Is There a Link Between Productivity and Healthspan?
You’ve probably started planning and saving for retirement, at least financially. Have you planned for your mental and physical health in retirement? If not, now is a good time to start!
March 17 is Wellderly Day. American culture has made it harder to get to old age in a healthy way, just as it makes paying attention to important tasks harder. However, you can push back on both – and the sooner you start, the better.
Your financial planner might have told you about an old (supposedly Chinese) saying: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. The same is true for saving money as well as planning for health in old age.
Being productive in the workplace will actually help you be wellderly too
In the US, we’re all used to the prevalence of medicine with side effects. If you take pill X for a certain condition, it might have side effects that you need to manage with pill Y. But pill Y has a side effect that you’ll want to manage with pill Z.
Therefore it might seem counterintuitive that for most people (without autoimmune or other disorders), the exact same factors that make you healthy today will also improve your productivity… and keep you healthy in old age. But it’s true.
These factors aren’t technological, either. Tech tools that are supposed to improve productivity can help around the margins. But if you’re trying to rely on four or five hours’ sleep a night, your productivity is capped because your brain isn’t getting the amount of recharging that it needs. So it doesn’t much matter whether you’re using the right project management tool or timer or whatever.
Not getting enough sleep is pretty common – sleep and exercise are often the first things to go when you feel pressed for time. Unfortunately, not only are you inhibiting the amount of good work that you can accomplish when you’re regularly skipping these two habits, but you’re increasing the likelihood that your golden years will be miserable.
Both exercise and the right amount of sleep (7-8 hours for the vast majority of adults) help prevent inflammation in the body. That kind of inflammation often leads to cardiovascular disease and certain cancers, among other diseases. Sleep and exercise also help prevent neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s.
As you can see, missing out on sleep and exercise have negative short-term consequences as well as long-term ones. Which means if you want to be productive and wellderly, something else has to change.
The earlier you start improving productivity, the better off you’ll be in the future
Again, don’t feel bad if you’ve been skipping the things you know lead to better emotional, mental, and physical health. American culture isn’t helping you! (But I can!) The best time to start is right now.
Yes, there’s more to productivity than just eating right / moving your *ss/ hydrating / having fun / spending time with loved ones / enjoying hobbies, all of which boost productivity and your health.
There’s also making sure you’re doing the right activities at the right time of day, which is dependent on your brain and your sleep chronotype. That you have your priorities straight, both at work and at home. You can get all the productivity-boosting activities in on a regular basis, but if you spend your time as a business owner doing everything because it’s just faster for you to do it or you waste a lot of time on emails, you’re still capping your productivity.
Another factor in productivity is having the right systems in place. Automation is especially key for solopreneurs, and it benefits every business owner. Having processes and systems makes it easier to scale if that’s your goal, and it also makes it easier to onboard new employees when they have a template for what they need to do.
Yet again, having systems and priorities are necessary for productivity… and work in conjunction with the factors that keep your brain in good shape.
Use productivity or lose it
Interestingly, with humans, the older we get, the more we need to use our bodies and brains or else their power diminishes. (In contrast to machines, which tend to wear out the more you use them.)
True, once you get older it does sometimes take more effort to do things that you did easily when you were younger. But, if you allow yourself to sit on the shelf, the faster you’ll degrade. Wiring in the good habits that keep you more productive as well as helping to keep you healthy now and in the future benefits your current self and your future self.
Getting enough sleep and exercise and the rest of it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll have a healthy old age, of course. Life happens. But absent some genetic issues, you’re more likely to be wellderly when you adopt the habits that support productivity.
Are you going to be perfect at it? No. There are nights when you just can’t sleep, or days when something happens and you can’t get the exercise you normally get. You go to a birthday party and go ham on the…ham. It’s about setting yourself up to get what you need most of the time, no matter what’s going on otherwise.
Recap (tl;dr):
The same things that boost productivity help keep you healthy now and in the future. Don’t shortchange yourself because you’re busy at work, since there are ways to work around that.
If you haven’t been exercising or sleeping because you have too much on your plate, click here to set up your free consultation to see how I can best help you.
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash