The relentless push for productivity misconstrues how our brains work

Is there anything more tedious than the endless drive to make every waking moment more productive? "If I can save ten seconds on a process that happens ten times per day, that's a minute and 40 seconds saved per day," a productivity guru recently advised in Time magazine, to take just one example. "Over the course of a year, that's ten hours saved." If that sounds exhausting, the good news is that there are many reasons to avoid putting ourselves under this kind of relentless pressure – not least the latest neuroscience on how the brain regulates focus, as we explore in "How to shift the brain's inner gearstick to optimise the way you think". It has to do with a tiny bundle of blue-tinged neurons in the brainstem called the locus coeruleus.