By Holland Cooke
Consultant
Do you wish you could get in just one more hour of focused work… but your brain won’t cooperate? You’re not alone.
21st century productivity – especially for those of us in talk media where the action never stops – demands that we work against the way we’re wired. “For the brain to produce work of quality,” physician and neuroscience researcher Dr. Mithu Storoni says, “it needs to work in its own way.”
She observes how we’re expected to solve problems as though we’re feeding an industrial-era conveyor belt. But ideas can’t be manufactured in assembly-line fashion. Her solution? Rather than imposing the rhythms of work on our brains, we should impose the rhythm of our brains on our work.
Simple tips from her book, Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work:
• Keep shifting gears. Our brains function like a car’s engine, different gears for different mental challenges. We’re better-off doing short bursts of intense work followed by longer periods of light work.
• Take a walk. Have you noticed that you have some of your best ideas when you do? Sitting upright in an office chair staring at a computer doesn’t let the mind wander.
• Coffee is a friend. Storoni finds “no evidence that caffeine ingestion upon waking is somehow responsible for an afternoon ‘crash’ — or that delaying consumption would somehow prevent this if it did occur.”
• Tech can be a foe. Screens are making us jittery. The quantity of information they deliver can hinder the quality of our ideas. Did you ever read an email… see red… then fire-off an ill-advised reply? And social media “has this power to distort space and time,” causing us to feel “that something we are seeing is happening now and near to us. The problem is if this event is taking place halfway around the world, you cannot do anything to make the situation better.”
• Practice paying attention. “It takes some effort to focus. If I were to say, ‘Focus on that spot on the blank wall’, you’d need to work at it,” Storoni says. “Now information is cheap and attention is expensive, so everything is competing to grab our attention.”
• Never ignore mental fatigue. If you do more than four hours of “mental heavy lifting” every day, Storoni says the mind can’t recover even after a night’s rest, and fatigue drags into the next day.
Holland Cooke (HollandCooke.com) is a consultant working the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow HC on Twitter @HollandCooke and connect on LinkedIn