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- #236: Study reveals why the brain 'zones out' when you're exhausted
#236: Study reveals why the brain 'zones out' when you're exhausted
Time Management Is Broken. Here's How to Fix It.
Jenae Spry
November 21, 2025
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
(Formerly Productivity Express)
Issue No. 236
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
Study reveals why the brain 'zones out' when you're exhausted
10 YouTube SEO Best Practices for Founders in 2025
Time Management Is Broken. Here's How to Fix It.
Google Calendar can finally block off time without faking a meeting
NotebookLM made my creative blocks disappear — by letting me remix my own brain
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
I have a "love hate" relationship with this quote.
Sometimes we are good (even great) at multiple things but it doesn't mean that we love all those things. Hell, we might even be great at something that we hate or lose interest in.
Now on to the part I love about this!
As business owners, one of the best pieces of productivity advice I can give is to […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
Those moments when you're reading the same sentence for the fifth time and still can't process it? Your sleep-deprived brain is literally trying to fall asleep while you're awake. This new MIT study reveals exactly what's happening in your brain during those attention failures.
"When you have attention failures … you have this fluid being flushed out of your brain, and when you regain attention, when you begin to respond to stimuli again, this fluid is flowing back into the brain. Those are things that we don't usually think about as being tightly locked in time — your ability to pay attention to the world and then basic fluid movement in the brain."
Key Insights:
Your exhausted brain mimics sleep patterns while you're awake. Researchers found that when sleep-deprived people zoned out, their brains showed the same cerebrospinal fluid flows and slow brain waves normally reserved for the first stages of non-REM sleep.
The physical signs are unmistakable. Large CSF pulses, massive blood flow changes, and pupil dilation all work together during attention failures, creating a measurable pattern that scientists can now track in real time.
The severity matters for daily life. While the study used 24 hours of total sleep deprivation to create clear results, these same patterns occur at smaller scales when you lose just a few hours of sleep, which is why even moderately bad nights impact your work performance.
Read the full article for the complete explanation of how CSF flow, pupil changes, and brain waves interact during exhaustion, plus what this means for future treatments. And check out our previous article New Study: "Right Sleep" Might Trump More Sleep for insights on why your ideal sleep duration might not be the standard 8 hours.
⚙️ Optimization
YouTube isn't just for influencers anymore. As AI makes written content easier to produce, video is becoming the differentiation point for small businesses. If you've been thinking about YouTube but worried it requires a massive production budget, this comprehensive guide breaks down exactly how to make the platform work as a lead generation machine without hiring a video team.
"YouTube SEO is a system of interconnected signals. A brilliant title fails without a compelling thumbnail. High watch time is irrelevant if your keywords are attracting the wrong audience. Every element, from your video description and tags to your playlist structure and engagement prompts, works in concert to signal your video's relevance and value to the YouTube algorithm."
Key Insights:
Intent-based keywords outperform volume every time. Instead of chasing "cold email," target "how to set up an Apollo.io cold email sequence" to attract qualified leads actively seeking your specific solution. These long-tail keywords face less competition and convert better because they capture people at the exact moment they need help.
Your first 60 minutes of optimization matter most. The article provides a tactical 60-minute workflow starting with auditing your top 5 videos by impressions, identifying the one with the lowest click-through rate, and redesigning its thumbnail and title. This single action can dramatically improve an underperforming video the algorithm already wants to show.
Transcripts are searchable gold that most creators ignore. Uploading accurate captions or SRT files allows YouTube to index every word you speak, meaning your video can rank for specific phrases mentioned 20 minutes into your content. This turns your entire script into discoverable metadata beyond just titles and descriptions.
Read the full article for the complete 10-strategy framework, including detailed implementation checklists for thumbnail design, playlist organization, engagement tactics, and the exact formulas for titles that drive clicks while maintaining SEO value.
⏲️ Time Management
Running your own business means juggling client work, admin tasks, marketing, and putting out fires—often all in the same day. Most productivity advice treats time management like a one-size-fits-all solution, but that rigid approach is exactly why you've tried five different systems and abandoned them all within a week.
"One of the most striking findings is that despite decades of research, there is still no universally accepted definition of time management. The review analyzed 107 studies published between 2006 and 2021. Almost half of the 86 peer-reviewed papers in the sample did not clearly define what 'time management' meant before measuring or intervening. That means many time management tips, training programs, and even scientific articles might be talking about completely different things."
