Staying Productive Under Pressure: How to Manage Stress Without Sacrificing Performance By David Maltman
Stress is, sadly, often viewed a cost of doing business, or as part of modern-day life. But, when left unchecked, it weakens decision-making, can quash creativity, and increases the likelihood of burnout.
“If you’re worried about your work/life balance, you’re missing the point. There is just life and your work is part of your life. That’s it.”
Balancing productivity with wellbeing isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s a must have.
Drawing on insights from stress management, productivity science, and practical workplace tools, this article outlines how individuals and leaders alike can mitigate stress without compromising results.
The Productivity-Stress Paradox
In modern workplaces, people are constantly stretched by conflicting demands: we’re expected to be responsive but take time to reflect; to get quick results but focus on the long-term; to do more with less or get more done in less time. The result is the productivity-stress paradox, where high productivity is pursued at the expense of our sustained wellbeing.
Stress becomes counterproductive when it leads to emotional exhaustion, detachment, or feelings of ineffectiveness. The effects aren’t just personal, they’re economic too; research from Gallup indicates that employees who experience burnout are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 2.6 times more likely to actively seek a new job.[1]
Exploring the paradox a bit further, we know that some stress is a good thing. Good stress (also known as eustress) pushes you out of your comfort zone, but in a good way like riding a rollercoaster or exercising. Good stress motivates us and helps us to grow, develop and get stronger. But if you were stuck on the rollercoaster for hours or had to do a punishing workout every day for a month, it wouldn’t seem like much fun, would it?
What makes this a paradox is that if there’s not enough stress then nothing will happen, we’ll just stay as we are. If there’s too much, we might start to break down and run into burnout.
Everyone experiences stress differently and each of us has a different, unique sweet spot where the level of stress is just right.
Finding that sweet spot might be easy enough, but managing to stay within it (and supporting others within it) can be much more difficult.
The key lies in learning to differentiate healthy, productive stress from chronic, negative stress and building habits and systems that allow people to operate in the former, not the latter.
Three Foundations for Sustainable Productivity
In our work over the past several years, we’ve found three interdependent foundations for sustained, healthy performance:
Raising Self-Awareness: Monitor Before You Manage
As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Awareness is the first defence against burnout.
Energy audits, mood tracking, and stress check-ins are practical tools to identify early warning signs. McKinsey have a helpful model which distinguishes between different manifestations of stress and we’ve found it a useful way of understanding what’s draining your battery, certainly in the very early stages of exploring how stress affects us.
Tools such as the Stress Container[2] can also help visualise how pressures accumulate and overflow when our coping strategies are insufficient or underutilized.
Leaders, especially, should model self-awareness openly. One cultural shift which pays huge dividends is simply acknowledging our personal limits and sharing them – this can legitimise similar, helpful behaviours in our teams and colleagues.
2. Setting and Managing Boundaries: Protect the Golden Hours
One of the most consistent insights from productivity research (and from our lived experience) is that not all hours are created equal, and that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Protecting time for deep work (cognitively demanding tasks requiring focus) is critical. We recommend identifying your own Golden Hour (the time of day when mental clarity is highest) and guarding it with your life. For some, this is first thing in the morning and for others, it might be in the evening or even at weekends.
It’s also important to establish clear boundaries around your day, the working day should have an endpoint and, ideally, one that suits you. Burnout thrives where boundaries blur. Evening email bans, digital detoxes, or simple shutdown rituals can restore control and reduce that “always on” feeling.
In practice, boundaries need to be more than just a nice idea. They must be routinised and socially reinforced by sharing with those you work with – particularly in hybrid or remote settings where the lines can become easily blurred and we might be more inclined to work longer hours or eat into our personal time.
3. Recovery: Build (and Rebuild) Resilience
The third pillar is often neglected when thinking about performance and productivity. Stress is not always the problem – a lack of sufficient recovery can also turn stress from challenge into threat.
Micro-breaks, active rest (e.g. a short walk), and mindfulness are simple but under-utilised practices. In high-demand roles, even 10 minutes of meaningful recovery per hour can have a measurable impact on cognitive stamina. More than anything, we recommend improving sleep hygiene as being the best ROI when it comes to wellbeing and stress reduction.
We’ve found the following graphic to be very helpful in illustrating when stress might be becoming too much. You can hear it in the language people use when, at one end of the scale, they talk about being “too comfortable” (boreout) and at the other end when they start to say things like they’re “a bit stretched” or that they’re “feeling the strain” – often these are clear signs that stress is a bit too high and we would benefit from some time off or, at least, time away from the pressures of the working day/week.
Organisations should approach recovery not as a cost, but as an investment and one that pays dividends in the short, medium and long-term. Encouraging regular time away from work (and ensuring it’s taken guilt-free) is essential for sustainable productivity.
Conclusion: Designing for Resilience, Not Just Results
Productivity and stress management are not opposing forces. When managed carefully and mindfully, they create a performance environment that is both productive and humane.
For leaders, the opportunity lies in (re)shaping workplace norms and culture: encouraging and embedding reflection rather than just promoting or discussing it, protecting time for focused (deep) work, and normalising recovery as a metric of success.
For individuals, the challenge is personal and practical: know your limits, design your day, and invest in your own resilience, because even the most ambitious goals aren’t worth chasing if they cost your health to reach.
For reflection:
What’s one boundary you need to enforce more clearly in your working week?
When is your Golden Hour — and how consistently do you protect it?
Who on your team is showing signs of productive stress, and who may be silently burning out?
If you’d like to find out more about how we help our clients balance productivity and stress management:
[1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/237059/employee-burnout-part-main-causes.aspx
[2] https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/safety/documents/health/health-stress-container-exercise.pdf