What works?

There are so many things that people say will boost your performance at work.� And I am not talking about your ability to get up to the seventh floor quicker than anyone else in the office (although that might add a few extra seconds of work-time to your day). I am talking about the thing that really matters. That is, your mental performance or your cognitive ability.� Especially your ability to problem solve, prioritise, focus and make decisions

Some things seem to make sense, but we don’t have absolute proof (like drinking water, which might boost attention but not necessarily cognitive ability).� Others are contingent on how you manage them (planning your time works, but it is dependent on how good your planning system is).

But here are some things that have been shown time and again to boost our mental powers:

1) Exercise – short bursts of aerobic exercise re-oxygenates the brain and provides vital fuel for problem-solving and decision-making
2) Sleep – a 20 minute sleep can boost cognitive performance by as much as 20-30%. Upgrade this to 40 minutes and the boost can last almost three hours

3) Caffeine – a wonderful discovery that just gives us another excuse for a coffee break.� Caffeine increases some of the chemicals that increase attention

4) Glucose drinks – but before you run off to the kitchen and make yourself a cordial, this might only be a short-term fix as the insulin rebound may hamper performance in an hour or two

5) Bigger computer screens – I keep reading that this works, but am completely unsure of the mechanism.� However, there is just too much evidence to ignore it.

90-minutes of fuel

There is quite a bit of research to suggest that we can only maintain full intensity for a maximum of 90-minutes.� After this time our cognitive performance, including concentration, problem-solving and decision-making, tends to drop off dramatically.� It appears as though 90-minutes of full engagement in a task (that is, working flat out with full concentration) is all it takes to deplete our fuel tanks for this aspect of the brain.

90-Minute Chunks

Organising your time into 90-minute blocks allows you to do two things: 1) it ‘chunks’ your day into the optimum timeframe to get the most out of our limited cognitive resources and 2) it also sets you mini-deadlines at various intervals, making sure that you are working at your highest intensity.� You will be amazed at how much work you can squeeze into 90-iutes when you are intent on getting something completed within the timeframe.

What to do in Between? Refuel

The other side of this performance coin is that we need to be able to refill these fuel tanks in order to maximise the next 90-minute sprint.� These short recovery breaks can be anywhere between fifteen minutes and 30 minutes (different people require different amounts of time) and would ideally consist of three components: mental re-fuel (engaging your brain in something that is not work related), physical re-fuel (get away from your work station, preferably outside in some sunlight or a park) and nutritional re-fuel (water, low GI snacks).

Don’t be fooled into thinking that more time at your desk equals more productivity.� Managing your productivity effectively means more intensity for shorter periods.

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Trying to remember stops you from performing

There was once a paper published quite a few years ago that showed that we can only remember a maximum of seven things at any one time, before some form of ‘memory deficit’ started to take place.

But recently, there have been findings to suggest otherwise.� And it is not on the higher side.

It seems that we can really only hold four things in our short term memories at any given time.� That’s it.� The figure of seven might actually have been a bit optimistic and only possible if those seven things were of the utmost simplicity.

What does this mean for our productivity, effectiveness and managing teams?

Holding things in short-term memory reduces our ability to do the ‘important things’

When I ask people to tell me how many things are� on their task lists every day, they generally come back with anywhere between ten and twenty.� The problem is, that when I walk back to the office from a meeting, those twenty things are spinning around in my head as I try to prioritise how I am going to manage the next two hours that I have in the office.� What should I do first?� What is most important?

Here’s the thing.� The same part of our brain involved in trying to remember those twenty things is also used to do the important stuff.� The stuff that actually adds value to our jobs, like decision-making, problem-solving and creative thinking.� The fuel for this sort of thinking is a limited resource – that means that if I am burning fuel trying to remember, I have less for higher order processing.

What’s the answer?

Well, there are two things that you can do right now to stop burning up your mental ‘fuel’ with useless activity and start to conserve it for the more important things.

First, we need to ‘chunk’ down all our information where possible.� Instead of those twenty tasks bobbing through your head, try reducing them to four ‘macro’ tasks.� This sounds like cheating, but our brain is happier holding a smaller number of complex tasks rather than many simple ones.� This is why it is easier to remember a phone number when you break it down into two, three or four groups of numbers.

Secondly, the more you can get things out of your head and onto a piece of paper (or screen or whiteboard) the better.� If you are trying to decide between five different things, the simple act of writing them down helps to free up brain capacity for making the decision.� You are no longer burning ‘fuel’ holding them in memory, which means you have more for processing.

This can be applied to task lists, team goals and KPI’s.� With two many things to remember, our brain’s natural instinct is to do one of two things: 1) use more processing capacity just to hold things in our short-term memory, or 2) just forget about them.� It takes too much effort.

You might actually need both

Many people have the opinion that being motivated by fear of failure is a terrible thing.� But it just might be that a bit of fear is exactly what we need in order to get focused and put our full attention into the job at hand.

