This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. – Cal Newport
- You should focus on the ability to “prioritize prioritizing”
- Schedule the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind
- Plan activities strategically around mental energy cycles
- Visualize your ideas
- Schedule time blocks for different modes of thinking
An absolute overload of emails. An overload of information. A calendar full of meetings that leave you exhausted. A constantly changing world (should we care about AI? Is this just another fad?). The small wins that keep you going. If this sounds like your average workday, you’re not alone.
Today, more people than ever before are being paid to do thinking-based work. The Catch-22 is that more than ever before, people seem to have a hard time getting anyone to leave them alone long enough to think. In the avalanche of constant interruptions, it’s hard to find just 10 minutes to focus. You can’t really solve new problems when you’re constantly being hit on every possible form of communication with the familiar “got a sec?”
It doesn’t help that breakthroughs seem to come at the most inopportune times too. You’re brushing your teeth in the morning before work and you suddenly have a breakthrough for a brand-new idea for this presentation you’re putting on next week. You’re excited to sit down at work and start working on it. This is what you’ve been waiting for, this mental breakthrough. While you’re driving to work (or walking back upstairs to your home office) your brain is spinning. You’re full of ideas, you’re fantasizing about everyone cheering when you walk in the day after the presentation. They were so impressed; you’re now the CEO.
You snap back to reality as you pull up to work. You pull out your phone. Your heart instantly starts beating a little faster. Three text messages from your boss, inbox notifications coming in as if your phone was having a stroke and you are about to hop on a call in 5 minutes. Your eyes widen as every possible communication app you can think of starts telling you it needs your attention, and overwhelm sets in.
The wave of anxiety consumes you as you try to tame the beast bursting through the door of information. Just answering these messages could take most of the day—let alone the meetings already booked and last-minute requests due before end of day. You probably don’t need a science lesson in how the brain works to tell you that this wash of anxiety, and the brain being pulled in a thousand directions, steals the thunder from your breakthrough idea.
While you’re frantically trying to catch a breath and trying to decide who to respond to first, your anxious brain is going into overdrive. You have in the back of your mind how working an extra few hours today to catch up might affect your kids. You did snap at them over the weekend intensely when they interrupted you from going through your emails to ask how long it would take for the cat’s hair to grow back if they had shaved it. While you’re lost in thought, you accidentally delete the email you were responding to and, in a panic, are frantically looking at how to recover it. Meanwhile, the cat has a fresh mohawk.
You’re not alone if this looks like an example of your average day. The average knowledge worker is experiencing an epidemic of overwhelm, related to a variety of pressures and reasons, but ultimately it comes down to the constant and massive overwhelming volume of work pouring in at any given time. As the world digitizes and in this post-pandemic world, the separation of “this is the time I’m at work” and “this is the time I am at home” is becoming almost non-existent.
Furthermore, the time at work is much easier to get hijacked at a moment’s notice. The ability to interrupt a team of people all over the world, get them on a video call, and go through the latest “urgent” idea is an ongoing problem plaguing the workforce. Most people have their communication tools (Teams, Slack, their phone, their email) open and competing for attention the entire day, making it easy for a notification to distract them from what they’re working on.
The trouble is, when it comes to decision-making and problem-solving, the brain has a tough time being able to do that effectively while simultaneously juggling all the different intrusions discussed earlier. You can’t sit and focus on an important project while also working your inbox, responding to IMs, and worrying if your overwork habits are to blame for your son’s fascination with shaving the family cat.
Your brain is being overtaxed at a biological level. When you join that 9:00 AM Zoom call, you take in a flood of data: the sounds of people all trying to speak at once, the colors all around you, the faces of everyone. Why isn’t Steve on camera? You did read in an article last week that Elon Musk plays video games while he’s on conference calls—is Steve doing that? Then you remember how Steve sent you a snide email last week, and while you’re swearing at Steve in your head…
You have so much data coming in at once that your brain is processing. Multiply that by the number of meetings you have during the day, let alone the constant interruptions of communication. You forgot to write down your idea about the killer new presentation earlier and are struggling to remember that in the back of your mind as you navigate your day. Your brain is full. When you are doing this for 8, 10, 12-plus hours a day, you have no time to actually sit and think and work on your important work.
The first step to recovery here is what is referred to as “prioritize prioritizing.” This means you are prioritizing first before jumping into other attention-rich activities. Your meetings and emails are all taking away from your brain’s limited daily resources (replenished with the 8-9 hours of sleep, which I know you’re getting every night) and takes away from your ability to properly plan and prioritize. Ten minutes of emails can take away the energy you need to prioritize. Spread that through the conference call examples earlier, and it’s no wonder people can work a 16-hour day and feel like they accomplished very little.
There is a lot of science on how the different parts of the brain work that can be summarized by saying your brain only has a limited capacity every day to perform critical thinking tasks. It’s the same reason that famous concert violinists and other musicians only practice for a maximum of six hours a day (often less). There is only so much anyone’s brain can do in a day. Hence, why “prioritize prioritizing” is important. You take the things that absolutely must get done and do those in the times you still have the energy to do them.
