Looking through blog posts and YouTube videos on productivity and time management, you will be inundated with new apps, systems and processes. It’s as if finding the right app or system will be the pinnacle of your productivity journey.

Now, having the right system and processes in place can significantly improve your productivity — having a block of time each day for responding to your actionable email will prevent you from being swamped by out-of-control inboxes. But these systems and processes will only help you if you are focused, disciplined and not half asleep.

There are three other, more critical, elements in the productivity mix you need to prioritise over everything else. These are sleep, movement and diet.

For many people, these three elements are the elephants in their otherwise well-ordered life. You know, deep down, if you are not getting sufficient sleep, not getting outside and moving, and eating highly processed and unnatural foods, you are destroying your ability to focus and concentrate, ultimately affecting your overall output. (Not to mention what these will do to your long-term health)

And I am not just talking about work output. If you are constantly tired and unable to concentrate, that will negatively affect your family life. You will be too tired for quality time with your kids and partner, and that poor diet and lack of sleep will adversely affect your mood when you have time for your family life.

Planning the day at the end of the day when you’re tired and want to do nothing because you are exhausted is not going to be something high on your list of priorities.

We can all operate a reasonably productive day without doing daily planning. This is how most people have operated for years without any immediate adverse effects. However, how are things turning out without following a few simple daily practices?

Is that a good thing if you are stressed out, anxious and exhausted at the end of your working day? Is that how you want to feel at the end of the day?

What can we do?

While new systems and apps are exciting and the sexy part of productivity and time management, these things will only go so far. No new app or system will change the work you still have to do. Just because a task is in Things 3 instead of Todoist won’t change the fact that the task still needs to be done.

No app will plan your day — even with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Only you, as an individual, know what’s important to you. I find it interesting that Outlook Calendar’s AI will fill your blank times with work and never tell you to call your partner or go for a walk.

I’ve been studying productivity and time management long enough to know that it’s never a case of not having time. You have time. You have more than enough time to fit everything in. The real reason you “feel” you don’t have time is you have not prioritised what’s important to you.

But let’s step back and look at the three absolute basics of being more productive. Let’s start with sleep. When you get sufficient sleep, you are more awake, creative, and focused. Those three on their own will give you a far more productive day than being half asleep and distracted.

I did a little experiment earlier this year. I spent a week surviving on four and a half hours of sleep each day. That week was a complete disaster for my overall productivity. Work I could typically get done in a week was a struggle. In fact, I had to give up trying to do some of the work I wanted to do.

By the end of that week, I had a backlog. I NEVER have backlogs. I was too tired to clear my actionable email each day. I became irritable towards the end of the week and started craving sugary snacks after only two days.

By the end of the week, I was exhausted. My exercise was terrible. Even taking my dog for a walk became a chore — something I usually love doing.

Now, I’ve never been a good sleeper. But The lessons I learned from that little experiment got me serious about my sleep. I will now rearrange meetings and appointments if I need to to ensure I get my minimum number of hours (six and a half).

If you don’t know how much sleep you need, do an experiment over the end-of-year break and sleep with no alarm for seven days. Note how much sleep you get each night and average it out. That will tell you how much sleep you naturally need. We are all different here.

I would strongly recommend that you read Matthew Walker’s book, Why We Sleep. That will change your whole thinking about sleep.

Getting enough sleep each day will radically improve your overall productivity and mood, so you are a lot more attentive to the people you care about.

Now, what about exercise? Now here’s the problem with exercise. A lot of people hate exercise. Possibly because of how they were introduced to exercise at school, which has left a scar that still lives with them today. Yet exercise is essential for productivity.

The good news is, to get the benefit of exercise, you do not need to go to a gym or out running. Really, what is meant by “exercise” is movement. We need to move.

Interestingly, when Apple was developing the Apple Watch, the two key parts of their exercise app were the number of “active” minutes and the number of times you stood up per day. They even put a target on these: Thirty minutes of activity and standing twelve times daily.

