Less Noise More Signal: Training your Brain

 

Let’s face it.  We’re all addicts. 

The brain naturally desires the path of least resistance  From YouTube binges to Facebook obsessions our inner Id is always trying to take the easy way out.  It’s the mental equivalent of eating cotton candy all day long.

All the digital activities the mind gravitates toward tend to utilize a minor percentage of your processing power.  The more time you spend engaged in this type of activity the more your brain becomes accustomed to operating at this low level.  The more you engage in passive activities the harder it is to snap back to doing more active mentally challenging tasks.

It’s not a respite – it’s a relapse.

The mind operate off of a baseline and resists any deviation for the better. Each time you indulge in the guilty pleasure you train your brain to get lazier.  However, over time, it’s also possible to train your brain to gravitate to be active and seek out stimulation. 

Furthermore, from my experience (admitted backed by no science)the minor use of brainpower is the most pernicious state of being.  You don’t progress (learn/grow/build) and you don’t rest (recover/reenergize).  It’s a no mans land of passive decline.

So what’s the answer? Clean living! Remove the passive engagement portion of your life.  Train your brain to work or rest.  Not muddle in between.  You’ll find you get more done, feel less stressed, and will increase mental acuity.

Some tools to help you on your way:

BlockSi  - A pretty good parental control toolset.  Block your most addictive sites (youtube/hulu/netflix etc).  It’s not bullet proof (since you’ll know the password), but having to go in and un-block something or open a new browser type will help break a habitual activity (alt-tabbing to FB/favorites).

RescueTime – A great desktop app that tracks all activity on your computer.  It provides analytics that let you know where you spend your time.  This is your answer to ‘where did the day go?’.  Also – it will help you align your intended priorities with daily activity (how much time do you spend on email vs eclipse/powerpoint/excel?)

Dubious?  Try it for a week.  It will be hard to stick to it 7 days straight, but at the end you’ll be amazed at how quiet the voice of temptation has become.

Time Management Process

Life is complicated. As we accumulate responsibilities and relationships throughout the development of our professional and personal life the challenge of keeping track of it all mounts.  We all need a system, and here is mine:

Input generally comes in person and over email. If it’s in person I just make a quick note and send myself an email to get it into the stack.

Once I’m on my laptop I’ll go down all of my email items and decide to delete, delegate, or allocate.

Delete – I just don’t have the time or interest to do this.

Delegate – This is someone else’s problem. Rely all to the email to loop in the assignee and then delete.

Allocate – any task I commit to doing has to go on my calendar.

While, this may make my schedule look like a bit of a mess (see above), it prevents over commitment. Also, if the task has any notes (i.e. ideas I have or notes from a customer call) I’ll input them directly into the calendar item. If I have a meeting I’ll input the email correspondence leading up to the meeting right into the calendar item for easy recall on my iPhone when I’m on the move (great for sales).

If a work item is taking longer than expected, is recurring, or needs to be shifted – I simply shift the calendar item. And, in any given day I’ll usually have an hour or two of unplanned interruption, so I plan my schedule with a hour lunch and an hour before sleep that I can use as buffer.

Using calendars in this way enables you to force an allocation process in your life and provides a chronological record of notes (easier to recall/review). Stay organized my friends!

Work is just a rhythm

After spending over a year working alone on cimls.com I’ve found the biggest challenge is staying focused every day. When people work together in an office there is a mutual social motivation that is very powerful, but you only tend to notice it when its gone. After experimenting with a number of different motivators I found that, for me, it boiled down to rhythm. Once I planned and established a daily schedule as a habitual pattern the work easily followed:

Workout/breakfast (8-9)
I found 30 mins a day was the best fit. Enough to get the heart rate and endorphins up, but not so much to make me tired. Think of it as a primer. I do this before looking at my phone or email. Looking will sink this part of the routine.
Work (9-1)
This is always my most productive time. After going through urgent mail I prioritize my first task. I’d say 70% of the real work that I do all day happens here (difficult coding/pitch decks).
Lunch (1-2)
Nap (2-3)
Napping here is very important. Any later it inferred with my sleeping schedule. Forcing a nap here even if I wasn’t tired really brought up my energy the rest of the day.
Work (3-7)
I intentionally plan fun/easier work here (design/planning/email). This tends to be the part of the day hardest to re-start. If the work is fun or easier you get back into the zone.
Dinner (7-8)
Work (8-12)
Oddly, this also tends to be a very productive time for me. Especially with no other calls/emails to distract I get quite a bit of solid work done at night.
At the end of the night wind down by planning the tasks for tomorrow. Generally I block everything out in outlook

Sleep (12-9)
Sleep is the keystone to every day. Everything falls apart without adequate sleep and I won’t sacrifice my sack time for anything short of a catastrophic failure (site is down).
This may look like a lot, but I will take brakes as needed. I found from RescueTime I’m actively productive 8-10 hours a day. That’s about as good as it gets.

Getting on this schedule was challenging for the first couple days, but afterwards the general inertia made it easy to maintain and you almost automatically start each phase.
I have a 3 hour limit on hitting a wall. If I can’t work I just take that ‘block’ off
Breaks are always physical (walking, driving range, ping pong, darts) or sleep. No intellectually stimulating breaks at all. Bodies tend to like to be lazy, so we want to do something that uses 30% of our brain (TV/books/games) rather than 80% (coding /writing). Any opportunity to engage in a simple activity is attractive, but tended to make me less energetic and productive after.
Vacations. I’d generally take every other weekend completely off. No work whatsoever for 2 days. That typically is enough to allow me to reset, recharge and take a quick strategic review then dive back into the trenches. If I’m cycling caffeine intake then these two days will always be complete detox days (no caffeine at all).
Hope some of you find this useful to focus in and get work done!