Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Don't work according to a template change the way you work to suit these very, very powerful and clear rhymes in the brain.
Welcome to curious mize at work. I'm your host, gale Allen. As a knowledge worker, you face two chAllenges.
First, do you need to take in staggering amounts of information to stay current? Second, you must consistently convert that information into innovative solutions that benefit your team and your company. While expectations for consuming and processing information have changed.
Most of our mental habits harken back to the days of the outdated factory model, yet we're ignoring the tremendous power of our human biology, namely our brains. What if we designed an optimal works built around key features of the human brain? That's the question mitt stony works to answer in her book.
Hyper efficient, optimize your brain to transform the way you work SHE, like in spring function to a car engine with multiple gears. Then SHE shares how to best put those gears to work for us and how to shift them as circumstances change. It's just the right book with the right amount of information for the age we're living in.
Before we start one quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on itunes or whatever you subscribe your feedback since a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with me too, Steven. I miti sterny welcome to the podcast. IT is great to have you on.
Thank you so much for having meats and honor to join you.
What does IT mean to be hyper efficient? And why is this so .
important? Efficiency is a word that we encounter a constantly doing work during Normal working days when we're doing any kind of action, whether with a mind or with the hands, with a body. And efficiency has had a especially in the last century or so, it's played a really important in our work lives, really starting from the point in recent history that is starting from the point of the industrial revolution, when we found that when we were producing many things, many goods, many tangible goods, you could produce more of those goods per unit time by working faster, by constantly staying at a moving convey t and really essentially with an assembly line. And so we have equated, being efficient, we working using the same principles of an age of an assembly line ever since.
But the reason why I wrote this book can call a hypericum ent is because we are now entering a new era of work where we are not only working with a mind, which we have been doing much more since the last second, since the second world war in the last century, but in this new phase of knowledge work, the work we are doing is changing in a large part because of technology, because of A I assistance and automation. And so this new kind of work that we are now doing requires quality over quantity because the the large that the maximum area of growth in most companies and in large sectors of work involve intangible goods, like ideas, like software solutions, like innovations. And in order to come up with very, very excEllent quality output, when you are thinking of ideas or coming up with innovative situation, your mind has to work with a view on quality, not quantity.
In other words, it's much more important to have a single exceptional idea than to have a thousand mediocre ones. And so high efficient gives a label to working with a view to maxim quality. So not simply producing more items per unit time, which is efficient, but by producing excEllent mental output per unit time, which I define is being hypertension ent.
Me too, the term power law IT comes up early in your book. Can you tell lesh what IT is and how it's connected to human behavior?
A power law is when two variables change according to some power. So when I looked at mental work and the way we work and the way the brain likes to work, IT becomes very clear that a continuous way of working is not the best way to produce good ideas and to produce good quality work. We can produce, we can type a hundred emails without sleeping very well the night before or after working in eight hour day.
But we cannot solve a very complex differential equation with such a lack of sleep and with such a tired mind. So it's very clear, if you look into the brain's dynamics, when IT performs complex cognitive work, IT cannot do so well when IT works continuously. The standard working hours, the standard working template, is one of continuous work we put in an hour or so for lunch and the hot coffee break here and there, but we are expected to work continuously.
So these two ideas are at odds with each other. So the next step to think about is what is the way, what is the best way that the brain works? Now, in order to answer this question, I took a step back and I looked at, how has work been done through our history, through human history? And I went back into a hunt, gather at times using data from current hunter gathered populations and anthropogenic observations Carried out in the last two to three hundred years.
And I was quite struck by how, regardless of where these three industrial societies exist in the world, whether in south america, weather in africa, whether anywhere else, the antipope gist who look to them all reported that they seem to have a very distinct pattern of working and resting, and working more specifically, where any bowl of intense work was followed by much longer out of slower paced work. IT didn't mean that they didn't work hard. They worked exceptionally hard, but for very small bouts of time.
Then there are, there is another branch of anthropogenic data that shows that even while people work when they go off forrid ing or when they go off hunting, their mood of working and their mood of of hunting actually follows what are known as levy patterns, where they go long distances, very rarely, and they go short distances for most of the time. And so if you imagine that as a graph with frequency at the bottom and intensity of work at the top, IT resembles the sort of inverse law graph, which follows a powerful equation where the toughest st. Bolts of work are done for the shortest bolts of time.
