How to Be The Most Productive You Can Be - Portal Gems #35

Est. Read time: 4 min
Edition Number: 35
Adapted from: Managing Time for Productivity
Instructor: Ustadh Mohammed Al-Mathil

Assalamu Alaykum,

Today’s gem is from Ustadh Mohammed Al-Mathil’s course, Managing Time for Productivity. In this gem, Ustadh Mohammed was asked a question from a student that was having trouble concentrating later in the day and in the evening, so he shares an analogy to illustrate when we’re most productive.

Hope you enjoy!

We begin in the Name of Allah ﷻ, the Most Merciful and Compassionate,
We ask that He ﷻ sends Peace and Blessings upon our noble and beloved
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

Let me try to break down the research for you as quickly as possible.

You see, it’s not easy to focus at night. Although there are exceptions depending on how people have built their routines, their sleep time, their food intake, and everything else. In general if you’re a person that sleeps at night and wakes up in the morning, it’s harder to study at night. Studying is a mentally taxing, mentally demanding activity. It requires the usage of your prefrontal cortex. It requires the usage of multiple regions of your brain to process information, to understand information, to retain information, to memorize information, to recall information. In short, it’s mentally demanding.

Think of it like your phone. When you fully charge it at night and you wake up in the morning it’s 100% charged, right? Let’s assume later on in the day, you have 1% left, and then you try to open a video or something that requires a lot of space and a lot of power, the phone dies because it doesn’t have any juice left. There’s no power to be able to fulfill that task that you want at that time.

Now your brain at night, in a way, gets rejuvenated and recharged. Your brain resets at night, and it actually processes what you learned the day before. It creates connections and neural pathways that didn’t exist before - it’s almost like you’re charging your brain.

When you wake up in the morning, your brain’s “charge” is at 100%, which means you can memorize better, you can think better, you can analyze better, you can problem solve better, you can do deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, all of that you can do so much better because you’re at 100%.

And then when your brain is at 20% later on in the day or 10% later on in the day and you’re trying to study, it just doesn’t match. That’s why you’ll struggle. Maybe what takes you 10 minutes to memorize early in the morning will take you one hour later on in the day. Why? Because your brain doesn’t have enough juice for that time of the day.

That’s why we start to yawn a lot more. We start to tear or start to get distracted. We look at the page, and we feel disoriented, and it’s blurry in some cases.

Try to match the task and what it requires from cognitive power and energy with your mental and physical energy. And then shift them accordingly. Some things in the morning, some things in the afternoon. Take a look at your energy levels and adjust accordingly. For example, if in the afternoon, my energy level dips a little bit, then here is the right task that I’m going to put in my schedule for that particular time slot.

At night I’m feeling low mentally and physically so I’m going to schedule things that aren’t as important: checking email, checking social media, going for a short walk, etc. Don’t schedule high intensity training for the night when you don’t have the energy.

And each one of us here is different. Look at it for yourself and then match the task with the mental and physical energy. May Allah grant us Tawfiq to make the most of our time and energy.

أقول قولي هذا وأستغفر الله لي ولكم، فاستغفروه إنه هو الغفور الرحيم

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