No rest for the … “productive”
Every day in the communication industry, we power through taxing hours in exercising our passions and pleasing our creative sides, all to meet deadlines. We’re stress addicts and our struggle for productivity, in an endless paradox of daily dilemmas to squeeze every ounce of it out, is now something that we are abusing.
To make the most out of our productivity and performance, we forget to eat to avoid wasting any precious time, we give up the quality of our sleep from the constant brain-picking, and while we’re at it, we go on and on about glamourising the idea of overworking. We have become masters at taking the things that are putting us under pressure and converting them into units of stress in our systems. This is why we treat being stressed as a stimulant that keeps us on our feet – going in full swing – and the force that drives our productivity.
We forget that our bodies are, miraculous, yes, but quite delicate biological machines. Just think of what a single paper cut does to us. Yours truly over here is a former stress junkie. 4 years ago, I was a night owl of a freelancer, working with no consistency – 9 days a week, give or take – with a very unhealthy sleep schedule that was distributed along power naps throughout the day, and more often than not, I would sleep through my AMs. I thought I was doing everything right from the amount of work I was getting done, until my body gave in.
We like to leverage survival mode into a stressful productivity scheme – thinking that we can’t have it any other way. I learned the hard way that we are not built to work through nights, and that we actually perform better in the morning. That revelation came to light by accident at that time 4 years ago when I found myself struggling with a health condition, which I will discuss in my next blog, and it led me to discover that stress and productivity can be separated, by hours. Next up, science in the concept of time.
Ghada Abu Seir is Senior Copywriter at Cicero & Bernay Communication Consultancy, an independent PR agency headquartered in Dubai offering new-age public relations consultancy to the UAE and across the MENA region. | www.cbpr.me