Written by Lesley Cooper, Co-author of Brave New Leader: How to Transform Workplace Pressure into Sustainable Performance and Growth.
Five ways to balance focus with intentional recovery
It is undeniable that the pace of work now can take its toll on everyone in the workplace. Whether you work independently or as part of a larger team, workplace pressure and the requirement to find more ways of doing more with the same or even fewer resources, is a constant.
As IFA businesses strive to stay competitive and differentiate themselves in complex and increasingly global markets, managing the impact of prolonged stress and pressure remains a priority. Blurred boundaries between work and life mean that some IFA’s, in common with most other knowledge workers, are finding their working day extended on a regular basis as they struggle to find the right balance between meeting client expectations and being able to participate fully in the activities outside of work that make them, them.
IFAs know that a rapid, quality response to client needs is foundational to good service and customer loyalty. Continuous focus is, therefore, a requirement, but sustained, creative and accurate performance requires that level of attention to be balanced with intentional recovery – specific activities built into the workday that renew cognitive energy and respond to the body’s fundamental needs for hydration, movement and refuelling. Our modern go faster, do more with less working lives often see these activities overlooked. Recovery time is recycled into another meeting or a batch of emails with predictable, if not always immediately apparent, performance consequences.
There is a level of individual responsibility in balancing focus and recovery, but this does not absolve team leaders and higher-ups of the responsibility to empower teams with ways to support the recovery process. All stakeholders – clients, bosses, staff, and shareholders – benefit when there is a workplace culture that recognizes and allows for the fundamental importance of intentional recovery.
Here I have shared five approaches you can adopt and, if you lead a team, support your co-workers to adopt to balance focus with intentional recovery.
Recognising the relationship that exists between your ability to focus and recovery
A great place to start is to consider the relationship between focus and recovery. It’s not necessarily a question of balance, which some might first think. In fact, one is very necessary for the other.
Our brains can focus very well, but only for about 90-120 minutes at a time on the same task without a reduction in effectiveness. Evolution has seen to it that we are still designed to be ‘on – off – on’ – as our hunter gathering ancestry required – not ‘on – on and a bit more on’ like a hard drive, which has very quickly become the norm in the increasingly digital age. The more in-flow we are, the more inclined we are to just keep going, but the quality of mental processing starts to decline after 90 minutes or so unless you recover. Therefore recovery = focus.
Despite this clear relationship, recovery continues to be neglected. If you are putting in focused effort, then you need to spend time on focused recovery too. This recovery needs to be deliberate, intentional and tailored to your body’s physical needs. Your physical body is the foundational layer of personal resources that support the emotional and mental energies that facilitate focus, and which allow you to ‘do’ the work.
Long meetings, or lengthy complex tasks that require focused attention, must be balanced with similarly structured and focused recovery time to stand up, hydrate, move (stretch) and switch focus for a short time, before addressing the next element of the meeting/task. This will help to reset both body and mind.
When you spend time working together as a team and looking at the fundamental relationship between intentional focus and intentional recovery, you will be in a much stronger position to embed healthy working behaviours and a culture that facilitates open discussions about required recovery.
Stay fully engaged on a single task
Balancing intentional focus and recovery includes making the most efficient use of your mental energy. Deliberately excluding distractions, such as turning off alerts or setting to ‘do not disturb’, and then making specific time for intentional recovery sets you up well for a healthy and productive day. When working in a team, inform others that you are having intentional focus time for a specific task, so they know not to disturbyou during this time. Or you could have designated ‘no meeting’ slots where meetings are never booked for certain days or times to allow people to stay fully engaged in their tasks.
Multi-tasking feels effective, but being continuously only partially present, which is what happens when you constantly switch attention or pay attention to more than one thing at once, means you are not fully directing your cognitive skills and getting the best bang for your mental energy buck.
Change the way you manage tasks
Thinking about tasks in a different way can help you to create periods of intentional focus. Try thinking about your task list as a quadrant with high and low importance tasks, and high and low ‘like’ tasks. ‘Chunk’ your day into 90-minute blocks and tackle the high importance/high dislike task for 90 minutes when your personal energy is at its highest, and then recover with a task you find easier to do and enjoy.
This is because recovery doesn’t necessarily mean rest – recovery often comes when you switch your focus to something that requires a different kind of cognitive effort. For example, this recovery period could be reading an article for 10 minutes that you’ve been keen to get into but ‘don’t have time’. If this could be done while moving around or stretching, so much the better. Another option is talking to someone on the phone instead of on Teams maybe. Whatever helps you reset and then go back to your key task refreshed because you have spent time recovering with a task that requires different cognitive effort.
Intentionally using physical activity as recovery
As previously mentioned, a very important part of intentional recovery is stretching your body or mind in a different way to allow energy to be restored. Physical activity is one of the best ways of recovering. You could get the biggest muscles in your body, quads/glutes, moving with a few squats for 5 minutes whilst listening to your favourite songs. This change in physical movement and sensory stimulation moves blood, and therefore water and nutrients, around the body and up to the brain to keep you sharp. If running or intense exercise is not your thing, do not force yourself to do so because this will just leave you feeling even more drained, instead do something that stimulates you personally, it could be a walk, yoga, tennis, or dance. If all else fails, use the stairs and not the lift when you are in the office or make a few phone calls whilst walking outside the office.
Factor in team recovery
As a leader, facilitating team recovery is a great way to build strong relationships, and ensure everyone feels supported and has a place to voice any concerns. Offloading any challenges is an important part of recovery so these do not eat into energy and focus levels. You could schedule 10 minutes before the ‘meat’ of the meeting starts to just chat with each other. Apart from nurturing valuable bonds of friendship, sharing stories, particularly good ones around small successes/funny moments, builds trust and greater psychological safety in the team. Critically, it will decompress those who need it from whatever meeting they were probably on before they joined the call. These 10 short minutes of recovery will then ensure they are focused on the task at hand when you do move onto the meeting agenda.
Whatever actions you choose to take within your team, ensure you are working with each member individually on what ‘recovery’ means to them. If you work alone, work out before you need to what your ‘go’ to recovery activity is. Empower yourself and your colleagues with the knowledge that recovery is essential for sustained high performance and focus, it should never be an afterthought. Recovery is an intentional investment in the next performance wave – it fuels the next ‘sprint’.
About the Author
Lesley Cooper is a management consultant with over 25 years of experience in the design and delivery of all elements of employee well-being management programmes. In 1997 Lesley founded WorkingWell, an award-winning specialist consultancy that helps companies manage workplace pressure in a way that facilitates growth and development. She is also the co-author of Brave New Leader: How to Transform Workplace Pressure into Sustainable Performance and Growth.
