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July 3 - December 4, 2019
checks his assumptions about the situations and people he’s about to encounter. “I remind myself to go in expecting the best.
priming cues. “I admit I sometimes choose my clothes
Mental contrasting.
Priming.
Mind’s-eye rehearsal.
our productivity and cognitive performance decline once our working day stretches beyond eight hours,
multitasking damages our productivity—
slows us down, but causes us to make more mistakes—with the resulting rework slowing us down even more.
the number of interruptions you get in your average day,
since emotional regulation—staying cool and collected—is also part of the deliberate system’s job, loading it more heavily tends to affect our composure,
BATCH YOUR TASKS, ZONE YOUR DAY
Batch your tasks into different types of work.
Which to-dos fit into which category?
Responding to emails and messages
Reading and researching • Meetings
Administrative tasks
identify your uninterrupted blocks of time.
decide which batch of tasks fits into each block of time.
close your email program entirely. Close your browser,
Store stray thoughts in a “parking lot.”
Plan small rewards for good behavior.
for example, by setting a timer, or keeping a log?
DECISION FATIGUE
peak after each break, followed by a steady decline.
when our brain’s deliberate system is overworked, it can’t do its job properly. That means we have less insight, less self-control, less concentration, and less effective forward thinking.
people were better at the task after being asked to take a moment to reflect on which strategies were working for them.
giving our brain the chance to step back from a task and consolidate our experiences
carve out a little time to recharge and reflect during the day,
scheduled pit stops.
Plan for it, protect it, respect
SMART BREAKS
zoning your day, by grouping together similar types of tasks.
Plan to take a brief break between the
different task “zones” in your day.
Never let more than ninety minutes pass without doing something to refresh your mind and body—
Make Decisions at Peaks, Not at Troughs
What important decisions do you need to make today
How can you make those decisions when you’re mentally fresh, rather than drained?
arranging twenty- or twenty-five-minute conference calls,
after completing big tasks, learning something new, or finishing up a meeting: Amplify the value of the experience by taking a moment to step back and reflect on your insights. What struck you most?
(What will you do differently as a result?) If you’re with others, invite them to do it, too.
Immediately after each major experience of the day—a conversation, something she’s read—she takes thirty seconds to write down whatever important
thoughts it’s provoked.
the planning fallacy.1 This describes the fact that we typically expect tasks to take less time than they actually do, because
we base our estimates on one standout memory—our best past experience—rather than the average time it’s taken us to do similar tasks in the past.
when you’re estimating the amount of time a task is going to take, balance your brain’s natural optimism by imagining a scenario where things don’t
go entirely your way. Then plan for something close to that.
‘triangular breathing,’ where you breathe in for a count of three, then breathe out for a count of three, then pause for a count of three.
Develop a habit of immediately getting worries and work-in-progress thoughts out of your head and down on “paper”—
what’s really the single most important thing to do today?”
