by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 24 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Touch it once
— From The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies by Chet Holmes
What would you do with a gift of 90+ hours/year to spend however you see fit?
To explain this, let me share this scenario, and you tell me if it sounds familiar:
“You come into your office, and there on your desk sit three folders and two letters that you must respond to. You look at the first letter and read a few sentences. Dealing with it is clearly going to take more time than you have right now. You put it aside. In one of your folders is another task. You handle that task and your phone rings. You answer the phone and get pulled in a new direction for 10 to 15 minutes. Then you go back to the folder, but, just as you do, an email comes in. You stop to read the email, which contains a task that must be dealt with but requires more time than you have right now.”
Can you identify with this? If you spend “just 15 minutes every day to revisit, readdress, or reread documents or emails, you will waste 91 hours per year where no action is taken.” (!)
Chet Holmes, business guru and author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, had a simple, yet practical and very effective way of handling paperwork and email: deal with each thing just once.
“If you touch it, take action. […] Don’t open that email or letter until you are ready to deal with it.”
And dealing with it may take many forms, but at the very least, it means adding the action to your to-do list and saving the email to a particular folder. Holmes says, “the more files you have for work in progress and the more organized you can be in that process, the more productive you will be. So, for example, suppose I open my email from my PR firm that requires me to approve a press release. I have a PR folder. On my to-do list I write, ‘Approve press release. See PR folder.’ That’s how organized you need to be today.”
Short and simple, yet profound in changing the way we work and handle the demands for our time. Plus, the amount of time we’ll save from not having to revisit is astonishing! (For other time saving tips, read this post from Time Traps.)
ACTION
TODAY: Try this touch-it-once approach today and see how much time you save and how much more organized you get.
FUTURE: Make this touch-it-once philosophy a part of your productivity habits. As with every new habit, it will take time and tweaking to adapt to your specific needs, yet I strongly suggest giving it a shot since it will save you much time!
Know someone who’s wasting much time on revisiting things? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 46 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Are you fighting gravity?
— From Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Designing Your Life is a fantastic book that guides the reader to build an intentionally meaningful and joyful life. It’s a fantastic and highly recommended read! (Hmmmm, miniseries, anyone?)
Both authors are engineers and, as such, they are very well versed in the design of solutions for problems. They teach this approach—“design thinking”—to help you design and live the life you want.
Yet one of the things that they have encountered time and again is people fighting gravity, so to speak. “Gravity problems” as they’ve dubbed them, are those problems on which you cannot take any action. These problems simply exist, yet we tend to get mired in them somehow.
“I’ve got this big problem and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Oh, wow, Jane, what’s the problem?”
“It’s gravity.”
“Gravity?”
“Yeah—it’s making me crazy! I’m feeling heavier and heavier. I can’t get my bike up hills easily. It never leaves me. I don’t know what to do about it. Can you help me?”
While even the authors cite this is a silly example, it’s an accurate representation of how we sometimes spend our precious time on trying to solve the wrong problem:
- “The company I work for has been family-owned for five generations. There is no way that, as an outsider, I’m ever going to be an executive. What do I do about it?”
- “I’ve been out of work for five years. It’s going to be much harder for me to get a job and that is not fair. What do I do about it?”
- “I want to go back to school and become a doctor, but it will take me at least ten years, and I don’t want to invest that much time at this stage of my life. What do I do about it?”
The authors say that these “gravity problems” are not even problems. We may perceive them as such, but each one is “a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.” It is the reality of things and when we argue or try to fight it, reality always wins. “You can’t outsmart it. You can’t trick it. You can’t bend it to your will. Not now. Not ever.”
So, should we just give up?
No!
What do we do about it?
One word: Reframe. “They key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. We are all for aggressive and world-changing goals. […] But do it smart. If you become open-minded enough to accept reality, you’ll be freed to reframe an actionable problem and design a way to participate in the world on things that matter to you and might even work. “
The authors wisely say that the only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. And acceptance is what enables us to reframe situations and be able to solve the problems they create for us. Solving the problem will take many forms, and one of those—which is valid every time—is to simply change our minds.
