2018年考研英語閱讀第四篇文章來源於2017年6月13日BBC網站上一篇名為Why you should manage your energy not your time的文章，網址如下：http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170612-why-you-should-manage-your-energy-not-your-time。鑑於此，文都考研教學研究院教研中心再次強烈建議有意參加2019考研的同學們，無論是基於切實提高自身英語閱讀能力的目的還是基於考研英語取得佳績的目的，都應該在日常學習過程中，廣泛涉獵英美核心期刊雜誌以及網站， 如The Guardian(《衛報》)，The Economics(《經濟學人》)，Scientific American(《科學美國人》)，Newsweek(《新聞周刊》)，The Times(《泰晤士報》)等等。希望同學們通過精讀與泛讀相結合的方式提升自己的英語閱讀理解水平，只有做到知己知彼，方能百戰百勝，無往而不利。回歸到2018考研英語二閱讀第四篇，以下為其英文原文完整版呈現：
By Madeleine Dore
13 June 2017
For ten years, Lisa Congdon’s days were packed like a 「can of sardines.」 Juggling between five and 20 projects at any one time, the artist and author, based in Portland, Oregon in the US, tried to squeeze as much into her daily work schedule as she could.
Finally, in the tenth year of her career, she started to have physical symptoms as a result of the stress – chronic back pain, upper neck pain and headaches.
「I was waking up with anxiety, feeling a sense of tension in the pit of my stomach, and I had trouble sleeping,」 she says.
Many of us will have had that sense of there just not being enough hours in the day to do everything we need to do. Tasks that should take only a few minutes can stretch into hours, all while other work mounts up.
For most, the solution is to work later into the evening or even over the weekend, which leaves many of us feeling exhausted, stressed and burned out. But what if working less were the key to getting more done?
The time management myth
Previously, Congdon would often work from eight in the morning until seven at night without a break.
It’s an easy trap to fall into – it’s drilled into us that working solidly for eight or more hours will increase our output and impress our colleagues and managers. But in reality, even the traditional nine-to-five workday is not conducive to productivity.
A workplace study found an average working professional experiences 87 interruptions per day, making it difficult to remain productive and focused for a full day.
Knowing something had to give, Congdon began to adjust her approach to work and restructured her day to achieve the same amount of output, without working around the clock. She decided to split her day into fewer 45-minute segments, and aimed to maximise her productivity within those strict time sessions.
The key to maintaining focus and energy in shorter bursts was to apply flexibility to those segments – she could use some for exercise, some for meditation, some for work. Getting rest within her workday helped lower stress levels and therefore achieve better results within the allotted time for working, Congdon found.
This makes sense in the light of research that has found our productivity has less to do with the amount of hours we squeeze out of the working day, and more to do with the rest we have.
In 2014, the social networking company The Draugiem Group used a time-tracking productivity app to study what habits set their most productive employees apart.
Working for show, it seems, is also futile. A study of consultants by Boston University’s School of Business found that managers could not tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to.
Deflecting distraction
To combat the trap of putting such a premium on being busy, Newport recommends building a habit of 『deep work』 – the ability to focus without distraction.
There are a number of approaches to mastering the art of deep work – be it lengthy retreats dedicated to a specific task; developing a daily ritual; or taking a 『journalistic』 approach to seizing moments of deep work when you can throughout the day. Whichever approach, the key is to determine your length of focus time and stick to it.
Newport also recommends 『deep scheduling』 to combat constant interruptions and get more done in less time. 「At any given point, I should have deep work scheduled for roughly the next month. Once on the calendar, I protect this time like I would a doctor’s appointment or important meeting,」 he writes.
Another approach to getting more done in less time is to rethink how you prioritise your day – in particular how we craft our to-do lists. Tim Harford, author of Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, points to a study in the early 1980s that divided undergraduates into two groups: some were advised to set out monthly goals and study activities; others were told to plan activities and goals in much more detail, day by day.
While the researchers assumed that the well-structured daily plans would be most effective when it came to the execution of tasks, they were wrong: the detailed daily plans demotivated students. Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective, while leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results.
In order to make the most of our focus and energy, we also need to embrace downtime, or as Newport suggests, 「be lazy.」
「Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body… [idleness] is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done,」 he argues.