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Our minds are basically organized like human computers. They function to a great extent in much the same way. So, if we want to improve our daily productivity, efficiency and focus, we need to empty the cache of temporary “files” and reboot for our brains to allow us perform at our peak levels.
Otherwise we can easily experience brain overload with too many circuits firing simultaneously and so many programs (thoughts) working in the shadows that we often “freeze up” and cannot remember everything or simply process the information in a much slower and less efficient manner than we’d like.
It sounds odd, but when you stop to consider, it actually makes sense. The best part is that’s not difficult or time consuming at all. It really only requires a few minutes each day and surprisingly simple tools.
1. Choose your best time – Ideally, this process is best done, twice each day, first thing in the morning and again before bedtime, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Choose the time that works best for you. Any time will work. The key is to do it consistently.
I have found that I need to my morning coffee, breakfast, and exercise first. My brain has to wake up a bit. I apparently need a caffeine kick, fuel and stress release in order to form coherent thoughts.
2. Choose your method of logging – Any number of apps on your phone will work well to record thoughts and tasks. If you prefer, you can use the voice-recording feature. Even the basic note function works fine. An organizational program or document, such as Outlook, OneNote, or Evernote on your computer will work as well.
Though I tend to be a “techie” by nature, I still prefer to use a pen and pad for this process. Sometimes the simplest method is the most effective. Whatever tool you choose, make sure it’s quick, and readily accessible.
3. Quickly dump everything you’re keeping in your head – And I mean everything… Not just tasks, but thoughts, concerns, questions, and ideas too. Get it all out. Don’t worry about sorting them; you can do that later, just get them out of your head so that they can stop spinning around, using up precious brainpower and space.
Once you’re finished, ask yourself if you need or want to act on any of these items today.
If the answer is yes:
Add those tasks to your ongoing task or to-do list (you have one of those right?)Cross them off or remove them.
If the answer is no:
Is it an idea? – Add it to an idea file, work notebook, or document to pursue later.
Is it really more of a question or concerns you have? – Record it in a journal or notebook to mull over at another time. (If you never go back to consider them, they probably weren’t that important.)
It’s that simple. It should take no more than 5 – 10 minutes
By making it a habit to set aside a few minutes each day to empty and organize your brain, you can drastically improve your ability to focus, complete tasks, and achieve your goals. A streamlined mind is much more effective than a perpetually overloaded one.
In addition, an overloaded brain forgets things; important tasks, details and deadlines. The quality of our output suffers as well. We are simply unable to concentrate and use our intelligence and skills to their highest potential.
As a side benefit, you’ll find better balance, less stress and increased energy. Swirling thoughts cause an enormous amount of stress and prevent our minds from truly ever resting. This results in brain fatigue, which keeps us exhausted and irritable.
When we’re unable to let go of thoughts and responsibilities that plague us, we are no longer constantly preoccupied. We are better able to quiet our mind and enjoy the other parts of our lives. When we aren’t stuck in our head, we can fully engage with the rest of the world outside us.
When it comes to getting things done – whether we’re talking about David Allen’s wildly popular methodology or just the act of doing stuff – the first thing you have to do is get it all out of your head and capture it somewhere. Your brain is not meant to hold all of the stuff you have (or want) to do and keeping it all up in there will only serve to disappoint you in both the short and long term.
Knowing that you have to get it out of your head is one thing. Where you put it is an entirely different matter. Some people are great with tools of technology, such as apps on your mobile device or desktop software solutions. Others deal with this kind of stuff far better when it’s on paper. No matter which type of person you are, I’m going to unveil for you the ultimate way to get it all out – to do a “brain dump” if you will – so that you can keep moving forward instead of always looking back to see what might have slipped through the cracks.
That’s right. Even if you are someone who lives in the digital world, you need to write stuff down using simple analog tools. In fact, if you’re a technophile you’re in somewhat of a better position in that you don’t see the need to spend money on fancy pens and notebooks – you can save your money for the tech gear you want. There is something about writing something down that makes it stick; you connect better with the tasks, projects and goals you have on your plate when you write them down rather than enter them into a device.
You need to have the following headings for your list: Musts, Wants and Perhaps. Each of these heading represent the things you’ve committed to doing (Musts), the things you would like to do but haven’t committed to them yet (Wants), and the things you may want to do at some point but are far down on the priority list (Perhaps). You might need more than one sheet of paper for each list as you go, but start with the Musts, then move on to the Wants and finish up with the Perhaps. It is important that you go in that order, because that way your brain isn’t moving all over the place. It is focusing on one type of thing at a time and writing down the things that fall under that type until there are no more left to capture.