So, what is involved in movement or activity? A thirty-minute intentional walk would do. But you can go further. Stop using lifts (or elevators as they are called in North America) and escalators. Reintroduce yourself to stairs. The stairs are an excellent source for getting the blood flowing and improving your focus and productivity.

Even if you have a disability and cannot walk unaided, any activity you can do that will raise your heart rate counts as exercise. A non-motorised wheelchair gives you fantastic opportunities to move with your upper body, for example.

One tip I learned from a functional medicine doctor (Dr Mark Hyman) is to get outside and walk for twenty minutes after a meal. That movement will prevent your blood sugar levels from spiking after a meal and help you avoid the ‘afternoon slump’ that affects many people.

Seventy years ago, finding a gym would have been very hard. Lifting weights was an exclusive and minority sport. Unless you were into bodybuilding — a sport most people had never heard of back then — your only introduction to a gymnasium was at school. Most people treated those as a wicked form of torture, meted out my evil PE teachers.

Why were gyms so rare back then? Well, that’s because we moved a lot more and never needed them. There wasn’t the convenience we have today. Escalators were rare; very few people had TVs in their homes (and those that did had to keep getting up to change the channel), and if someone called you, you again had to get up, go to the hall and answer the phone.

There was no home delivery pizza or other convenience foods, so we had to cook. Our whole lives were based around movement.

Today, it’s perfectly normal for people to get home, sit on the sofa and not move again until they head off to bed four or five hours later. They left their home, walked the three metres to their car, drove to the office, parked in the car park, walked the five metres to the lifts, got to their desks, and spent the next eight or nine hours sitting down. Then repeated the homeward journey to spend the evening sitting on a sofa.

Is it any wonder in the developed world, over 60% of people are dangerously overweight and are either in the early stages of or have some form of preventable metabolic disease?

And that leads me to the final piece in the mix. Diet.

Yes, convenience food is often delicious. It’s also quick and can fill a hole instantly. You would think if all I have to do is order something through an app and have it delivered to my door within thirty minutes, that would allow me more time to get more stuff done.

Well, no. The majority of the food we eat today is highly processed, full of sugar, and not satiating. It leaves you craving more, which disastrously affects your blood sugars. This then leads to spikes in your insulin levels and, if repeated over a long period of time, will result in you becoming pre or full-blown diabetic.

And diabetes is not a disease you want. It’s linked to an increased risk of dementia, not to mention the likelihood of limb amputations, irreversible heart disease and kidney failure. You really do not want to develop this horrible disease.

The effects of all that sugar and highly processed food on your productivity is devastating. It leaves you hungry mid-morning, sleepy in the afternoon and exhausted in the evenings. You’re not in the mood to focus your attention on anything. This is why we are so easily distracted by email, messages and our co-workers gossiping.

The trouble is most people are in denial about the state of their diet. They think the problem is they have too much work, they are overwhelmed, or their systems are a mess (so they need to find a new app).

No. If you’re not getting enough sleep or exercise and your diet is a disaster zone, that is the reason why you are stressed out, overwhelmed and tired all the time. It’s not your work or the things you have to do.

As we come towards the end of the year, I advise starting with these three unsexy parts of the productivity mix. Commit yourself to start moving and sleeping more and sort out your diet.

As I mentioned before, read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. In addition, I would recommend Dr Mark Hyman’s Pegan Diet book and Dr David Perlmutter’s Drop Acid.

Once you’ve read those three books, read Dr Jason Fung’s Obesity Code.

If you commit to reading those four books over the end of the year break, you will have the knowledge to make better choices about how and when to sleep and what to eat. They will dramatically change your life.

Making changes in these three areas of your life: your sleep, movement and diet will have a profound impact on your energy levels throughout the day which will impact the quality and quantity not only of what you do at work but with your relationships with the people that matter most to you.

Plus, of course, you will significantly reduce your risk of developing debilitating lifestyle diseases that ultimately prevent you from living the life you have always dreamed of.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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