Medium intensity work is done for slightly longer, and least intense work is done for the longest period of time. Now you can have a parallel in this when you look inside the dynamics of the brain. So whether you're looking at eye movements, whether you are looking at the way we search for a memory, we also follow this very interesting pattern of activity where fast jots of movement or fast searches or intense work happens for the shortest bolts of time and then IT sort of slides and smooth into a slower curve.
Of course, it's very IT would be wrong of me to immediately relate this to mental work as so I thought, what else is there in the data that suggests maybe mental work also follows this sort of power law pattern of physical work? So I found a very interesting research paper that looked at how Charles, dan, a. Einstein and free sign fried Albert and send signal, right, how the three of them vote letters.
Now, back in Darwin's time, letter writing was a form of research. And you didn't have peer reviewed through the internet. You had peer review through your peers, writing and telling you whether your ideas were any good.
And so how often Charles downing and others root their letters really wasn't indicator of how they performed mental work. And so this research team took their letters and looked at the frequency with which they wrote the letters. Now, if they simply replied to letters as let us came in, they would be writing at random.
But that's not what the researchers found. They found that, in fact, Darwin, einstein and royd think to reply to the letters in a very power law like pattern. So you see here that when people, extremely intense cognitive workers from two hundred years ago who worked without a framework and without a scuffled of imposed work hours or imposed work template in the laboratory, they seem to naturally gravitate towards the power law like pattern of working.
So in the book I draw these two together. I also describes some data about this network in the brain called the local sereda and the power of patterns of tivy that can be found there. And then I answer the question that in a workplace, what is the best way to work?
So we've establish that continuous work is not the brain is not suited for continuous work is simply cannot perform at its peak. So an alternative is, well, why not work in spring? So work very intensely and then do nothing.
The problem is, if you work like this works very well, muscle, but IT doesn't work for the mind, because the mind does not simply stop working when the like muscle, if the mine stops working, if you physically stop working, your mind Carries on working. That's one angle to IT. The other angle to IT is if you simply work in a stop go fashion, your wasting lots of time, not working.
So a great compromise is, is to bring all these threats together. And we actually find that this, that this compromise, which involves a power mode of working where you do the most intense or difficult work for short bolts of time and immediately relax into a slightly slower, less intens Epace f or a l ong a bout o f t ime, finally winding down completely at the end of your work session and at the end of your working day, is the best time date for mental work. Me too.
based on what you've just discussed, i'm wondering if this is a good leader in to um something you describe as the gear network. Yes.
IT is. So the gain network refers to a metaphor i've created to describe how you feel when you're working. When you're working, you can find yourself, your mind existing sort of slowly at a very slow, gentl Epace.
You can also feed yourself in the state of really good focus, where you can concentrate and focus really well. Or you might find yourself slightly distracted, uh, where the slightest interruption or noise distracts you. And these three states of mind are what I call gives one, two and three.
So when you talk about these three different states of mind that folks are in, how does this relate to sort of what's happening in their brains? And how we work, is there a way to make that connection for us?
Yes, IT is. So when you are in what I call gear too, when you can focus really well, the part of the brain that sits in the front of your head, behind your forehead, call the prefer al cortex, is fully engaged. And the reason why that so important is because you need this area of the brain to be fully engaged in order to do work of the highest quality with your solving problems are coming up with ideas. This is the the part of the brain that needs to work especially well. And when you're working in any kind of environment, the trick, the key to working really well is to navigate yourself into this middle zone of gear to.
So what one of the things I found really fascinating in your book, we will talk about helping you know how you explain to us how we can actually navigate and get into different years. But one of the things I also found that was really a kind of fun and interesting in your book is that we can have a gear personality. What does that mean? That a gear personality? What does this matter?
So what I describe as a gear personality is the fact that different people require different levels of stimulation, or different, a different environment to be the right state of mind. So for instance, what someone can find really distracting and noisy. So if you think of an open plan office, for instance, some people thriving IT.
Whether other people find its incredibly distracting, both these people will be doing the same kind of work. But the giz network, the metaphor that I use their brains react differently to the same level of stimulation, to the same level of noise and distraction. And so in order to get into this kind of goldy lock state of mind, retire for to as gear too. Everyone has a kind of unique fingerprint of environment where they thrive the best. And that's what I describe as gear personality.
wonderful. I love the description too. You can be stiff versus springy.