Now you need to honestly evaluate each list. Start with the Must list and move on until your have finished the Perhaps list. When you look at each list, use some of the principles of GTD to whittle the list down to a more manageable size. You can move stuff from one list to another during this exercise as well, but ultimately you want to wind up with the least amount of things on your Must list so that you can get to the Want list stuff that much faster.
Once you’ve criticized and crossed things off your lists that aren’t part of your “master plan” any longer, start to complete the things on the lists. Get the Must stuff out of the way first, then move on to the Want list – maybe even moving some of the Wants to the Must list as you go. Once Wants graduate to Musts, they become more crucial to you, and that means they have a greater chance of getting done. You’ll also be able to move some the Perhaps stuff into the Want list as you go, with the Perhaps list likely being the longest list you’ve got going.
Whenever you feel as if your life is getting out of balance or you are feeling overwhelmed by everything that is on your agenda, conduct this exercise and get yourself back to a more comfortable space. Not only is the stuff you’re trying to get done worth, but so is the person trying to get it done: you.
The moment you get effortlessly lost in work goes by any number of names: focus, concentration, escapism, flow, and countless others. It's the point where you're able to blur the world around you and calibrate your brain to pay attention to one single task. It's your sweet spot. It's when you Get Things Done. Your entire cognitive effort is concentrated on one task and when you're in that moment the outside world disappears.
We all struggle to maintain focus in our daily lives. Endless distractions keep our brains from focusing on a task as we struggle to get things done at work and complete projects around the house. But what's actually happening in your brain when you're lost in a project? And more importantly, how can you train to induce that focused state in yourself?
To get a better understanding of how focus and concentration work, I talked with Susan Perry, Ph.D, a social psychologist and writer for of the Creating in Flow Blog at Psychology Today. It's important to know what's happening in your brain when you're focused on something and what happens when you get distracted. From there we can look at minimizing those distractions and training your brain to focus better. After all, focusing is a skill and takes practice to develop.
To start, let's look at what's happening in the brain when you start to focus on something and then what causes you to break that focus. It turns, both processes are intertwined.
The brain goes through two main steps when it's focused on a task. It's thought that selective focus is controlled by the top-down attention system. This system is under your control and asks a simple question, "What do you want to focus on?" When you decide to focus on something, the brain goes through two steps to sort and understand the information.
Visually, you take in all information in a scene and start processing the information to find what you need to pay attention to. Picture the process like a blurry photo that slowly starts to come into focus.The second part involves focusing on one single aspect. As that same photo comes into focus, the attention starts to zoom in on the one aspect you want to pay attention to.
This is the same essential process for voluntary and involuntary focus. When you're focused your perception of the world around you changes and you have a heightened ability to ignore things around you. This is being in "the zone," or "the flow." It's when you're focused and don't notice events around you unless something initiates your bottom-up attention system (which we'll get to in the next section).
From a psychological standpoint, Dr. Perry describes these moments:
From what I've studied, it seems that both the right and left brain are working efficiently together, but able to screen out peripheral distractions. Time seems to disappear and you and the thing you're doing feel as though they've become one. Such flow states have aspects in common with trance states, though it's tough to do MRIs of someone writing a book or playing a game.
Photo by Mike Warot.
The root of breaking focus is an evolutionary system meant to keep us safe. Where selective focusing is reliant on top-down attention, breaking focus comes from the involuntary bottom-up attention. You cannot control this because bottom-up attention is hard-wired into your brain as a passive process. Bottom-up attention asks, "What is happening that needs your attention?"
Two outside events cause us to break focus: bright colors or lights, and loud noises. Your focus is drawn to things that might be dangerous or rewarding, like the growl of an animal or the sound and lights of a police siren.
Once the top-down focus is broken it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to a project. Each time it's broken, you restart the process and use up your brain's resources. Essentially you're slowly growing exhausted by distractions.
Picture your attention system like a glass of water. When it's still, it's easy to see through the glass and concentrate on one thing. When you hit it everything is disturbed and takes a while to calm down so you can see clearly through it. Over time, the water evaporates and by the end of the day you're left with nothing.
This brings us to the ways to pinpoint those evolutionary distractions and remove the triggers so you can focus on what needs to get done. Photo by Quinn Dombrowski.
Nobody is totally the same. It's likely at some point in your life you've met that one person who can enjoy reading with a TV on in the background or who has no problem concentrating on a task while blaring death metal. To help yourself focus when you need to, it's important to pinpoint your own triggers and get rid of them for blocks of time. Let's look at the two distraction triggers science has proven cause you to break focus.
For external distractions, two prime candidates break your concentration no matter how involved you are in what we're doing: loud sounds and blinking lights. Minimizing these common distractions is a sure way to ensure no outside forces will break your focus.
