As a professional translator, I generally think it quite fun to dig out the littel secrets of those foreign texts because it feels like playing detective game. For me, a thoroughly digested piece of new knowledge is just like refreshment.

However, the little joy could be spoiled by tight deadlines (which is exactly why one should not ask one’s hobby for paycheck). Chased by time stress, the mind would start behave like someone hit by ADHD, screaming “do something now” instead of trying to find out what the something should be.

This hyper-motivation harms (instead of improves) productivity, which is evident when one finds out, at the end of a full week, that he/she had accomplished what should had only taken five days.

I believe this is due to the self-protection mechanism of the brain. When our brain is hyper-stressed, the subconcious mind begin to step in, distracting the mind from the damaging task. We can realize this when our mind just couldn’t stop thinking about the everything except the work (which is the source of stress). As a result, efficiency drops.

The work-around is simple – stop struggling against the subconcious mind, let it finish its self-regulating job. A few work-outs such as Yoga wouldn’t take more than five minutes, but would make all the difference.