That's right. So what I describe as a stiff year is someone who feels perfectly calm, skin down a blank run one winter or working with in a very, very risky environment with lots, lots of deadlines. And they're thrive and they feel really calm. They do very well with competition.
And that is because if you imagine the gears as as a literal coal in your head, you need more to turn that cock real, you need more to shift that gear, you need a bigger push, whether others can get very, very easily flustered with deadlines, with competition. They might work much Better in a quiet, calm environment, whether is very little uncertainty and thread. And you can imagine that as the cockrell needing a very light touch or the gear needing a very light touch to to kind of move the needle.
I got to a kick out of the fact that you can sort of tell your personality by you, if you sit still, do you fall a sleep? If asked to sit in room by yourself, what you fall asleep.
That's that's right. And actually you might your listeners might be familiar with the idea of type a and type b personality um which came from researched on about a hundred years ago and that research actually was the first kind of research that establish this link between the way people appear, between the way people behave what so type AI, you know go get as they like competition.
They like a very sort of slightly uncertain, a very fast paced e environment. And type b individuals are slower. They prefer, they're not slower, but they prefer slower environments that calm. They don't seek out situations that are specially uncertain. And these researchers, a hundred years ago, established that having these two personalities can actually determine and decide an influence the kind of illness people people receive in that specific study they are looking at as though its growth and heart disease. And so this this kind of difference in personality really does come from this sort of alertness and this, the state of of action, of activity, the brain and body, which translates and percuss tes down to your as well.
And do they find that the illnesses would come up of a person was forced to be in in a type of work situation that was not conducive to sort of their personality?
So in this particular research, a, they looked at people in these work situations, so they didn't actually differentiates a personality so much. But they they they kind of thought they assumed that people would have gravitated to these environments for because their personalities were more suit to IT. But for those that were not, they were probably more likely to get these illnesses, these diseases because in the book I describe how you can shift the needle too far off and move away from get two into gear three when you are struggling to cope with an environment that that is just too uncertain or too, uh, to complete vely heavy for your mind, and when that happens, you have to your brain recruits all your resources to cope and steps on the peddle. So you're working in get three, and that results in a whole host of other consequences where you stay in this kind of very wired state of mind, not the only do you not produce your best work, but you go home and you are unable to unwind before you fall asleep, which can contribute to ein soma and and various other things down the line.
If you'd like to learn how to craft powerful goals that stay in the best chance of helping you achieve success, check out episode two or four when the IoT fish book alter of the book and get IT done surprising lessons from the science of motivation. For example, he explains the critical importance of intrinsic motivation.
When we talk about new yest resolutions and many of the cause that we said, they are not really one hundred percent in trying sicily motivated. If you set the resolution, I am pretty sure that you are not completely musically motivated, that you have some other reasons why you want to do. Of course, there are reasons why you didn't do IT so far, but your resolutions and your goals in general vary by intrinsic motivation.
Some feel more like their own, and they just fun to do or exciting. You feel like your achieving something as you do IT. And some will only be beneficial in the long run. And what we find is that when people enjoy resolutions, when they feel trying sicily motivated to do IT, they are sticking with them long go.
Now let's get back to my interview with me, too sterny. When explaining in your book why we were able to change gears at other points in history compared to today, you write, quote, we never had to change our mental gears alone. We were helped by the rhythms around us.
And you explain that those rythm are the rhymes of nature, of the body and of the mind. And I want to start by going into the rythm of the body, you write, quote, we began divorcing the body from the mind at scale in the era of assembly lines, when the body worked while the mind slapped. More recently, knowledge work has taken this to the opposite extreme.
The mind works while the body sleeps. Talk about why this matters. In both instances, the impact on us.
The obvious weight um in which we are now discovering this impact us is because we are now taking all the things we have erased and adding them back in and realizing their beneficial for us. So for instance, we're realizing that if your mind works while your body sleeps, then adding exercise into your day actually improves markers of health.