A lot of different ways exist to easily block outside influences. Entire businesses and apps are built on the very idea. Here are a few simple suggestions to help you minimize the risk of outside influences breaking your focus.
Wear headphones or earplugs: If loud noises are the biggest cause of distraction then the most logical approach is to remove them from the equation. Noise cancelling headphones or earplugs can do this easily. The important thing to remember is that distraction doesn't come from just loud noises that are directed at you (someone shouting your name) but loud noises in general. That includes the car bumping Cyndi Lauper, the fire truck screaming down the road, and even a loud furnace turning on. All of these are enough to break your focus. If you want to get really hardcore about blocking your outside sound cues, consider recording your entire day on a digital recorder to find where and when those sounds are coming so you can reschedule your day around them.Strap on your digital blinders: Seeing as how you probably don't want to literally wear blinders when you want to focus on a task, the next best thing you can do is remove the visual cues from your environment. For most of us, this means blocking audio and visual notifications. We've mentioned before that notifications are evil and since they typically come with both distraction triggers, audio and visual, they can wreck serious havoc on your concentration. You can set up timed internet blocks that block the likes of email or Facebook, use browser extensions to keep you on track, or if all else fails, simply close down your email, throw your phone in another room and get to work. Your solutions will vary, but the point is you want to block those notifications that call attention to anything other than the task you're working on.
Creating a private little noise and light-free cubicle is a good for blocking the outside influences neuroscientists have pinpointed as the cause of distractions, but what about the all-too-familiar internal distractions we all deal with? Photo by Chris.
We all get distracted by different internal things throughout the day. Those thoughts might be about what you're eating for dinner, why the girl at the coffee shop didn't want to go out on a date, or that stupid thing you said to you boss. You can, however, limit those brain wanderings when you need to focus on a task by simply putting the brakes on the thought process. Dr. Perry notes:
You can set up your environment to diminish distractions, decide on a routine or ritual that feels to you like a good way to begin your focused work. But in reality, our minds are so busy multi-tasking and keeping track of so many inputs that it's going to take a genuine decision, a commitment, to make that transition from "all over the place" to "right here, right now."
Author and teacher David Rock describes this as paying attention to your attention. He suggests it's not easy to do, but it's possible to stop those thoughts from overwhelming you:
To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold. It turns out that, like the old saying goes, timing is everything. Once you take an action, an energetic loop commences that makes it harder to stop that action. Many activities have built-in rewards, in the form of increased arousal that holds your attention. Once you open your email program and see the messages from people you know, it's so much harder to stop yourself from reading them. Most motor or mental acts also generate their own momentum. Decide to get out of your chair and the relevant brain regions, as well as dozens of muscles, are all activated. Blood starts pumping and energy moves around. To stop getting out of your chair once you start will take more focus and effort than to decide not to get up when you first have the urge. To avoid distractions it's helpful to get into the habit of stopping the wrong behaviors early, quickly, and often, well before they take over.
Learning to deal with distraction is great, but what's more sustainable in the long term is training your brain to focus better. Let's see how you can do it.
Learning how to focus takes training. If you maximize your environment and train your brain, focused moments are easier to come by when you want them. On top of the above examples for creating an environment conducive to focusing, here are a few ideas for training your brain to kick into focus mode without as much effort on your part.
The idea here is pretty simple. Our attention system is a top-down priority list (and distractions are bottom-up). This is the key feature in any to-do list. The most important thing is at the top, the least important is at the bottom. If you've ever managed to cram a homework assignment into a single evening, you know that a deadline is crucial for forcing yourself to focus. The same is said for any task you need to complete. In an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers suggest that you can override your attention system to maintain focus provided you have a good working memory, which is something you can train yourself.
To increase the relevance of a task, assign a due-date (if one isn't assigned) and tap into the reward center of your brain and offer up a reward for completing a task. For instance, "When I finish writing this article, I get a cookie." Prioritize with a to-do list, organize everything, and focus only on the top-most goal. The goal is to add weight to the project you want to focus on so that it's easier to do so.
Early research from UCLA suggests that meditation can build brain tissue around areas of the brain associated with attention. Although the study looked at long term effects, the most interesting part is that the brain is malleable and trainable. In this case, meditation is used to train your brain to focus better.
Before you get worried about learning all about chakra's and omm's, it's good to note we've talked about the practical ways anyone can meditate. One of the first steps in meditation is concentrating on your breathing and blocking out your thoughts. As pointed out above, putting the brakes on wandering thoughts is one of the key ways to keep yourself focused. The very first step of meditation teaches you how to do this. It's a trick that applies at nearly any moment and is worth training yourself to do, even if you don't follow through with the entire meditation ideal.
