EPTI wanted to share this video with you, which I found on YouTube a long time ago. It is a one hour session at the Google HQ, in which a guy named Tony Schwartz talks about work, energy expenditure and energy recovery.
It is something which could be pretty interesting to most of us. We all have activities in life which expend energy, and I think this video helps us understand how our energy levels and our mentality influence our performance. This could be especially interesting for those who play Starcraft, or any other game, or who do sports competitively and strife to be among the best.
The reason why I put this into health & fitness is, that it a) is related to our body and our fitness and b) is based on data gathered in cooperation with professional sports athletes.
Without further ado
I hope you can take something from this video, and maybe you want to share your opinion on what Tony has to say and what you make of it.
Just as an aside, I scored 12/18 in the test. You will understand it, once you watch the video.
Edit:
On June 11 2012 23:06 Autofire2 wrote:
I think it would help if you sort of summarized the gist of the advice, few people will go through a long youtube vid without even having some idea of what it's saying
I think it would help if you sort of summarized the gist of the advice, few people will go through a long youtube vid without even having some idea of what it's saying
I took a few notes and tried to explain the gist of it in my own words (with the help of some quotes and Mr. Schwartz terminology).
Tony Schwartz says that in our life we have a certain demand (internal and external) and a certain capacity to deal with it. With age the demand keeps rising, while at age 30 the capacity to do stuff starts declining.
He says that capacity is not the amount of time we can expend on an activity, but the amount of energy we can put into it. The quality of work thus becomes the amount of energy spent. Energy also is a valuable we actually can influence, while that is not possible with time.
There are four sources of energy:
1 Physical: Quantity of Energy. The base energy. Consists of four components, nutrition, fitness, sleep and recovery (day-time equivalent of sleep).
2 Emotional: Quality of Energy. Influences how well you perform, lead and interact with others.
3 Mental: Focus of Energy. We do our most effect work, focusing on one thing at a time.
4 The Human Spirit: Purpose. Alignment of what you say is important in your life and how you live.
Schwartz says that we have four different energy states.
1 We got high energy, positive emotion which is the performance zone. The perfect state, where we feel great about what we do and how we do it. We perform to our maximum.
2 We got high energy, negative emotion which is the survival zone. Something from evolution which is activated in situations of imminent danger (i.e. A fire breaks out in the place we are at.). This is something we feel when we face deadlines, get pushed around or feel pressure by our boss.
3 We got low energy, positive emotion which is the recovery zone. Schwartz says this is the zone which is taboo in our modern society. We would call it slacking, but it actually should be the periods of recovery during work.
4 We got low energy, negative emotion which is the burnout zone. Should be self-explaining.
During the day we have regular intervals in our energy. We have phases of high performance and concentration and phases where we need to recover. Those phases occur in 90-120 minute intervals. Schwartz says they are pretty equal to the phases we go through during sleep, with a full sleeping cycle adding to our overall recovery.
He then goes on to explain how important it is to learn to recover during the day after phases of high performance and energy expenditure. He does a comparison here: In our current state we see ourselves as marathon runners, where we expend a steady amount of energy and keep it at that for the longest time. But he says that it would be the wrong way, because our body is not designed to work that way. What he advices us to do is to model our energy expenditure after the image of a sprinter, where we expend a high amount of energy in a short amount of time, and where we have a time for recovery immediately after.
