A recently published study led by Assistant Professor Ze (Mia) Zhu in the Texas A&M University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences looked into workers’ resilience – their ability to adapt to work stress and continue working toward daily goals – to examine how high work stress effected productivity later in the day.
The researchers conducted surveys to assess 108 employees’ resilience and work goal progress throughout the day. For five days, each participant received a survey near the start of their workday, a second survey two hours later and a third near the end of the workday.
The study found that getting hard tasks done first does not work for everyone. For people with low trait resilience, starting their workday with high work stress negatively impacts their resilience, impairing their goal-attainment process for the remainder of the day.
“The widely endorsed productivity strategies – such as tackling the most difficult tasks first – may not be equally effective for all employees,” Zhu said.