Going deeper, we are also realizing that if your mind isn't doing what you wanted to in both directions, so either feeling alert when you want IT to feel, or if IT isn't relaxing when you want IT to relax, one way to get the mind to do what you wanted to do is by making the body perform the action. And this is why the popularity of activity such as yoga, such as progressive muscle relaxation, has mushroms in the world. Because we are realizing that if you can't relax the mind, because it's always stuck in this high gear, uh, constantly on setting, then forcing the muscle to relax also makes the mind relax.
And there is a physiological reason behind this. There are studies the show that when you contract muscle, you actually increase the minds alertness, mental alertness in the opposite way. If you relax muscle after contracting IT, or if you stretch IT and then release IT, your your mental alertness also comes down. So you're using your body to moderate the mind. So the fact that we are realizing these two things happen, and we are telling people to exercise quickly if you want to feel brighter, alert first in the morning, to do all these other things to wind down late the evening. And we are also finding things like breathing exercises, which are modulating the state of fuel mind because of this very important network in the brain that I described in the book, when out putting all this together and realizing, well, is IT really that doing this as an extra is bringing us benefits, or is IT really that we've simply, he raised these things by divorcing the body from the mind when we started working in this way.
That's fascinating. I also thought I was interesting that you talk about detaching the gaze and how walking can help us detach the gaze without leaving your two. And again, you've talked about the fact that we probably walk to whole lot more many, many years ago.
That's right. For walking is a very is an intriguing practice. It's so monday and so commonplace that I at first really didn't think twice about IT.
And then I came across, first of all, lots of anodos of all these great thinkers in the past from dickens to Darwin who would go for uh and then think about ideas um and of course i've used anecdotes and heard anecdotes from lots of people from managing directors and tech companies to uh other to writers, to people in all sorts of a lines of work who use walking as a tool. And then I dugger into why walking is so incredibly spectacular. And actually there's a very special reason for IT.
The reason is that when you're walking the world around, you is moving. So you focus your gaze, cannot rest on one thing for too long. So what does IT do? Your attention starts to drift. IT drifts around, and then IT drifts into your head.
And once in your head, IT explains all the corners, all the crevices in your mind, all the little, little bits of thoughts, fragments of ideas that are sort of floating that your attention spotlights never really lit up. But at the same time, your attention can grab onto one of these and who on to one of those very long and too tightly, because your attention has to also stay in the outside world, because you have to know where you're going. So this creates a very interesting scenario of of your attention that can linger and discover and see things inside your head, but at the same time not get Carried away through rumination or go down an alway an avenue that leads to nowhere.
That is, when I go to IT. The second angle to IT is if you were to sit on a park bench and let your attention drift and wonder, you would start falling a sleep. You would start becoming drowse, a little like the dark room that you mentioned earlier.
But when you're walking, the simple act of walking, the physiology of IT forces you to stay in an mental state right in gear two. So when you're walking, you fuse these two things together. You stay perfectly alert, but at the same time, your attention can drift and wonder.
And this is why people, when people go for walk problem, suddenly see much more solve. They get aha moments of insight, and they even gets innovative kind of ideas and solutions to things they've been struggling with for a very long time. So walking is an incredibly powerful tool, and part of the reason is this idea of a floating attention.
The other rhythm that we talked about, in addition to the body, is the rythm of the mind. What are we talking about here? What does this mean? And how does that help us think about the ways we work?
So the rythm of their mind there, there is some data that has been accumulating for a long time, that attention and the way the brain works, and different elements, networks in the brain, all work in rhymes. They all work in rhymes. Now most of your listeners will be aware of brain waves, which is one form of rythm.
We have different brain waves that are now believed, increasingly believed to underline lots of brain processes. Um rythm of how the brain waves work also are being increasingly discovered. But in the kind of broader, broader aspect of this is that when you are working, your attention does not stay the same constantly.
And IT seems to vary in around about ninety to a hundred. Sometimes that can be between sixty two hundred periods of time. What this means is that when you're sitting down to work, if you work beyond ninety minutes continuously, your brain's rhymes are preventing you from doing so. So IT is much Better to stop and begin again rather than Carry out. And this is, this makes the case for making for segmenting your workdays into a around about ninety minute schedules.
How would you structure a work session? So if we think about a ninety minute work session, how how should we approach that? Are there any guidelines that can be helpful to us?
