By Dr Farah Sleiman

Further to the visionary move our beloved government in Dubai has made to turn the working week into 4.5 days, and the reluctance of the majority of the private sector to follow their lead under the excuse that “there is too much work and this schedule is not enough to finish the tasks required”, I am writing this article to demystify the concept of productivity and explain how scientifically productivity has nothing to do with the number of hours you put in and everything to do with the state of consciousness you are operating from, either you are in “flow” or you are “out of flow” and these two different states of consciousness yield completely different quality and quantity of output. So let me start by defining what is “flow”. Psychological flow is a state of consciousness in which the person is completely immersed and absorbed in a task at hand and enjoying it so much that the notion of time-space and body awareness fades , there is a deep feeling of intrinsic motivation, purpose, self-fulfillment and pleasure, ideas and tasks start flowing effortlessly. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the positive psychologist credited with having popularized the concept of Flow calls it : “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement”. Some people call it “getting in the zone” more recently the performance literature is calling it “deep work”

So why are we so concerned with “deep work” and what is so special about it? We are concerned with “deep work” because this the state needed for superior physical and cognitive performance. True innovation, creativity and out-of-the box thinking happens in flow, below this state whatever you are trying to build is just sticking and gluing pieces of Deja Vue. You want an edge over your competition, this is where you need to go to find it. In the state of flow, the information processing function of the brain moves from the conscious brain (the prefrontal cortex ) to the unconscious parts of the brain (sub-cortical limbic regions) and this is where all the magic happens. Why? I’ll tell you why: the conscious brain has a sequential mode of processing information, that is, it takes in one of piece of information after the other so it is very slow and easily jammable , the maximum amount of information it can process is 40 pieces per second. Try to cram in more than that and the system will get paralyzed :we call it “information overload”. The memory bank it taps into is also limited only to the information you are consciously aware of, that is a ridiculous library and machine compared to your unconscious.

Your unconscious brain on the other hand has a parallel mode of processing information , it can process thus 11 million pieces of information per second, that’s a quantum computer compared to your conscious brain, on top of that and this is where things get more interesting the memory bank it taps into is virtually unlimited , it is all the information your brain and body has gathered since you were born plus millions of years of evolutionary data stored at your cellular level in every inch of your body that you don’t even know exists. All of this neuroscience is very exciting but what does this means in terms of productivity? Let’s put this into numbers; in flow , your performance and cognitive abilities are 275,000 times higher than your non-flow state. With a turbo-charged brain like that , who needs 8 hours of work everyday unless you are building single-handedly a rocket to Saturn and your deadline is next month! The good news is that flow is a state of consciousness that can be induced, below are the conditions needed to induce it:

So, this whole narrative that companies have a lot of work and don’t have time to move to shorter work week is non-sense. You don’t have time because you are failing on many levels:

• One, you are failing in your planning and miscalculating your workload. 
• Two, you are failing in your recruitment , you are staffing people on jobs that are either below their skill level or way above it.
• Third you are failing in your leadership style, you are stuck in a carrot and stick reward model of performance management instead of inspiring people so that they feel a sense of purpose and ownership in what they do and take pleasure in it.
• Fourth, you are failing in your work environment design, this whole trend of adopting open space design for all job functions is a cemetery for productivity, entering flow requires the person to be able to work in a calm environment with no interruptions, your office design is creating an army of ADDs then you wonder why the work is not completed on time and force people to stay overtime. Shorter work weeks means working smarter , it requires a quantum leap in the mindset of the corporate community, it also requires eliminating labor intensive tasks through automation and digitization this is what our beloved government has managed to put in place beautifully in its e-government strategy and what the private sector has not captured yet and is trying to avoid. Avoidance is not the solution, in the digital era either you evolve, or you will be hit by the meteorite of obsolescence, choose wise, choose fast, your competitors already did.