening.

After half a year of putting in 60 to 80 hour weeks, in addition to applying virtually every productivity tactic under the sun to get the absolute most out of my time, my performance was squarely, disappointingly in the middle of the pack.

There had to be something I was missing. So I set up some time to shadow with two of our company’s most successful reps.They worked 35, MAYBE 40 hours a week. Yet, they were raking it in. And they had fun doing it!

WTF!!!

Their success flew in the face of everything I knew about what it took to be successful. I thought that to be successful, you had to cram as much into your day as possible, to clock in early and to stay late, and to take on as many extra projects as you can.

Yet, the numbers don’t lie. The beautiful thing about sales is that it’s very easy to quantify how effective (or not) what you’re doing is.

It wasn’t until years later that I could truly understand why those these guys were so successful. The biggest difference between the top performers at the company and me?

It wasn’t skill.

And it wasn’t the difference in sales territory.

It was their ability to manage their emotions, and specifically, their stress, that produced outsize results.

Why too much stress can crush your productivity

Consider what the latest scientific research has to say about the linkage between stress and productivity.

According to Harvard psychologist Robert Epstein, stress is a “well-known creativity killer.”

Decision making? Turns out that when we’re more stressed, we’re more inclined to lean on “irrational biases.”

Learning and memory? Toast.

When you’re overstressed, you’re more prone to making mistakes that create more downstream work. You’re more likely to snap at a colleague, damaging a professional relationship that you may very well depend on to thrive at your job. You’ll bring less energy and enthusiasm to the work at hand.

Worse yet — unhealthy stress creates a vicious cycle. When we’re stressed, we don’t do as well on the job…which creates even more stress!

And as people grow in their careers, it’s a problem that gets even worse. Promotions bring more responsibility, and more pressure to succeed — leading to more stress.

Without developing the toolset to effectively manage stress, it’s inevitable that at some point, people get to the point where stress is simply too much to handle, and professional performance becomes compromised.

This explains why simply working harder (and generating more stress for myself) didn’t produce better results for me. My chronic stress seeped into every aspect of my job, from how I interacted with prospects, to the decisions I made on how to spend my time, to the quality of my sales pitches.

Because of this, in order to improve my performance at work, I actually needed to DECREASE stress in order to circumvent its work-harming side-effects.

So I started to focus more time and energy towards eliminating stress and anxiety from my life. And counterintuitively, after doing so, my career really began to take off.

Why ambitious professionals should make stress reduction a priority

If you’re going to invest ANYWHERE in your professional development, you should invest in reducing your stress, not increasing your productivity with random “hacks.”

Think about it. While most productivity strategies are additive in nature — say, you find some hack that helps you spend 10 minutes less per day on email — those strategies have a built-in ceiling.

In contrast, reducing your stress creates multiplicative, exponential impact on the quality of your work.

And, sometimes, increasing your stress, simply working harder when you’re overstressed can be like multiplying by zero.

This is why eliminating stress is the lead domino you can knock down to create downstream positive goodness across your entire life.

Which, of course, is easier said than done.

Tested strategies for reducing stress at work

Seeing the impact that stress reduction can have on the quality of both life and work, I decided to write a guide capturing everything I’ve learned, tested, and refined to help transform my professional life from one-filled with stress to one filled with joy.

This article is the first in a multi-part series on how you can reduce stress at work by leveraging office-tested strategies and mindsets grounded in modern scientific research and ancient philosophy. Over the next month and a half, I’ll be sharing additional articles that cover:

The real causes of stress and anxiety, and what you can do to address these root causes

The one mindset shift that will make you 10X more effective at managing your stress at work

Tested tactics you can start implementing today to increase your resilience to stress

How to build stressproofing habits that reduce stress over the long term

Or, if you’d like instant access to the complete guide — which includes bonus content that I haven’t shared on Medium or my website — subscribe to my free Insiders List, where I share science-backed strategies and tactics to help people to eliminate stress and anxiety, find meaning in their work, and unleash their full professional potential.