So, let’s do a quick reframing of the above instances:
In the case of the family-owned company: you don’t stand a chance to be part of the C-Suite. Reframing: you can do the very best job you can do and decide to stay there and be happy, regardless of the title they give you. You can become the expert at running your division of the business. Or you can always look for a job elsewhere where you can grow if the title and position in the org chart are of utmost importance to you. Depends on your situation and your goals.
In the case of being out of work: you can’t change how recruiters think and perceive you and the gap in your resume. Reframing: you can change how you appear to recruiters. Take the volunteer roles you’ve been in and list some significant professional results, for example. That’s impressive!
In the case of med school: you can’t change the length of the studies. Reframing: you can remind yourself that much sooner than 10 years you can start treating patients as a resident in a hospital. Or you can become a physician’s assistant and do a few similar things to what doctors do, with much less training and cost. Or enter the wellness field from a non-clinical angle.
Once you reframe, then you are able to move into the direction of your choice. Prior to that, the battle has no solution and is all in your mind.
I’ll leave you with a quote from another one of my favorite authors, which encompasses the essence of reframing:
“Once you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – Wayne Dyer
ACTION
TODAY: Think for a moment: What sort of gravity problems are you fighting in your mind? Have they become so prevalent that they are part of your identity? (How many times have we heard someone introduce him or herself, as “I’m a frustrated teacher/lawyer/banker”? [Fill in the profession blank.]) Don’t fight gravity. Work with it instead. How can you reframe those problems?
FUTURE: As you look at new problems that emerge, give some thought to what’s going on in your mind. Are you approaching them as gravity problems, not knowing necessarily what you can do about them? How about acceptance and reframing? Easier said than done, indeed. Yet the burden is lifted almost instantly once we feel the relief acceptance brings; and we can take action to solve the problems once we have made a decision through reframing.
Know someone who’s fighting gravity? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Miniseries, Opportunity, Planning, Productivity, Resources, Time, Tools
Links to other parts of the miniseries:
Be Awesomely Effective Part 1: Embodied cognition
Be Awesomely Effective Part 2: Decision points
Be Awesomely Effective Part 3: Mental Energy
Be Awesomely Effective Part 4: Stop fighting distractions
Be Awesomely Effective Part 5: Mind-body connection
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 32 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Be Awesomely Effective Part 6: Workspace
— From Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done by Josh Davis, Ph.D.
Over the past few days, Josh Davis, Ph.D., has been guiding us to create at least Two Awesome Hours of peak productivity by recognizing our decision points, managing our mental energy, allowing our minds to wander, and leveraging our mind-body connection. Yet, there are still a few more things we can do regarding our immediate workspace surroundings that will help us set up the conditions to perform at our best.
Noise
“The research on the consequences of noise on productivity is fairly straightforward: for the bulk of the tasks performed in the knowledge economy, quiet is always better than noise.” With this in mind, here are a few suggestions from Davis to stay focused.
- Close the door. No office? “Reserve a conference room or set up camp somewhere that is largely free of noise and other potential distractions. A place with privacy that is away from noise distractions will be more favorable to productivity.”
- Cancel noise. If your space is shared and you have to stay there, wear noise-cancelling headphones. Alternatively, “those little squishy orange earplugs can sometimes do the trick too, and you can take them anywhere. You may look weird, but you’ll be more productive.”
- Turn it off. Don’t watch TV or listen to music or talk radio.
- Creativity. “If you’re taking on a task that requires lots of creativity, enjoy background noise. You may actually consider heading for the company’s busy cafeteria or a local coffee shop, or putting on a little music.”
- Carve quiet time. If you can, make some quiet time for you: get up early, stay up late or work in a quiet and uninterrupted environment.
Light
Light, just as noise, is another stimulus we can often control. “Both blue light and bright white light seem to enhance a number of the mental faculties that can help us be highly effective. […] That kind of light influences things like alertness and concentration, and it can help us recharge after mental fatigue.”
Further, our eyes were not just made for vision. There are cells in them that “connect to a part of the brain responsible for maintaining circadian rhythms… [thus guiding] sleep, wake, eating and energy cycles throughout the day.”
Davis recommends:
- More lights. “A brightly lit room is better for being at your mental best than a darker one, especially if it’s a cloudy day or the middle of the winter. If you have to, bring your own lamp to the office.”
