In a nut, here are the two points I want to get across with these graphs:
I think almost anyone would have a comparable experience if they were to drink more caffeine than they are used to. The amount of caffeine in a coffee is much greater than I’m accustomed to (4x as much, roughly, because I mostly drink green tea), and since my body isn’t accustomed to drinking so much caffeine, this no doubt contributed to my loss of productivity. But again, what goes up must come down, and I think on the whole, at least to me, the cost of drinking a cup of coffee was greater than its benefits: Coffee is definitely more stimulating (and fun) to drink, and it produces a huge productivity spike if you don’t over-caffeinate and get a case of the ‘coffee jitters’. For me, black tea was similarly rewarding.Ĭoffee was very different. In the case of green tea, the productivity you lose because of the crash (the light red area) is much smaller than the productivity you gain from the extra energy and focus that tea provides (the green area), which means you’ll get a net productivity gain from drinking green tea.
The crash you experience from green tea (if you experience one at all) is much much much much smaller than coffee, but it’s still there, for me at least. When caffeine clears its way out of your system, it can produce a caffeine ‘crash’. 2 It generally helps you focus better, and also helps your body with physical coordination. Caffeine quickly stimulates your central nervous system, reduces your physical fatigue, and restores alertness when you feel drowsy. There isn’t much science behind the productivity “baseline” below – it’s just an arbitrary, flat curve that I’ll show the affects of caffeine against.Īfter you drink a caffeinated beverage, caffeine gets to work quickly. I think everyone has a different productivity baseline (how productive they are without any outside stimulants). To observe how adding caffeine to my diet affected my focus and energy levels, I started by not drinking any caffeine at all for the first two days so I could have a baseline to compare other days to. Most of the popular ones are overloaded with sugar and are terrible for you, though there are some great ones out there.) (Unless you count energy drinks, which I purposely didn’t include. 1 If you’re looking for an energy boost, coffee has the biggest effects, and it’s no doubt the strongest. I usually drink a cup or two of green tea every day, and one or two coffees every week.Ī cup of green tea contains 25mg of caffeine, a cup of black tea contains 42mg, and a cup of brewed coffee contains 108mg, so coffee definitely packs the biggest punch out of the three beverages. Last week I mainly experimented with coffee, green tea, and black tea. Here’s what I learned! What I discovered experimenting with coffee and tea To measure how caffeine impacted my learning, I mainly observed how caffeine affected my energy and focus (it would have been difficult to measure information retention), and discovered a lot about how caffeine can affect your productivity. Last week I watched 70 hours of TED talks as a productivity experiment, and over the course of the experiment I deeply explored how caffeine helped, and hindered my ability to learn. To get as much energy out of caffeine as possible, don’t drink too much, drink lots of water, drink caffeine over a longer period of time (and wait a bit before your second cup), stay away from sugary energy drinks, don’t drink caffeine on an empty stomach (or first thing in the morning), and eat very well if you consume caffeine. Takeaway: Caffeine can make you a lot more productive, but only if you drink it right.
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