You’d think if you met the executive productivity advisor at Google, she’d give you endless tips on how to go, go, go, right? Well, yes—but also, Laura Mae Martin knows the power of slowing down, too.
If you feel the least bit guilty about your summer vacation, listen to Martin, who knows what she’s talking about: you not only deserve downtime, you need it to be your best self at work and home.
That’s the premise of Martin’s 2024 book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing, which makes the case for downtime—relaxed time away from work—so that one’s uptime when you are productive and firing on all cylinders can be even more effective.
When I ask Martin over Zoom if, as an executive productivity advisor, she feels pressure to always be productive, she says, “I actually try to showcase that I’m not always churning out and grinding because I know that, long-term, that’s not going to make me the most productive. So I try to be an example of that to teammates, like, ‘Hey, I’m really going to unplug on vacation,’ or I can tell that I’m not doing my best work, so I’m just going to take a walk and think about something.”
“I try to actually not be the person who’s like, ‘Oh, I’m checking all these things off my list,’” she continues. “My best ideas [come] on that little walk break. So yeah, it’s a little of the opposite.”
In Martin’s words, she describes uptime as “in the way that a computer is in uptime—its runtime, the time that it’s producing output and it’s in that zone, working properly, operational—so, for you, it’s that same zone. Some people say it’s rare, but it’s that time when you’re like, ‘Wow. I’m really feeling at my best. I’m firing on all fronts. I’m balanced. I’m feeling like I’m doing personal work and work work, and I just am coming up with good ideas and I’m in that zone and I have it going on productivity wise.’”
A cornerstone of quality uptime? Quality downtime. Whenever Martin does a big speaking event, she asks the crowd to raise their hands if the best place they think of ideas is on a walk, in the shower, during a workout. “And then I say, ‘What about in your ninth back-to-back-to-back meeting of the day?’” Martin says. “Crickets. Nobody’s raising their hands.”
“If we’re in the meeting, we’re not really having our best ideas about the meeting,” she adds. “And so that downtime is giving a chance for your brain to soak.” She continues that when downtime is effectively used, “You’re having better ideas,” and, that while downtime is about rest, but also “When you take that rest, you’re coming back with your best creativity, your best ideas—and maybe something you were going to spend five hours on, you took 10 minutes to decompress and you got an idea that you’ll now only spend an hour on,” she says. “And so, overall, that 10 minutes was worth it. It’s a really important part of longevity.”
Don’t get me wrong—Uptime has plenty of productivity hacks, like her famous laundry method of email, how to treat your time like a bank account, the five Cs of productivity. How to be efficient on email and in meetings. How to make an effective to do list. But Martin’s favorite part of her book is where she talks about not just downtime, but how “things like meditation plays so much into your overall ability to get things done, and the idea that you’re focused on the things that really matter to you, not the things that you think you’re supposed to be focused on, or learning how to say no to the things that you’re on the fence about,” she says. “And so that aspect—the wellbeing aspect of productivity—I feel like it makes the difference in the book because there’s a million productivity books, but I think really marrying those two and saying, ‘Yes, you can have both, you should have both, and that’s actually how they feed off of each other.’”
These are the new rules of productivity, Martin says; embracing, for example, the power of an unplanned day, which she realizes gives so many people “anxiety just hearing that”: “I even say you can plan, just plan to relax all day,” she tells me. “I’ve literally added things like relax to my calendar.”
While the aforementioned 10-minute breaks are great, really getting “in that full unplugged zone, having something like a full day of saying, ‘I’m not even going to check my email even once’” is also critical. Giving ourselves a full day—even a full week—to totally unplug “and just let your brain kind of soak in anything that you’ve been meaning to think about, and giving yourself that quiet space to do so is both relaxing in the sense that you don’t have to be doing anything with your brain in that alpha mode, but you also will probably end up thinking about things that you’ve been meaning to solve or wanting to work through,” Martin says. That true downtime will only fuel true uptime when you return to the grind.
The new way of productivity, Martin says, “is saying, ‘What do I need to accomplish? What’s important to me? What’s the best time to do it? What’s the best way to get the best results?’ And let me set up my schedule within the confines of what I need to do at work and where I need to be, but let me do that in a way that has me get the most done and do it the best way.”
Martin’s foray into productivity work came naturally. She started her career at Google in sales but quickly carved out a niche as a productivity expert. She never started researching productivity, she tells me, but, as her sister would say, Martin was always this way—in her words, “trying to think, ‘How can I do this?’ Whether it was baking cookies or doing work emails, I always just wanted to take the things that I had to do and do them in the best way in limited time so that I could get on to the things that I want to do.”
“And so it’s just saying, how do you take the things you need to do, do them efficiently, feel good about them and have better ideas and then have that time to do what you want to do with it,” she says.
At Google, she does one-on-one coaching with executives and runs the Productivity at Google program, a scalable program where Martin runs trainings about topics like time management and email management. She also sends out a weekly productivity newsletter that reaches over 50,000 employees. Uptime, her book, allows her to take her work to the masses even outside of Google.
“When I start my coaching sessions, I’ll ask them, ‘If you had an extra hour of your day, what would you do with it?’” she tells me. “And I call that kind of the cusp, the productivity goal. It’s like the thing you’re not doing every day that you wish you were doing.” That’s the starting point, Martin says: that extra hour. Finding that one hour pocket of time and seeing those she coaches happier because of it is “really what keeps me going,” she says. She wanted to write a book “so that people could have better days,” adding that when she does her coaching work or teaches courses and people come back to her and tell her that they’re more efficient, that’s when she knows that she’s found the work she’s meant to do.
So yes, Martin is a productivity expert, but really, she says, her work gives people permission to design their own lives—to find out what really matters to them and to build a life they’re proud of.
“Whether it’s permission to say no, focusing on what you want to do, permission to take your own wellbeing into consideration, to be in the right meetings and not be in the wrong meetings and design your day to capitalize on your own productivity,” she tells me. “I guess the ultimate bottom line would be that actually designing your life at work and outside of work, it benefits not only you, but actually the people around you, because you’re operating at your best.”