Home featured Advice Featured Hot Tips Advice Awake at work: Best strategies for sustainable energy & productivity Guest Author October 28, 2015 You want to feel alert, fresh and awake at work. You are hoping to feel energised and focused throughout the day. Yet by 2pm your energy sags. You still have several meetings in the hours ahead. You order another coffee and keep going, all the while feeling increasingly depleted. The demands, the deadlines and expectations together with the intense pace, may often leave you feeling exhausted. You wonder whether sustaining an optimal performance is just an elusive dream. “Faster, bigger, more and more.” This ethos of market economies over the last hundred years is grounded in a totally misguided notion: “The assumption that as humans we operate in a linear and sustainable fashion. “The reality is that we are not designed to run like a computer; continuously at high speed for long periods of time. Humans are not linear,” explains Jim Loer and Tony Shwartz in “The Power of Full Engagement.” Our bodies and our brains function rhythmically. Brief periods of recovery and restoration are essential for peak performance. The human battery must be recharged. Annual leave is great, so too are the weekends. However in order to be truly awake at all levels, the need for renewal is far more immediate and is in fact a daily prerequisite. A new and growing body of scientific research data demonstrates that strategic renewal —boosts productivity, mental stamina, job performance