If you’re into hyper-optimization, the findings of a new study published in Science Advances will probably be a revelation. If you’re a little more cynical, then you’ll probably ugly snort laugh when you hear that researchers have found that when your brain is at absolute peak performance, when you’re mentally firing on all cylinders like a high-performance sports car tuned to the apex of its abilities, you’ll only squeeze out around an extra 40 minutes of productivity in your day.
Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough tracked 184 students over 12 weeks, measuring daily cognitive performance through mental tasks and comparing that data to whether the participants achieved the goals they set for themselves. Instead of comparing people to each other, the researchers looked at fluctuations within each individual.
They found that most of us swing between sharper and foggier days, and that those swings matter quite a bit regarding how much we can accomplish in a day.
On days when they were really on the ball, operating at a mental peak, participants completed the equivalent of about 40 extra minutes of work. On days where they were seriously dragging ass, or to put it more scientifically, low-acuity days, they lost roughly the same amount. That creates as much as an 80-minute gap between your best and worst days, nearly an hour and ½ of difference without radically changing your schedule, workload, or who you are fundamentally as a human being.
Enter the Intention-Behavior Gap
In a statement released on the University of Toronto Scarborough website, Lead researcher Cendri Hutcherson said that the team wanted to understand why some days “everything just clicks,” while other days it feels like your brain is trudging through mud. The study focused on what psychologists call the “intention-behavior gap,” which is the distance between our daily aspirations and the harsh reality of what we can actually accomplish.
The gap between the two was narrowed by the degree of mental sharpness a participant experiences on any given day. They were not only more likely to complete tasks on sharper days, but they also set more ambitious goals, as compared to ass-dragging days, when even routine day-to-day responsibilities were a slog to complete.
You might argue that individual personality traits like self-control likely play a big role in this, and you would only be partially correct. They had some influence on overall performance averages, but they didn’t fully shield anyone from the occasional wild cognitive swing.
The researchers also looked into the factors that influence these good and bad cognitive traits today. While it doesn’t claim direct causation, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the usual culprits are at play, including sleep quality, stress management, and the management of depressive symptoms.
All of this is to say that this study found that everyone has off days. Who’d a thunk it?
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