So using the idea of power laws, the best way to structure such a session would be at the start of your work session, your mind is going to be fresh. So put in the toughest work, the most difficult work, in the first, around about twenty minutes of that session. Now if you have more a more work to do, so you haven't finish that tough work in that twenty minute slot.
Don't Carry on doing IT reserve IT for the first twenty minutes of your next work session beyond the twenty minute period. We can be slightly flexible with this. Of course, you should dial dial down the intensity of the work you're doing, so change what you're doing to something that slightly lighter by the end of the ninety minute or session.
You should be doing something that's very light. And when you finally stop the session, you should be in a state of mind that is not doing any work at all, where your mind is in a state of complete rest. So if you imagine that you're doing the toughest work for the shortest period of time, that at the start, and then gradually as the session continues, your intensity of work grows lower and lower and lower until you end with a clear break.
So then let's talk about breaks. You talk about two kinds of bricks are charging station and rest station. How do we think about this? And you know, how long should these breaks be? How often?
So a charging station and and rest station are different in the following way. So when you're doing any kind of work, you want to be in gear too. If you're doing work that's very boring, you're push into gear one.
If you're doing work that's very difficult, overwhelming difficult, you also pushed into get. But if you're doing work that's that you're struggling with, you're also pushed into gear three. So bottom line is, while you're working, the nature of the work is pushing you out of the optimal state.
When that happens, you want to stop what you're doing and take a very brief pause. That pause lets you reenter gear to the best mental state for work, and then you will start again. So in the grand, a scheme of the entire work session, what you're doing is, is your entering the session.
And gear two, you're drifting off, stopping as soon as you drift off, getting back to the right side of mind, going back to your work again. As soon as you start drifting off your pause, you go back in the right side of mind. So you're really resetting your mind to the right state by having these poses.
The second type of rate that I describe is a rejuvenating rest break, where you're not stopping to reset yourself into the right frame of mind. You're stopping to refresh your mental resources because you are tired or exhausted. That is the difference.
If you have something you're doing that's extremely boring, are there ways through the recharge process? And then when you reengage, are there ways to, for lack of a Better way to say and make the work a little bit more interesting? Is there a game you can play with yourself?
Yes, you have to think of IT in terms of bandwidth. If your work is very boring, IT means that you need to push yourself up to a middle state of mind into what I call gear to, by whatever means are available to you. So one obvious mean is by actually increasing the difficulty of your work.
So some people I know, for instance, use multitasking to make their work, their primary work, less boring, or rather to be to be able to stay engaged by being the right state of mind with their primary work. Now I remember when you're engaging with your work, no matter what that work is, the reason why you're engaging is because you are in this year to state. So if you're doing boring ing work, you getting pushed out of that state if you're now adding a second stream of work.
So for instance, you know if you're watching something on the screen and it's incredibly boring, you can have a second screen there where you are writing emails. You could also have a little game on your phone that you're playing in parallel, something like tetris for. So what you're doing here is you're actually increasing the progressive load and forcing your brain, your mind, to kind of step on the peddle and get into the right, get into gear too. And as soon as you're gear too, you are able to do the work and no longer feels boring enough to pursue you out.
What about the mental state that you call tired and wired, where you're ruminating? You can't stop thinking about work. What are some things to do when that happens?
So when you are tired, you can be tired in two ways. Now remember, the mind is very different from muscle. When your muscle is lifting weight in a gym, as soon as you stop lifting weights, your muscle stops working when your mind is working in an office or at at your desk.
IT doesn't simply stop working when you leave your chair and leave the room. So if you're doing work that is either emotionally intense or that causes you some kind of stress or distress, your mind is going to keep thinking about that work. You might feel physically tired and mentally drained, but your mind will still be busy.
That is a form of tired and wide. And what happens there is your brain has, again, using this metaphor, pushed so hard on this peddle that your mind is staying at peak working capacity when you're otherwise tired. But there's a very interesting thing about this, which is that when you're tired and wired, you can do things faster, but you can't do sophisticated mental work well at all, if at all.
So in order to get out of this mental state of being tied and wide, you need to distract yourself. One way of distracting yourself is by doing something so absorbing that you forget the work you are doing earlier. Once you have distracted yourself away, you can then relax and then rejuvenate.
