part0026

“Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.”

If you’re anything like me, the workings of your brain are a mystery. For me, it’s a bit like the engine of our car: I’m thrilled that it works, but I have no idea how. Neuroscience is a complicated subject, which is why you’ll see that this chapter relies on the work of neuroscientist David Rock. If having a deeper understanding of your brain and the various neuropathways and chemical reactions going on is your happy place, grab David Rock’s excellent book, Your Brain at Work , and give it a read.

Our brains are incredibly complex and sophisticated. They can deliver tremendous results if we work with them. Unfortunately, most of the time we are working against our brains without even realizing it. This chapter will give you some ideas about how to create the conditions for optimal functioning of our brains. If we use these strategies, we can work with flow and ease, accomplishing far more than if we simply work harder and put in longer hours.

More and more in our fast-paced world, we tax our brains. Our brains need quiet time to process and reflect, but how many of us give ourselves even a few minutes a day of mental stillness? I’m sure I’m not alone in finding it very challenging to quiet my inner voice and to create that critical calm that my brain needs to be most effective. As you know, I’m turning more and more to yoga and meditation as they force me into quiet time. When I take the time to do meditation or yoga, something wonderful happens. I get far more work done with far more ease. If you haven’t tried it yet, please give meditation a shot. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can lie in the bath and do box breathing for three minutes or go for a walk at lunch and notice your five senses. The more we slow down, the better our brains work.

We can’t concentrate for eight hours a day. We can’t even concentrate for five hours a day. Think of yourself as a kid in school: you need recess, lunch break, and a whole lot of school holidays.

Our capacity for focus and attention is limited. We run out of attention. We can’t keep focusing. But we try anyway. All of a sudden, it’s eight at night; we’re still working, but we’re not getting much done.

Let’s start to recognize that we’ve only got so much capacity to pay attention. Then we can use our powers of focus wisely. David Rock explains, “Every time you focus your attention you use a measurable amount of glucose and other metabolic resources. . . . Each task you do tends to make you less effective at the next task, and this is especially true for high energy tasks like self-control or decision making.” 1

Decision making and self-control consume our limited resources. They wear us out. In today’s high-pressure, multitasking, filled-with-distractions-and-demands world of work, we often use up our self-control and decision-making powers on tasks that don’t warrant them. If you spend the first hour of your day going through e-mail and making decisions about how to respond, you’ve used up critical decision-making powers. Your decision-making ability might be done for the day, but you have a whole lot more you need to get done.

When we can be more thoughtful about how we use our mental energy and recognize it as a limited resource, similar to our physical energy, we can be much more productive. Just as you would never expect to be able to run without a break for eight hours a day, you shouldn’t expect uninterrupted activity from your brain either.

With this understanding of how our brains work, we can make better choices about what we give our focus and attention to. When we think of our mental energy (ability to concentrate, make decisions, and think clearly) as limited, we can be more thoughtful about how we use it.

While it was once commonly believed that the number of items we can hold in our mind was seven, a survey of by Nelson Cowan at the University of Missouri found that it’s “more like four, and even then this depends on the complexity of the four items.” 2

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m holding eighteen things in my mind at any given time—not just work-related items, but also school events, childcare scheduling, and social plans. I’m learning to make better use of my calendar and to do giant brain dumps of my mental to-do lists to free up more space for those precious four items that I need to hold in my mind.

I’m also trying to stop taxing my brain by remembering thoughts that occur to me in the moment. I don’t know if this happens to you, but I often have an idea come to mind or a thought about something that I need to do. Typically, I will hold on to that idea or thought for hours, consuming precious mental energy and space. Now, as soon as I’m able to, I pull out my phone and jot down a note, so I’m no longer putting the strain of remembering the idea on my brain. That means I’m conserving precious mental energy for other tasks.

How many of you are doing two or more things at once, multiple times a day? It’s frying your poor brain. I know that we’re all maxed out and trying to get everything done, but multitasking is making us dumb. In fact, one scientist, Harold Pashler, “showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old.” 3

That’s alarming. Not that there aren’t some brilliant eight-year-olds out there, but I’m pretty sure the Harvard MBAs would give them a run for their money.

So, how do we stop multitasking in a world that holds it as the height of productivity? We go back to focusing on doing one thing at a time, because intuitively we know that we’re actually going to be more productive, thoughtful, and present when we’re maintaining a single focus.

Many of us have gotten into the habit of multitasking, usually because we are moving at a frantic pace and we think it’s the best way to get work done. Now that we know it’s not, we need to break ourselves of the multitasking habit. When you notice that you’re trying to do two (or more) things at once, stop and retrain yourself to perform one task at a time.