- Natural light. “If you can, be somewhere with ambient natural light on a day with clear blue skies, and set yourself up to work there.”
- Lightbulbs. “Consider replacing the current lightbulbs in your workspace with white lights that include more of the blue spectrum, even if it’s just at your desk lamp.”
- Creativity. “Dim your lights a bit or find a spot that’s a little darker than usual when you want to work on a project that requires creativity.”
Immediate workspace
According to Davis’ research, our immediate workspace is the part of the work environment that we can influence in some important ways with some relatively minor tweaks.
- Clutter. “Perhaps clutter works for a very few people. But for the vast majority of us, clutter is a hindrance to our mental performance. […] Clear the clutter. […] If you don’t have the time to clear it, simply move it somewhere that is out of sight.”
- Expansive movement. “Place your phone, your glass of water, your pen and any other work tools at the far corners of your desk, where you will need to reach for them expansively. If you feel tense, sit back for a minute, expand your chest and spread your arms out.” Adopt some power poses to shift your mental state.
- Sitting. “Don’t sit at your desk for too long. We tend to become engrossed in working, so it will probably not be too much if you get up every time you think of doing so. If you can choose your workspace, choose one where getting up and moving around is easy to do.” Find a place where you can sit and work, and another where you can stand and work, and alternate between them.
- Personalization. Regardless of noise, light, no clutter and movement, you will eventually get fatigued. Add your personal touch to your workspace in some way with objects and visuals to recharge your mental energy. “Specifically, consider adding some plants or images of water. When you personalize your space, though, don’t do it by adding clutter to your desk.” If you have a beautiful view, don’t forget to look outside.
The strategies described here today and throughout this miniseries are effective because their implementation is simple and easy, and also because they work with your biology, not against it. Davis believes that the biggest challenge resulting from our work culture is being overwhelmed. He says, “By becoming students of how human beings can work most effectively, we all can increase our self-compassion, master our work, and gain control over our lives.” It is my sincere hope that this miniseries will help you accomplish all that and become your most effective and productive. Let me know how you liked the miniseries!
ACTION
TODAY & FUTURE: Take a look around at your workspace: how can you set it up to help you achieve maximum productivity?
Know someone who could benefit from reading this? Please share the miniseries with that person! You can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Miniseries, Opportunity, Planning, Productivity, Resources, Time, Tools
Links to other parts of the miniseries:
Be Awesomely Effective Part 1: Embodied cognition
Be Awesomely Effective Part 2: Decision points
Be Awesomely Effective Part 3: Mental Energy
Be Awesomely Effective Part 4: Stop fighting distractions
Be Awesomely Effective Part 6: Workspace
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 27 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Be Awesomely Effective Part 5: Mind-body connection
— From Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done by Josh Davis, Ph.D.
Yesterday we learned to be nice to ourselves and let our minds wander. That strategy, coupled with seizing our decision points and managing our mental energy and emotions can help us create incredibly productive chunks of time in our days. That is, of course, when we have full control over our schedules. But who does?
Life happens. Business happens. Stuff happens. We may find ourselves anxious or overwhelmed at times and still need to perform at our best. What do we do then?
Josh Davis, Ph.D., adds one more strategy to help us out. Now that we know that our physical states affect and influence our mental states, “By understanding how exercise and food affect your mental functioning, you can use them as tools to help you be more productive when work demands it.” The mind-body connection is strong and powerful.
It’s important to clarify that this strategy is not about the long-term health and wellness benefits of an exercise routine and a well-balanced diet. We’ve all heard about that many times, undoubtedly. What Davis shares here are the immediate benefits of mental functioning derived from eating in a particular way or felt after just one session of exercising. This is one more way in which we learn how to create the optimal conditions in our minds, bodies, and surroundings for peak productivity.
Exercise strategically
Exercising, for these purposes, refers to moderate physical activity (brisk walking or even light jogging) for 20-40 minutes. “Whether or not you currently have an exercise routine, you can use physical activity at specific times to boost your thinking abilities and your mental energy. […] A little exercise at the right time can help you think better, stay focused, sharpen your thoughts and reduce your anxiety—key elements of sustained productivity—in the hours that follow the physical activity.”