The brain chemicals that get us to focus and to get engaged aren’t aroused unless we have a need for them.� If we can operate on cruise control, then that is precisely what we will do.� Less energy, less attention, less stress.� This is actually the default mechanism that our brains are wired to pursue.� We have a pressing (evolutionary) need to conserve energy, and so the more we can put on auto-pilot the better.

However, we also know that this is not how we do our best work.� We do our best work when we are giving conscious effort and for this to take place we need both dopamine and nor-epinephrine (the brain’s adrenaline) to be active and stimulating us to greater mental performance.

So where does fear and reward fit in?

Well, fear actually gets our attention.� It stimulates the release of the ‘brain adrenaline’ that causes us to pay attention to something.� When you are driving your car, literally on auto-pilot, and then you see a police car in the rear -vision mirror, you tend to pay a heck of a lot more attention to what you are doing.� This is the fear chemical at work.

On the other hand, rewards, or even the prospect of rewards, tends to produce dopamine.� Dopamine gets us engaged and interested.� It doesn’t just get our attention, but it also stimulates a desire to understand and improve.

We need both chemicals to perform at our best.� To generate attention as well as engagement.

Think about consequences, think about rewards

So if you find yourself languishing on a task – surfing the net or doing the filing when you know you are supposed to be working on that presentation – then fear and reward in moderate measure may work.� Thinking about the consequences of being under-prepared as well as the accolades you will get from a great presentation might be the two triggers that you need to stimulate both attention and engagement.

Like everything, we probably need both in moderation.� If your emotions run out of control on either fear or reward, then the research tell us that your performance will deteriorate dramatically.

Where did we go wrong?

I witnessed a wonderful thing on the weekend.� I sat with my five-year-old at a cafe to have a milkshake and spend some quality time together and I noticed another dad with another boy of similar age sitting next to us.� “What does one hundred plus one hundred make, dad?” asked the little boy.

Well, the father proceeded to do some wonderful teaching.� Holding up fingers, asking what one plus one would make, then trying to get the boy to extrapolate out to discover, for himself, what one hundred plus one hundred would indeed add up to.� There was no way that the dad was just going to give up the answer – he wanted the boy to discover it for himself.�� And when the discovery finally happened, the look of delight on the boy’s face was priceless.

So what happens when we try to teach adults in the workplace?� Do we do the same thing?� Most managers do not.

But, the first question is to find out why we instinctively teach our children in this way and what that means for learning.

When we learn, our brain physically changes

It was thought for quite a while that when we got to a certain age our brains remained relatively stagnant.� Now, however, there is plenty of research (along with some pretty cool video footage) that shows us that when our brain learns new things, it develops new neural connections and new networks.

When the five-year-old boy learned to add up one hundred and one hundred, his brain developed a whole new set of neural connections – a new network – for working that problem out.� He learned to connect the dots, so to speak, and to make connections between what he already knows and how that affects the new problem.� This is how we learn best, and how we develop the ability to keep making these connections between current knowledge and new problems in the future.

What would have happened if dad just gave him the answer?

What if dad just said, matter-of-factly, “Two hundred, son.”

I haven’t got the precise answer to this, although I will endeavour to do enough research to find it in the next few weeks.� My most likely theory (borne out by similar research in the past) is that the boy would have made new neural connections in this instance as well.� However, these connections would be made according to the tone of his dad’s voice, the setting, what he was eating at the time.� In short, he most likely would have stored the memory of the event, rather than making any connection between current knowledge and how to apply that to a new problem.� What would this mean for future problems, say, two hundred plus one hundred?� Well the short answer is that his dad would have to tell him again.

Now, how about adults in the workplace?

The same principles should be applied by managers all over the world.� We learn best when we are able to discover.� When we are told what to do, rather than coached or taught, chances are that we are going to need to be told again in a slightly different situation.� And even though it might be more time-efficient to simply tell our employees what they need to do, the lack of development ensures that we will spend more time doing the same thing in the future.

So next time you find yourself teaching your five-year-old something new, stop and ask yourself how you can apply this to other parts of your life where you need to teach people effectively.

You would think that people who multitask are better equipped to switch between complex tasks at a rapid rate.� Afterall, isn’t that what they do all day?� It’s becoming well documented that we cannot actually Multitask (processing things in parallel), but in fact we just continually Task Switch (processing things in series), so why can’t chronic multitaskers perform better when task switching is actually required?

When we look at the effect of the the multitasking lifestyle on performance, we see that those who multitask the most have a greatly decreased ability to ignore irrelevant information and organise information into working memory effectively.� This could quite possibly lead to a decreased performance in task switching when the need actually arises.� So not only are we beginning to continually task switch throughout the day, chances are we are actually getting worse at it as we go.

Practice makes perfect.� When you practice being distracted and un-focussed on the task at hand, guess what happens?� You get better at it!� You get more distracted and become more un-focussed.

Multitask or get focussed?� It’s a no-brainer, really.