Focusing on something productive triggers the same parts of the brain as focusing on entertainment. Using entertainment as a training program is a great way to teach yourself to break free of distractions, enjoy a good story, and learn what it takes to focus. Dr. Perry suggests getting lost in a story isn't all that different from getting lost in something productive:
It's not easy to differentiate the sensation of being lost in something with a productive flow state. After all, there isn't any objective difference between one kind of absorption and another. You can be reading actively, watching a movie actively, or creating something or working toward a work goal actively. During any of those activities, you can go from engaged to bored and mentally drifting at any point. I think we all know when we're reading or watching something that requires no effort (what I would call media for the brain dead). You're in flow when you're slightly challenged, rather than bored, riding that line between too hard and too easy.
You can use any type of entertainment you like, but the key point Dr. Perry points out is that it's challenging and you're doing it actively. Television doesn't work so well because ads break focus, but books, movies, and games are all ways to utilize your escapism as a means to calibrate your brain to focusing. The key is that you actively pay attention and absorb what you're consuming. That means no Twitter breaks, phone calls, or anything else. Turn off the lights, huddle up on the couch, and enjoy your media without distractions.
These training exercises won't allow you to run off and start working on a big project without having to worry about distractions. Instead, they get you used to the feeling of being focused and that feeling transfers over across everything you do. Photo by niezwyciezony.
When you understand what causes your brain to focus on something it's easier to train your brain to focus better and ignore distractions. No one-size-fits-all method works because everyone deals with (or even notices) distractions differently. But once you're focused, the last thing you want to do is let that feeling get away. Have some tips that help you maintain focus? Share them in the comments.
Letting your mind wander from time to time can actually help your brain process information, and can serve as a workout for your "working memory," or your mental capacity for handling multiple thoughts and dealing with competing issues simultaneously. In fact, a new study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that if you frequently catch yourself daydreaming, you may have a strong working memory—meaning you can focus on multiple things and daydream without forgetting the things you have to work on.
Granted, the study draws the line between people who daydream because they're bored and subsequently forget everything they were doing before they started daydreaming, and people who daydream because the things they're working on simply doesn't require their full attention. "Working memory" is that ability to process multiple things in your head at once—or in other words, what you're using on the long commute home when you're thinking about what you'll make for dinner when you get home, whether you'll have time to play a few video games or fire up a movie, when you should check in with the office again, if you have any chores to do when you get home, all while you're trying to safely drive through rush-hour traffic.
To support the conclusion that daydreaming may be actually mental exercise for your working memory, researchers asked groups of people from 18 to 65 to do simple tasks—so simple their full attention wasn't required—and then followed up with some light cognitive tests to have participants remember letters while doing simple math equations. In almost all cases, the individuals who admitted to their mind wandering during the simple tasks did better on the cognitive tests. The researchers concluded that while everyone did well on the tests, those people with more working memory are likely to use it to do more mentally even when they're supposed to be doing something else—effectively daydreaming.
This isn't the first research to indicate that daydreaming can be good for your brain. So if your attention tends to wander a bit while you work on other things, don't feel too bad about it. As long as it doesn't make you less creative and productive, you could actually be getting more done with the brainpower you have.
Do you catch yourself daydreaming from time to time? Do you feel like it helps or hurts your productivity? For more information on the study—which was published in the March 14th edition of Psychological Science, hit the link below, and let us know what you think in the comments.
Most people would already describe someone who knows multiple languages as a smart person, but there's new research that shows learning and knowing more than one language can have a deeper impact on the way your brain works than previously believed. In reality, people who know multiple languages are able to monitor their surroundings better and switch between mental tasks faster, and those benefits extend from the early years to old age—and you can harness them even later in life by picking up a new language.
In its examination of the topic, the New York Times points to a trio of studies, one from 2004 and published in the journal Developmental Science from researchers at the York University Department of Psychology that indicated bilingual individuals are more adept at certain mental challenges and tasks than people who only know one language.
Newer research being conducted at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain, however, shows that people who know multiple languages process their surroundings in a different way and respond more rapidly to mental tests that require them to shift focus in ways completely unrelated to language, and unlike previous research that implied the biggest bang for your cognitive buck comes from learning a second language at a young age, this new study implies that people who learn a language later in life may also be able to reap those sharp-minded benefits.
In the end, it's very possible that being bilingual (or even a polyglot) may make you smarter in more ways than just the fact that you know another language, and may give you more of a leg up than being able to add another language to your resume normally would. For more information on the research, check your the full story below. Do you know multiple languages? Are you planning to learn a new one? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
