Most would agree the Holy Grail of the workplace is to increase productivity while reducing stress . . . but is that possible? The more work a person does, the more stress it creates, right? Not necessarily. Carl Pullein says the trick is to compartmentalize tasks—to organize work mentally and spatially so that tasks don’t overlap. “In a productivity sense, what it means is that you actually treat different types of work that you have to do as if you have separate rooms,” Pullein said. Each day, Pullein blocks out time on his calendar for what he calls “deep work.” This is an uninterrupted time where he focuses on only one task, whether it’s video editing or writing a blog post. His email is turned off and his phone is on silent. “A lot of the reasons why our work seems to take a lot longer to do these days than it used to is largely because we allow ourselves to be distracted by anything—it could be colleagues, it could be mobile devices and computers pinging all the time—anything like that can just take your attention away from what you’re working on right now,” he says. “So it’s really important to just focus on that one thing.”