I know I’ve already mentioned this in the context of having better relationships and taking care of yourself but guess what? Turning off your phone will also significantly increase your productivity. Our phones pull our focus, and we often multitask when we are on them.

A study done at the University of London “found that constant emailing and text messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.” 4

I know there are some of you who are reading this and thinking that you’re an excellent multitasker, and this research doesn’t really apply to you.

when the brain is forced to be on “alert” far too much, it increases your allostatic load: a reading of stress hormones and other factors that relate to a sense of threat. The wear and tear from this threat has an impact. Neuroscientists have found that this always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. 5

So many of us live lives where we are “always on,” and we feel that we’re in a state of constant crisis. We’re often in fight or flight mode and that’s taxing on our bodies. It’s no way to live! It’s no wonder that so many people are dealing with physical and mental health issues.

Let’s find ways to turn off, to disconnect from work and the hundreds of e-mails bombarding us, so that we can become less stressed and more productive.

If you haven’t already, please find a way to turn your phone off just for a few hours a day, for the sake of your productivity, your health, and your relationships.

Our brains are like our muscles. They get tired. Most of us start our days dealing with e-mails, which consumes our precious mental energy and limited decision-making power. Checking e-mails first thing in the morning also releases the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, so we aren’t necessarily starting our day in a great state.

It may be wiser to schedule our days differently. Rock suggests that we “schedule the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh start and an alert mind. Prioritize first, before any attention-rich activity such as emailing, because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes. After even just a few mental activities, you may not have the resources left to prioritize.” 6

When we start our days dealing with e-mail (as I certainly used to before I read David Rock’s book), we’ve already worn out our brains before we get to our true work. I found it a difficult habit to break, and I still sometimes check my e-mail before I start work. But on the days that I start with writing or meditating (or on a good day, both), I’m on fire. Give it a try for a couple of weeks, and see what happens. Even one hour (or if that sounds too overwhelming, just start with fifteen minutes) of prioritizing, planning, thinking, or working on your most important tasks before you deal with your e-mail can have a huge impact on your productivity.

I don’t know about you, but I find myself very easily distracted these days. I can be pulled from a task or a conversation by the sound of the phone buzzing. (I turn the ringer to silent, but there are times when I can’t turn the phone completely off, in spite of all the research that suggests I’d be happier and more productive if I just threw the damn thing away.) Even though I don’t look at or respond to the text or e-mail, my concentration is broken.

I’m also often interrupted from conversations or work by one of my kids or my husband asking me a question—there are upsides and downsides to working from home. Other distractions I experience regularly include my own internal distractions: trying to keep track of too many details, my mental to-do list and random thoughts popping into my mind, the urgent need to clean out the closet when I should be writing, a sudden desire to know when and where the next Garth Brooks concert will be, and other similar Internet rabbit holes.

I know I’m not alone, and I’m negatively impacting my productivity with all these distractions.

A study conducted by Gloria Mark, professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, “found people switched activities on average of every three minutes and five seconds. Roughly half of them are self-interruptions.” 7

How many of you do this to yourself? You’re working on one task but then something pops into your brain and you rush to deal with that instead. This seems like it’s not that big a deal, right? You’re working on a presentation, but you remember you need to send an e-mail, so you switch tasks. You send the e-mail in two minutes then you get right back to the presentation. Except you don’t. Mark’s research found that “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the [initial] task.” 8

Distractions are costing us a lot of time. And they’re causing us a lot of stress. Mark’s study “used a NASA workload scale, which measures various dimensions of stress, and we found that people scored significantly higher when interrupted. They had higher levels of stress, frustration, mental effort, feeling of time pressure and mental workload.” 9

Make a list of your most common distractions and ways to avoid them (turning off the phone, the notifications on our computer, turning off the Internet while working, closing your office door, forcing your children to play outside).

When we are aware of what distracts us, we can make different choices and not get caught up in the distraction. When we reduce or eliminate some of our more common distractions, we can gain back up to two hours of productive working time every day .

I’ve coached many people who have an open-door policy, and I’ve worked hard to get them to spend at least one hour a day with a closed door. They have to train their coworkers and staff to give them this uninterrupted time, but it enables them to have focused time to work on their most important projects.

Otherwise, they spend all day responding to the needs of everyone else, being distracted, and switching tasks frequently, sometimes staying late to get their own work done. Sound familiar? It can be difficult to close our doors, but if we choose a time that is the least disruptive to the people who need us, and if we explain to people that we are closing the door to get focused time to increase our productivity, they will understand, and they might even follow suit.