When you are brushing your teeth and suddenly have that new idea, you pull out a recorder or notebook and jot down your idea. You then have a way to address it later, when you’re in the position to think critically about the idea. You know you don’t want to tire your brain trying to remember those types of things and save the important ideas for later. When the hurricane of anxiety comes crashing down on you when you see the 100 emails download, remember to prioritize prioritizing. Turn off your computer, ignore your phone, and start prioritizing.
Speaking of science and that sleep cycle, when you’re the most productive depends on your circadian rhythm. Certain tasks are better suited for specific times of day. To keep it simple, the theory is that 1 in 5 of you are “night owls” and the rest of us are not. The majority rule applies here but can be adjusted based on who you are.
Most of us peak in the morning, trough in the afternoon, and rebound as we head into the evening. This means the best analytical tasks are done between 9:00-11:00 AM. About seven hours after you wake up is when the trough begins, the early to mid-afternoon feeling of wanting nothing more than to go back to bed. The idea is that most unproductive times are around 2:55 PM. Which seems oddly specific, but I’ll continue.
The recovery time in the late afternoon and early evening is when the average person will have better creative insights. The mood is on the rebound, but you are likely less vigilant during this peak. Knowing this information, armed with the ability to “prioritize prioritizing,” you can set up a much more productive day for yourself.
Start with the to-do list. This can be a list, a drawing, anything to get the concepts out of your head and onto paper. Using the example of your presentation, you might write out a to-do list that looks like this:
- Work out new idea for conference
- Post a job for a new assistant
- Catch up on emails
What you’re doing here is not just writing out the same to-do list every tech professional uses. Instead, you’re saving your brain’s energy by getting set up on what needs to be set up and being strategic and mindful about how you spend your time, and what matters most. Take a step back—what will be the hardest task? Focus on that one first, spend 40 minutes working on that and that only. As much as you think that conference is important, hiring a new assistant is going to be more taxing than working on the new idea for the conference. After the 40 minutes, while you’re still in your most analytical part of the day, scan the incoming messages for the truly urgent ones.
Where do you sit now? An hour later you have your important project done and have replied to several important emails. Your new idea for the presentation? You remember that presentation is a month away and working on that now isn’t nearly as important as revisiting it later in the day or tomorrow. Since you have your idea recorded, you can revisit it then.
Yes, this does mean that you had to leave your new analyst on read. He’s used to it from his Tinder dates anyway. If you’re constantly worried about getting back to people instantly, you’re going to find that you spend all your days responding to everyone else and not working on your set of projects and to-do lists.
You also want to keep in mind the peak, trough, and recovery pieces. The peak is when you want to hit all your critical tasks. The trough period is the ideal time for the status update meetings, fixing your inbox, and working on tasks that are neither analytical nor creative. The end of the day is the best time to try and work through some of the more creative tasks while saving the analytical parts for the next morning.
If you have a role where your working to-do list is generally controlled by other people, this exercise still applies. These are the types of positions where your job is to work on tasks assigned by a project manager, the company CEO, or answering help desk and support tickets. The key part about visualizing the to-do list is knowing your capacity and being able to properly organize the capacity. You can’t necessarily tell someone you won’t fix their laptop because you’re in a trough, but you can keep these ideas in mind to control as much as you can in your day-to-day.
Your leadership or colleagues won’t generally be upset if you have a clean set of priorities and are working on the most important tasks. What causes issues is when you are assigned a project and give an unrealistic ETA. You probably had every intention of getting the task done, but you didn’t expand out and look at this isolated task in the sea of tasks you had.
The number of items you have on your prioritization list can vary. The general advice is to take a “less is more” approach, with some experts recommending to only have one item on it. You will likely find that having 3-4 solid work to-do items will leave you feeling accomplished day after day—while allowing for time to work through some of the trivial things. What you don’t want to do is have a 20-item to-do list and then get discouraged when you do 1-2 (or none) of the items on your list every day.
Keep in mind this is the rule of averages here. You can’t necessarily control every aspect of your day in an ever-growing world of global communication. Your 9 AM is 9 PM in other parts of the world, and you can’t necessarily skip meeting with a colleague 12 hours ahead because it’s your “analytical time.” This creates more anxiety and frustration, which taxes the brain. The intention here is not that you selfishly organize your day to harm everyone else’s day; it’s to give you the tools you need to balance your workload in an overwhelming world.
Conscious thinking involves a lot of deeply complex biological interactions, not to mention the billions of neurons needed to fire. Every time you do that, you use a measurable and limited resource. Some mental processes take a lot more time than others, and it’s important to prioritize those. When you sit and think, you also take a meditative step back; you also look at your anxiety a little more objectively, you take a breath. You might even start the next day with addressing that new conference idea and say, “You know, having our salespeople come in on live elephants is actually pretty stupid and impractical.”