A Cuppa for Peak Performance
You may not be a big fan of drinking tea, and don’t worry, you don’t have to in order to work smarter! December 15 is National Tea Day, but even if you’re a coffee drinker you can raise your cup.
Caffeine can help you be more productive
Caffeine is a stimulant, and it can help you focus. Obviously it’s easy to overdo it on the caffeine, but drinking coffee and tea (and even eating dark chocolate) promote health in different ways.
Each cup, depending on your coffee or the type of tea you drink, has a different amount of caffeine to take into consideration. (Most tea generally has less than drip coffee, never mind an espresso.)
Some of us (such as myself) metabolize caffeine more slowly, so we have to stop drinking by a certain point during the day or else we’ll have trouble sleeping as a result of the caffeine that’s left in the system.
Anecdotally, this seems to get worse with age. When I was younger I normally needed to cut myself off around 5 pm. In the past few years, I’ve had to adjust that down to 2 pm. I can foresee a future where my coffee with lunch is the absolute last time I can have it during the day!
Proper tea is a ritual
If you prepare a cuppa like the British, there’s much more of a ritual to it. Tea is often accompanied by a couple of cookies (“biscuits”) or a small snack.
To prepare it properly, you may or may not use tea bags. (The British tea bags are much stronger than American tea, which is why the pot is usually accompanied by milk and sugar.)
You boil the water separately, and you do want to boil it, not microwave it. I have a kettle that’s just for boiling water, but in Britain and the rest of Europe the household current is much stronger than it is here so the water boils practically instantaneously.
You want to warm your teapot (this is not the same as the kettle where you boiled the water) with hot or boiling water before you put the tea and water in. Many people also warm the teacups with a splash of hot water.
You can put loose tea in a strainer or strainer bag in your teapot, then add the boiling water and let it sit for however many minutes your tea calls for (this is often written on the side of the box or loose tea container.) Then you pour it from the teapot (the one who pours is “Mother”) into the teacups and everyone adds milk and sugar as they like. You can also have a ritual with coffee, depending on how you make it.
The tea ritual often involves more than one person making and drinking the tea. It’s a time set aside during the day to tackle a break from work and socialize. Even if you live alone and have the tea ritual, it’s a time during the day where you can slow down and appreciate the moment. This helps refill your productivity tank.
Rituals can help you get more done
Why go through these rituals? Well, maybe you choose not to do a ritual with your tea or coffee. But you probably have a ritual around how you take care of your teeth and/or face at night. You might have the same routine every weekday morning, and a different one on weekends.
When I talk about building habits for productivity or having a schedule that you stick to, sometimes people aren’t interested. They think a schedule is boring or doesn’t allow room for creativity. I get that. (Done right, a schedule actually frees you up for more creative thinking.)
The reason people without schedules or habits are missing out on productivity is that decision making is not “free”. There is a cost (in terms of energy) to the brain for every single decision you make during the day. The more decisions you have to make, the faster your decision-making ability drains away.
So when you have habits, or rituals, or routines, or schedules where everything is already dialed in, you’re not wasting all that decision making capability on silly, small decisions like whether you should snooze your alarm or which pants to wear or whether you should have a banana with your yogurt or a strawberry.
You don’t have to waste precious brain time and energy figuring out what to tackle when you get into work.You’d have your three to five priorities listed in front of you (that you wrote down the night before) and you can just start on the first one.
That’s why routines actually give you more leeway to be creative – because you haven’t fatigued your brain with unnecessary decisions. When you get everything accomplished at work which the routines facilitate, then you can go home and be creative and try new activities and be spontaneous.
Creativity and new activities are fabulous for the brain and getting sh*t done. But if you had spent all day making little decision after little decision, you’d get home tired out from all of that and with no energy to be spontaneous. Then you end up on the soda with a glass of wine streaming a show.
Recap (tl;dr):
Caffeine can help you focus, and rituals and routines can help you be more productive by allowing you to slow down and to dial in decisions so you don’t waste energy remaking the same decisions over and over again.
If you need help putting together a schedule that works, click here to set up your free consultation with me.