The Protocol

What will you pay attention to today? This is the trailhead of the Nature of Work journey which will show you that through the careful curation of your time and attention you can be simultaneously more productive and less stressed out. You’ll be introduced to the fundamentals of mindfulness, mindset and resilience, and the science of habit and behavior change.  We’ll  prime you for what to expect throughout the rest course and how to set yourself up for success. Welcome.  It’s going to be a fun ride.

Time to get started! In this module we will dive into the physiology of our natural daily rhythms, and why you should complete your hardest work early in the day. We’ll establish the importance of a rock-solid morning routine, and you’ll create your own to start practicing as the first step towards reclaiming control of your day. 

Now that you’re getting a strong start to the day, it is time to confront your digital lifestyle and habits. We’ll explain why our digital habits have so much leverage in our lives and how they affect our brain. We’ll guide you through a detailed audit, analysis, and cleanup of your digital environments. The goal here is to stop the tail wagging the dog and get you back in control of your time and attention. You’ll begin to retrain your brain with new practices that lead you towards lasting behavior change.

To be your most productive, you need to be able to focus. Here we will tackle the myth of multitasking and get you on the road to excelling at doing one thing at a time. Crucially, we will address the need for a balance between stress and rest and how high quality downtime is just as productive as focused uptime. We’ll give you tools to prime yourself before focus sessions and how to set priorities with a daily and weekly priority system. Finally, we’ll provide a framework for focus interval training to get you flexing those focus muscles and training your brain into the superpower it will become.

Success is built on more than just hard work and focus. The quality of our ideas are as important as the quantity and our ability to produce work. Shifting our focus away from the conscious brain where we do our most focused work, we will turn our attention to unleashing the power of our personal supercomputers – the subconscious. We will explore the ability to shift modalities between hard and soft focus, introduce the power of mental space and discover why some of your best ideas come to you in the shower. This is perhaps the most profound chapter of the entire series, where we dive deep into the neuroscience of creativity and help you discover the ability to do the deep thinking that will get you ahead in your career and your life. 

The most successful people know the power of high quality rest and sleep. Downtime is a critical part of being a consistent high performer and crucial for showing up with the right mindset and resilience. In this chapter you’ll learn the latest science of sleep and how to optimize yourself and your environment to achieve high quality restoration. You’ll build a wind down ritual that completes the cycle that started with your morning routine, and ensures you get the quality and quantity of rest your body and your brain needs to be ultra high performing. Lastly you’ll learn about the science of nature’s greatest productivity hack: naps. 

Throughout this program you’ll have developed new habits, practices and routines throughout your morning, work day and evening that you’ve been adding to your calendar each week. In this level, you’ll bring it all together with the Nature of Work Calendar (aka the NOW Calendar), which will help you protect your time, set targets for your focus sessions and ensure you’re building in sufficient mental rests throughout the day to stay in peak performance mode. You’ll learn about the power of ritual and routine for unlocking the brain’s natural ability to be creative and productive and create your personalized rituals and routines.