Davis suggests the following ways to leverage exercise:
- Mental sluggishness and inability to focus. “Get out of your office and move right away. Walk very briskly for thirty to forty minutes. Or go up and down the back stairs for ten or twenty minutes.”
- Schedule changes. “Whenever possible, schedule challenging or anxiety-provoking meetings when you can block out time beforehand for moderate exercise.”
- Draining or challenging tasks. “When you have particularly challenging or draining tasks on your calendar, either exercise in the morning before it… or exercise soon after it to restore your drained mental energy and improve your mood in time to tackle whatever comes next.
- Workouts. “In general, plan to work out for about twenty to forty minutes within a couple of hours before you next need to be awesomely productive.”
Eat and drink strategically
What happens on the day that your schedule doesn’t allow for exercise when you most need it? Davis points out that, “There are other ways to work in concert with your body to achieve peak productivity… [with] something you already do every day, even at work: eating and drinking.”
What we eat and drink, and the timing of when we do so, can affect our energy levels, moods and our brain’s ability to plan, organize and complete tasks. If you don’t believe this, just remember the sluggishness, lack of energy and overwhelming desire to sleep after a very large meal (Thanksgiving, a holiday, a celebration, etc.).
Davis says, “When you want to be firing on all cylinders, being intentional about what you eat and drink—and how you want to feel an hour later—can make all the difference.” And he gives us the following tips to increase productivity after the two- or three-hour period after our meal or snack.
- Portions. “Eat only half your breakfast or lunch and enjoy the second half a couple of hours later.”
- Quick boost. “A high-carb snack may help you focus and feel good for about fifteen minutes. If you need to be in top mental shape for longer than that, avoid carb-rich meals and snacks altogether.”
- Food mix. “Eat meals or snacks that have a nice mix of proteins, low glycemic index carbs, and good fats—vegetables and fruits are generally good carbs; nuts make great snacks for when you are on the run.”
- Water. “Drink water if you haven’t had any for the last hour or two if you’ve done any physical activity.”
- Caffeine. “If you are tired or sleep deprived, drink a caffeinated drink, but keep it small. Don’t drink more than you normally would. Give it thirty minutes to kick in. And go ahead and put cream in that coffee—the fat may help keep your blood sugar more stable.”
Whether you exercise regularly or not, or whether you are a nutrition enthusiast or a fast-food lover, hopefully this mind-body strategy will add more tools to your productivity kit.
Cheers!
ACTION
TODAY & FUTURE: Take a moment to evaluate how you feel before an important work event (meeting, presentation, etc.). Are there any of the exercise or food/drink tips here that can help you? How can you proactively schedule time for physical activity before an event so that you can be at your best? Schedule also time to recharge after particularly taxing activities/meetings. Your mind and body will thank you and you’ll be performing in a much more productive way!
Know someone who could benefit from reading this? Please share the miniseries with that person! You can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Miniseries, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Links to other parts of the miniseries:
Be Awesomely Effective Part 1: Embodied cognition
Be Awesomely Effective Part 2: Decision points
Be Awesomely Effective Part 3: Mental Energy
Be Awesomely Effective Part 5: Mind-body connection
Be Awesomely Effective Part 6: Workspace
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 39 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Be Awesomely Effective Part 4: Stop fighting distractions
— From Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done by Josh Davis, Ph.D.
By now, in this miniseries, you can recognize the decision points in your day and choose your next task based on your mental energy and emotions. Woohoo! Today, Josh Davis, Ph.D., will share with us his uncommon—but very commonsensical—view on distractions and mind wandering.
As we shoot for creating Two Awesome Hours of productive work, we need to learn how to stay focused for prolonged periods of time.
Yet in today’s world, where our attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish, we tend to reproach ourselves every time we get distracted. “Focus!” “Pay Attention!” “Stay on task!” we tell ourselves, and we feel as if we’re being lazy for letting our minds wander off.