As you mentioned throughout the interview, we're living in a different time, and this time is requiring us to be continuously innovative, continuously learning. And this idea how to learn when the rate of technological progress is outpacing our adapt. Ly, you know, it's become a point where we need ChatGPT.
We need A I to help us because there's so much to process, so much to learn. And as you mentioned, we have to do IT at a high quality, more so than ever before, especially with knowledge work. How do we approach our art learning? One of the things you encourage is dive into a small piece of something that's closest to what we know, rather than trying to learn things deeply from end to end. Talk about this because IT sounds like this is becoming more more of what many as many of us have to do.
So an easy way of remembers this is by thinking of IT as a, as an eighty percent horrible or eighty percent rule, where we know data shows that when we're learning something, we learn best. When IT is neither too difficult nor too easy, so not neither too unfamiliar nor too familiar, but when we learning things for the first time, diving in with new elem models coming in all the time, almost everything is very new.
So the best strategy to use is look at everything in front of you and find one little bit where you know something, no matter how small that most that pieces use that as an island, and then step into the water around twenty percent at a time. So but what that means is instead of learning things in an order, learning things first before doing something, you're just driving onto one little island of familiar, and then you expanding the island by twenty percent every time. And if you've done that a few times, your island is so big that you can expanded by a much bigger absolute amount, and hence eventually be able to conquer the entire territory. So learn with a twenty percent step every time.
Me too. One of the other things that comes with this is strong feelings of uncertainty. And sometimes those strong feelings of uncertainty can actually become a barrier for us, whether it's for learning, or whether it's from performing. How do we navigate this?
So one way of of overcoming uncertainty is to actually become, grow more use to us. And I describing the book how we have created a world that has become increasingly certain at one level which deprives us of the ability to practice.
Overcoming uncertainty or dealing with uncertainty are facing uncertain in a day, day way, but at the same time, the world has become uncertain at another level where technological progress has meant that things are much more uncertain at the technological scale. So being able to navigate your, your mental state and stay in here too, by using tricks and approaches to keep your body and your mind calm is one way. Another way is simply by embracing more uncertainty. And I describe how some way some organizations do IT is by causing uncertainty deliberately and learning how to cope with that and getting comfortable with that happening at any time, which is a paradoxical message. But as we raise uncertainty from our lives, IT seems to be something we might need to increasingly be doing.
There are two questions I like to wrap up every interview I do with, and one of them has to do with the theme of the podcast, which is curiosity. What are you most curious about today?
I most curious about how the brain is going to adapt to this changing world um and that that inspired me, of course, to write my book but that many unanswered questions and i'm curious to know what what will happen whether they'll be a by fiction, whether this act has an evolutionary pressure, or either we will simply smoothly adapt and we will forget we ever had this .
conversation. And then my last question, we can't through everything in your book, there's so much there is so rich in nuances, detail and story and science. What's one thing that we maybe haven't gotten to speak about that you would like to talk and leave our listeners with? Or one tip maybe that you would like to share.
So the idea of don't work according to a template, change the way you work to suit this, very, very powerful and clear. We thus in the brain. What does that .
mean for you if you were to say how you've taken this and brought IT into your life? Maybe what one wave done that?
So one way have done that is I describe how the brain performs creative work, much Better first thing in the morning and lasting at night, and focused work in between. And so when i've been writing, it's much IT has been much Better for me to wake up, especially early in the morning and get a few hours of writing done, take the rest of the day at a much easier, slower pace, and then engage again late in the evening, which is completely as ord with my usual cheele of waking up, getting some exercise and starting work. So changing my schedule to suit the exact work i'm doing has been very, very useful for me.
Me too, IT has been such a pleasure to speak with you. This is an incredible book, and I think that really helps us realized that we can make adjustments even weeks and get a lot more out of the kind of productivity that we both want to have and that we need have today. Thank you very much for speaking with me.
Thank you so much for having me curious minds.
Work is made possible through a partnership with the innovative circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer in editor rob maka belly for leaving the amazing behind the scenes team that makes IT all happen. Each episode will give a shout out to something that's feeding our curiosity.
This week it's Julia su cus novel with the emperor was divine. It's a family story of living in a japanese and turn ment campaign taught during world war two. In her spare prose, the author captures the complex emotions of each family before daring and after the experience breathtaking.