While some distractions come from external sources, many come from our own busy brains. We all have many internal distractions that can keep us from being productive. Not only do we jump from thought to thought, but if we’re not in a positive mental state, we may be bringing ourselves down with our thoughts.

Many of us get easily distracted when we are working on something we don’t want to do or find challenging. At that point, it can seem really important that we go ask Bob how his weekend was or check with Jasmine about the lunch we’d discussed setting up. Or, we’ll just take a few minutes to check social media or look up tickets for that game or concert we were interested in, because, after all, taking a break is really good for productivity, right?

Our minds run around like monkeys, flitting from one thing to another, particularly when faced with work we don’t want to engage with. It’s up to us to take control back. As with everything else, the key is in self-awareness and noticing when we’re distracting ourselves. When we can notice our monkey mind at play, we can wrest control back from the little wriggler.

When I practice mindfulness and notice my internal thoughts, I often hear things like: This is boring, I’ll just check my e-mail , or, I’ll never get this done, maybe I should eat some chocolate instead . When I’m paying close attention, I can catch myself in the act of getting distracted and make the choice to stay focused, rather than give in to the distraction.

What I’ll often do is turn the desired distraction into a reward for myself. I tell myself, If you do another fifteen minutes of writing, you can take a break and check e-mail or eat a square (or three) of chocolate —whatever my little monkey mind desires.

Next time you notice yourself getting distracted, either from an internal or external source, bring your focus back to the task at hand while promising yourself a reward for completing that task.

When you reward yourself, choose a treat that’s really a treat for you—maybe a fancy coffee, a cookie, or a quick walk. Whatever it is, make sure you link it to your ability to stay focused, so you reinforce the new behavior with a real reward. Sounds a bit like training the monkey, doesn’t it?! We’ll talk more about why this works in Chapter Twelve about habits.

E-mails deserve their very own category of distraction as they consume so much of our working lives. Some work relationships are also happening through texts or social media: “According to the Radicati Group, a technology research firm, in 2018, there will [have been] ‘about 124.5 billion business emails sent and received each day.’ . . . The average office worker receives 121 emails a day.” 10 No wonder e-mail is such a workplace stressor!

Based on what we now know about distractions and the mental energy that processing e-mails consumes, what can you do differently in your relationship with your e-mail?

Some of the changes I’ve made regarding my e-mail are to turn off all notifications, check it only after I’ve spent at least half an hour doing my thinking and creative work, to check it less frequently, and to respond to e-mails as soon as I check them. I used to just check e-mails to get the rush of dopamine associated with receiving a message and then not deal with them . . . not a great strategy.

If you’re looking for some more strategies, here’s how some of the world’s CEOs are handling their relationships with e-mail as reported by Rachel Gillett in Business Insider :

He says: “I decided to conduct an experiment where I wouldn’t write an email unless absolutely necessary. End result: Materially fewer emails and a far more navigable inbox. ”

“The last time my mother got angry with me before she died was when she saw me reading my email and talking to my children at the same time,” Huffington writes in her book. “Being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves.”

“We’ve totally cut out all internal emails,” Dooris previously told Business Insider .

Dooris was tired of people relying on e-mail as the primary means of communication with their coworkers. “In the office I don’t see it as a necessity, when the people you’re emailing are only a few [steps] away and you can chat with them,” he said.

Instead, Dooris and his employees use Wunderlist to track tasks, Dropbox to share files, and face-to-face contact for anything else. The only exception is calendar invites, which may be e-mailed. 11

Hopefully, this has given you a few ideas for how you can change your relationship with your e-mail. Obviously, you’re limited by what works for your company culture—not everyone is keen on the idea of eliminating e-mail altogether. That said, if your company culture produces so much e-mail that you start each day feeling buried in it, you might want to suggest some changes.

I’ve worked with a few people who are self-confessed “keyboard warriors.” They save all their difficult communication for e-mail so they can avoid conflict. Sometimes at work, we forget that there is another person on the receiving end of our e-mails, someone who will be impacted by our words or uncertain about our tone. If you have to deliver difficult feedback or have a challenging conversation, please have the courage to do it in person, or at the very least on the telephone. This goes for our personal lives too. It will prevent a great deal of stress and confusion for all involved.

When I teach my communication courses, I emphasize that face-to-face is always our best option for communication. If that’s not an option, pick up the phone. Only if there are no other options is e-mail an acceptable last resort. If you do need to use e-mail, keep it fact-based and to the point, and clarify for the receiver exactly what you need from them. Starting our e-mails with an indication of what we need can save a great deal of time for those who receive them. FYI, Action Required, and Urgent, Response Needed are examples of ways to clarify the purpose of your e-mails.