“Although our ability to sustain attention on a task is critical for our success, finding focus… without distraction is a remarkably difficult thing to do.” Our brains are wired to respond to distractions, scan our surroundings constantly, and be on the lookout for dangers—it’s a survival mechanism. But we also have the ability to come back to what we were doing previously whenever our focus shifts, “parts of our brain are devoted to switching attention—to disengaging and reorienting to a changing environment.”
This is indeed good news: “It is wholly unnatural to focus without wavering. If you have failed at maintaining continual focus throughout your work sessions, rejoice. If you had, you’d be remarkably dysfunctional.” Proof of this is that if we try to suppress it, it backfires with our consequent frustration.
Scientific evidence points out that the more we try to avoid or suppress distractions the more we get stuck on them. “When people are asked not to think about something, it increases the likelihood that they will think about these things. Don’t think about a polar bear right now, and see how that goes.”
I bet the polar bear took you to other images of polar bears, your visits to the zoo as a child, a documentary you saw, etc. Our neurons work in networks, which means they’re associated with many others. Thus, your neuron for polar bear fired up other neurons associated with this thought, taking you down a rabbit trail (polar bear trail?) of images and memories.
To somewhat control this, Davis says we must master two skills: removing distractions and letting our minds wander.
Let’s get the first one out of the way: distractions are like booby-traps. No one in their right mind would set a bucket of water over a door frame, spread thumbtacks on the carpet or put a whoopee cushion on a chair at a workplace. Davis says, “That’s more or less what you are doing to yourself when you set up your devices and workspace so that distractions are coming to you all the time. You have created a work setting booby-trapped not with buckets of water and thumbtacks, but with phones, screens, websites, open doors, etc.” And all the buzzing, notifications, and people stopping by are distracting you from your two hours of maximum productivity.
“There’s no need to be a hermit of drop off the grid. Just find a way that your devices can’t divert you for perhaps twenty minutes at a time.” Turn off notifications, close your open door, wear noise cancelling headphones, put your devices away, etc.
While we can remove distractors as much as possible within our circumstances, we can’t remove distractions entirely. We can’t stop the blasting siren of an ambulance out on the street, for example. And we can’t do away with another, unavoidable distraction: our wandering mind.
“Research suggests that mind wandering may not be a flaw after all. It may have important benefits when it comes to […] creative problem solving and long-term planning.” Davis shares the results of studies: “mind wandering didn’t make participants more creative in general, it helped them creatively solve the problems they had been working on before they started mind wandering.” Also, it is good for long-term planning because “it enables us to think in the right ways about the future.”
Yet it’s important to make the distinction between mind wandering in a productive way and getting completely sidetracked. To avoid the latter, Davis suggests mindful attention: as we find ourselves losing focus, “noting without judgment that our thoughts have drifted, gently bring our attention back to what we are experiencing in the present moment.”
Be nice to yourself, says Davis, “when it comes to staying focused for a prolonged period of time, our secret weapon is not discipline or willpower but self-compassion.”
ACTION
TODAY & FUTURE: Given that your mind will wander, Davis suggests enabling it when you want to solve a problem by choosing a super easy task ahead of time that requires very little thinking. Pick a task that will take a brief moment (minutes) and from which you will recover naturally, not one that will make you fall into autopilot for hours on end. Here’s what he means by very easy: appreciating a picture on the wall, a plant, the view, straightening up your desk, listening to music and noticing all instruments, etc.
These are the tasks you need to avoid engaging in when your mind wanders. They’ll quickly absorb and sidetrack you, as they require lots of thinking and are loaded with decisions and emotions: filing paperwork, reading the news, checking email, rehearsing presentations, prepping for meetings, working or a crossword puzzle.
Know someone who could benefit from reading this? Please share the miniseries with that person! You can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Miniseries, Planning, Productivity, Time
Links to other parts of the miniseries:
Be Awesomely Effective Part 1: Embodied cognition
Be Awesomely Effective Part 2: Decision points
Be Awesomely Effective Part 4: Stop fighting distractions
Be Awesomely Effective Part 5: Mind-body connection
Be Awesomely Effective Part 6: Workspace
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 45 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Be Awesomely Effective Part 3: Mental Energy
— From Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done by Josh Davis, Ph.D.