Key Insights:
Your personality determines which strategies will actually work for you. Research across 30,000+ participants found that highly conscientious people excel with time blocking and strict scheduling, while extraverted and open personality types benefit more from flexible goal-focused approaches. This explains why Getting Things Done works brilliantly for some people and feels suffocating to others—they're different brains requiring different systems.
Effective time management requires three components working together: intentional time allocation toward specific goals, regular self-monitoring of what's working, and built-in adaptation when priorities shift. The most successful approaches combine planning, prioritization, and periodic self-review rather than relying on a single tactic like making better to-do lists.
Your system must account for the unpredictable reality of running a business. Research shows people in high-autonomy roles with frequent interruptions only maintain productivity when they build explicit contingency planning and backup time blocks into their schedules. This means intentionally leaving open chunks in your calendar for handling the client emergency, tech meltdown, or sewage flood that will inevitably derail your perfect plan.
Read the full article for the complete breakdown of evidence-based strategies, including how age and work context affect which approaches succeed, why most time management training fails long-term, and the Build the Bucket framework for making changes that actually stick instead of lasting just one week.
💻 Tools & Technology
If you've ever created a fake meeting just to protect focus time on your calendar, Google finally gets it. The new Tasks feature update lets you block off time for actual work and mark yourself as busy without pretending you're in a meeting with yourself or creating workarounds that make your schedule look ridiculous.
"The latest feature update for Google Calendar allows you to block off time for tasks and mark yourself as busy, all in one place, expanding the existing Tasks feature in Calendar. It's something Workspace users have been specifically requesting and effectively allows tasks to function like meetings, including options to set (and adjust) a specific block of time, turn on 'do not disturb,' and automatically reject meeting requests."
Key Insights:
Tasks now function like actual calendar blocks with protective features. You can set specific time blocks, enable do not disturb mode, and automatically reject meeting requests—essentially treating your focused work time with the same respect as client meetings. This means no more fake "Busy - Do Not Schedule" events cluttering your calendar.
The update bridges the gap between task management and time blocking. Unlike Google's existing "Focus Time" feature which just creates generic blocks, this lets you assign time to specific tasks, see exactly what you should be working on during each block, and track completion all in one view.
It's rolling out gradually across all account types. The feature started appearing for Rapid Release Workspace domains on November 6th but could take until mid-December to reach all Workspace customers, individual subscribers, and personal Gmail accounts. You can access it by clicking any empty calendar block and selecting "Task" from the options.
Read the full article for details on how the feature compares to Outlook's similar functionality, the limitation on deadline times (you can only set dates), and step-by-step instructions for testing it out in your own Google Calendar..
🤖 AI
Those moments when you know you've written something useful before but can't find it across your scattered notes, voice memos, and half-finished drafts? Your best ideas aren't missing—they're buried under everything else you've created. NotebookLM, Google's AI research assistant, turns that chaotic archive into a pattern-recognition engine that surfaces connections you didn't know existed.
"After uploading all my notes and essays, I asked NotebookLM a deliberately vague question: 'What themes keep appearing in my writing?' The response was incredibly coherent. It surfaced four major threads that kept re-emerging across everything I'd written, often months apart, and often without me realizing it. The difference between this and using search or tags in other apps: NotebookLM wasn't finding keyword matches. It was identifying conceptual overlap. When I searched my notes for 'AI' manually, I got six results. When NotebookLM analyzed thematic connections, it pulled quotes from 11 different sources, including notes that never used those exact words but were clearly wrestling with the same underlying tension."
Key Insights:
Creative blocks often come from having too much material, not too little. The writer uploaded 40+ files spanning a year of scattered thoughts, and NotebookLM revealed four recurring themes threading through everything—patterns that weren't visible when reviewing notes individually. This matters because breakthrough ideas typically emerge when disparate concepts collide, not from single isolated notes.
The AI becomes a creative partner by reframing your own work back to you. When asked to brainstorm article angles, NotebookLM suggested "What if you wrote about how productivity tools create the anxiety they claim to solve?" by pulling from multiple complaints about Notion templates, Obsidian linking, and Todoist guilt. The writer turned this synthesis into three published articles in one week, all sourced entirely from existing notes.
Audio Overviews create psychological distance that breaks mental loops. NotebookLM generates podcast-style discussions between two AI hosts analyzing your sources, which sounds gimmicky until you hear your half-formed ideas debated out loud. This external perspective helps you spot obvious next steps that stay invisible when you're stuck inside your own head.
Read the full article for the complete workflow on uploading source material, examples of how NotebookLM's "useful mistakes" force clarity in your thinking, and why mining your own archive beats chasing trending topics for sustainable content creation.
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Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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