Intense work requires that you ratchet up the level of time, attention, and focus to a task or project.
There’s no time for distractions. Your use of time becomes more efficient. Your attention to detail is magnified – you see more details and you see each one more clearly.
Immersing yourself in the problem totally provides a new, more comprehensive viewpoint and a deeper understanding. And you get more done. Much more. More than you thought.
Then, you ratchet back down to work on something else. And this other thing that seemed like a lot of hard work not so long ago, suddenly seems much easier.
Not only does getting intense once in a while help to get something done (and probably at a higher quality level), it can make regular work seem easy.
Getting intense is worth doing. Regularly.
Photo credit: gustaffo89
One of the best ways to get physically fit is through high-intensity interval training. The studies are pretty clear on this. Intervals of short, but really hard all-out efforts with longer, moderate efforts in between yield the best results. In one recent study, cyclists who did interval training totaling just 20 minutes of high-intensity work over two weeks increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who did 10 hours of moderate-paced work over the same time period.