In yesterday’s post, Josh Davis, Ph.D. taught us the importance of being aware and seizing decision points. Today, the author of 2 Awesome Hours will share with us how to manage our mental energy as part of creating those two hours of peak performance on a daily basis.
Time management and productivity experts tell us that we should tackle the biggest priority first as there may not be time later on to get to it. Experts are partly right, says Davis. However, “Their advice misses an important element. Our mental energy is the fuel that drives us—or fails to drive us.”
Davis goes on to explain: “every task takes a mental toll on us; some even fatigue our minds. And perhaps every task elicits emotions that make that task and the ones that follow either harder or easier to do. While it would be nice to bring our A game to every task we tackle, there’s only so much of the right mental energy to go around… we’re much better off choosing what’s worth giving the right mental energy to and putting off, in strategic ways, those tasks on our to-do lists that get in the way.”
Decision making, planning, holding on to thoughts for a short time (while we need them), staying focused and self-control are among the mental activities that generate the most mental fatigue. This, in turn, reduces our ability to perform at our best.
The simple task of answering email, turns out, is quite taxing because it “involves making decisions, and sometimes complex ones: Should I reply? Do I have to respond now? If I write it this way instead of that way, will the person react well to my e-mail or be offended by it? Should I delete it or file it for future reference? Should I write a short response or forward it to someone else?” Argh! No wonder we get mentally exhausted if we spend hours on it. These seemingly small and inconsequential decisions do pile on.
There are several fascinating studies that have found out that willpower (self-control) is like a muscle. It starts fresh every morning, and after resisting many temptations—big and small—it fatigues throughout the day. That’s why most diets are broken in the evening, because the dieter’s self-control is fatigued from resisting yummy temptations all day long and finally gives in.
To ensure our brains are ready to perform at their best when we need them, we must understand the emotions that our tasks generate on us, and the effect this will have on the subsequent tasks. We must plan accordingly. “Being ‘on’ at the right moment matters so much [that] saying no to tasks that will get in the way of that is key to deciding what should get our attention.”
Since most tasks involve decision-making and self-control, we are bound to experience some mental fatigue. “The key to limiting mental fatigue is recognizing the work that is most likely to deplete your resources in a substantial way and, when you have any say in the matter, to simply not engage in that work before you want to be at your best.”
There are some activities that unavoidably will deplete us (dealing with a difficult client, repeated insistence from someone for us to do something, a dreaded and stressful meeting, confrontation, etc.), and some that fatigue us to a certain degree (switching tasks often, networking and small talk, sitting still for long periods, making cold calls, looking for errors and correcting them, planning, scheduling, deadlines), but avoiding them is not always possible, much less practical.
The good news is we don’t have to avoid them. “If we strategically choose the order in which we complete the various tasks on our to-do lists, we can carve out two awesome hours when our brains are not as fatigued and get some amazing things done.”
ACTION
TODAY & FUTURE: The author suggests four simple things you can try to avoid mental fatigue:
1. Complete your most important work first thing in the morning (before your brain has been depleted by hundreds of small decisions).
2. Label the tasks on your day “Important,” “Creative,” or “Other.” Schedule time later in the day to tackle the “Other” category, Knowing you’ve set aside time for this will ease your mind, and you won’t be stressed to tackle them early in the day when your mental reserves are full.
3. Try checking email for just one hour in the afternoon (to me, the mere idea of this, at first gave me hives! Now I love it). Not every day will allow for this. Try it once and see if this approach helps improve your focus on tasks that require problem solving or creativity during the rest of the day. For all you know, you may be pleasantly surprised with this solution, and you might be able to do this occasionally or even frequently. Tim Ferriss, life hacking guru and author of The 4-hour Workweek, checks his personal email once daily and his business email once every 7-10 days! His secret? Autoresponders. (Here’s a complementary post.)
4. Make a few decisions the night before a big day. Big or small, avoid making them on your big day as much as possible. By eliminating choice, you’ll be eliminating fatigue and you can focus your energy on what really matters that day.
Lastly, what to do if you are fatigued or overly emotional and need to recharge? Davis suggests breathing deeply and slowly, having a good laugh and/or taking a short nap.
Know someone who is constantly mentally exhausted? Please share this miniseries with that person! You can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