Keeping your e-mails succinct (five sentences or less) will also help you be more productive and save you time in the long run. Keeping your e-mails clear and kind will keep your working relationships strong, which will help you be work more efficiently and effectively .

We all have strengths and talents that come naturally to us. We have developed or inherited these strengths, and we take these abilities for granted. Just last week a client asked me how I listen and paraphrase so well. It wasn’t an easy answer as it’s something I’ve always done—a natural strength. When our brains are active in an area of strength, we are at ease.

The research company Gallup found if we work in our areas of natural strength and focus on leveraging those strengths and managing our weaknesses, we can be highly productive and successful. Gallup identified three important principles of how to work with our strengths: “For an activity to be a strength, you must be able to do it consistently. You do not have to have strength in every aspect of your role to excel. You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses.” 12

For those of us who have been trying way too hard to fix every little imperfection we have, this is totally liberating research. All you have to do is focus on your strengths because trying to fix your weaknesses won’t help you excel. Hallelujah! I never have to figure out math.

When I completed Gallup’s online test that helps you identify your strengths, the Clifton StrengthsFinder Assessment, 13 it became clear to me why I lasted less than a month in a job as a grocery store clerk but happily spent nearly a decade working with youth. It also gave me insight into why I’m so happy as a coach, facilitator, and consultant. I have natural strengths in relating to people, connecting big ideas, and simplifying them for others, and I love change.

I am not detail-oriented, nor do I move at a particularly fast pace, both strengths that would have served me well in my role as a grocery store clerk. The Clifton StrengthsFinder tool is a quick and affordable way to discover your natural talents and provide some insight about yourself. I’ve used it with many teams and clients. I’ve included the link in the resource section.

We also have an intuitive sense of our own strengths and areas of comfort. I’ve always enjoyed working with people, so it wasn’t a surprise when my StrengthsFinder results showed that relating was a top strength of mine.

We often feel stressed and unproductive when we’re working in jobs that require strengths that we don’t have. When I worked as a receptionist at a high school in my late twenties, I went home every day feeling drained. I wasn’t skilled at dealing with multiple requests at the same time, filing and organizing paperwork, trying to keep track of details, all while being constantly interrupted by parents, teachers, and ringing phones. Some people thrive in this fast-paced environment with a lot of distractions. I did not.

The complete lack of fit in this job convinced me to quit working and go back to school at the age of twenty-seven to complete my education degree. I was really nervous about returning to school because I knew that I was going to come out with thousands of dollars of debt. But I pushed myself past the discomfort. It was the best decision I ever made.

While I didn’t enjoy teaching high school, I love teaching leadership to people in the workforce. In my role as a consultant and coach, I’ve been able to branch out and do all kinds of work related to my strengths that I would never have been able to access if I hadn’t continued to seek opportunities to learn more and find jobs in my areas of strength.

If we are working in an area of natural strength, chances are we will be highly productive and engaged. If we are working in an area of natural weakness, often identified as “skills gaps,” or “areas for growth,” chances are we will be more stressed and less productive.

This is not to say that skills can’t be learned, but you want to capitalize on your natural strengths at work. You’ll be more productive and happier.

It’s unlikely that any of us are working 100 percent of the time in our areas of strength, but the more time we spend there, the more productive and less stressed out we will be.

Gallup suggests that we need to manage around our weaknesses rather than ignoring them altogether. As I’ve mentioned, an area of weakness for me is math. My grade twelve math teacher passed me so I could graduate, as long as I promised to never take another math class. I’ve happily stayed true to that promise.

When I have to do proposals and invoices, I ask my engineer husband to review them. I also have a very good accountant whom I rely on heavily. We can find ways to manage around our weaknesses but if we are constantly working in an area of weakness, it can be quite demoralizing and draining.

When you’ve identified your natural strengths, either through your own discovery process or with the help of the Clifton StrengthsFinder, think of ways you can use your strengths more at work—or find work that’s a better fit for you and your natural strengths. Not only will you be happier and more productive when you’re working in an area of strength, but your strengths will flourish.

When we understand how our brains work, we can make better choices. Like everything in this book, the key is to take action based on what you’ve learned. Think of ways that you can stop multitasking and turn distractions off. Schedule your days differently, so you’re doing your thinking, planning, and prioritizing work early in the day when your brain is fresh. Think about what your natural strengths are, and find more opportunities to use them, at home and at work.

Our brains are incredible, but they aren’t invincible. Let’s find ways to slow down, give our brains a rest, and create good conditions that enable our brains to operate at their best. When our brains are functioning well, so are we—we’re far more productive, happier, and more relaxed.