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Think of your most productive days:
- You sit down to work and what normally takes three hours, you finish in one.
- Your thinking is clear. Decisions come easily, and you move through your to-do list like it’s nothing.
- You set even bigger goals than you normally would, and somehow pull those off too.
Those days aren’t every day, of course, and researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough wanted to figure out what sets them apart.
The study, found in Science Advancestracked 184 students throughout 12 weeks — measuring cognitive sharpness daily through short performance tests, alongside goals, productivitymood, sleep, and workload.
Instead of comparing different people to each other, researchers compared each person to themselves across days, isolating what shifts from one day to the next.
What they found: The swing between subjects’ best and worst days amounted to an average of roughly 80 minutes of productive work, which means being above your baseline is worth about 40 extra minutes on any given day.
On sharp days, people set more ambitious goals and completed more of them. On foggy days, even routine tasks stalled.
“Some days everything just clicks, and on other days it feels like you’re pushing through fog,” explained lead researcher Cendri Hutchersonassociate professor of psychology at U of T Scarborough.
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