cooking

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity

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So grab a bottle of whisky, put your feet up with a burger and read this:

Think back to your most productive workday in the past week. Now ask yourself: On that afternoon, what did you have for lunch?

When we think about the factors that contribute to workplace performance, we rarely give much consideration to food. For those of us battling to stay on top of emails, meetings, and deadlines, food is simply fuel.

But as it turns out, this analogy is misleading. The foods we eat affect us more than we realize. With fuel, you can reliably expect the same performance from your car no matter what brand of unleaded you put in your tank. Food is different. Imagine a world where filling up at Mobil meant avoiding all traffic and using BP meant driving no faster than 20 miles an hour. Would you then be so cavalier about where you purchased your gas?

Food has a direct impact on our cognitive performance, which is why a poor decision at lunch can derail an entire afternoon.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (17 October 2014

Read the full piece.

Who cooks your breakfast at 5am?

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Nobody. What are you, mad?

I do this thing of getting up at 5am to work and I’ve mentioned it enough that last night I got into a conversation about how it works, specifically what my morning pattern is. And the key thing a friend wanted to know was whether my wife Angela also got up at 5am, whether she cooked me breakfast.

This is a friend and she wondered this: I cannot believe you have given my morning routine a single thought but if she’s wondered this, maybe you have too and I really can’t leave you thinking Angela has to do this stupid thing just because I have to do this stupid thing.

I’m up at five and I shower and I do make some tea, naturally, but then I’m straight to the keyboard and I am working. Around 7am, maybe 8am on some days, Angela will get up and I will cook breakfast for us both.

I feel I’m wasting your time telling you this but the slightest possibility that you’d think I’m off here in fairyland pretending to be an early morning writer while Angela suffers, I can’t bear that. Shudder.

Now, since you’ve got me on the subject, I am ravenous. Wait while I phone Angela up and ask what she’s made me for lunch.

Shudder 2.