Written by: Laurence Nicholson, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Following on from my last article on ‘Doing Too Much,’ this month, I am going to talk about how to navigate the usual morning email ‘tsunami.’
If you have never experienced the tidal wave of emails waiting for you every morning, then congratulations. You either already know how to manage this well to optimize your mental resources and resilience, work in an environment that is not email obsessed, pre-teen, or retired (and even then, this might still apply!).
For the rest of us, the following scenario is all too familiar and carries some level of anxiety and dread each morning:
Whilst you have been making your way to your desk, either traveling to the office or walking to your home office if working from home, you are concentrating on a new idea you came up with overnight, trying to keep it all in focus so you can start fleshing it out at your desk.
You are aware of a rise in anxiety as you switch on your device, and you wait to see how many emails are waiting for you as the ‘pinging’ starts. The number starts in double figures, rising rapidly, and your pulse speeds up as the number goes past 100. Your heart sinks as you realize there is no way to answer all these as well as work on your projects today.
You realize you have stopped concentrating on your new idea, having been distracted by the email tsunami, and now you are struggling to recall the finer details you were keeping in mind.
You try launching yourself into the huge list of emails but make little progress as 30 minutes fly by. Your attempt to read emails and listen to voice messages proves (as it would) not just fruitless but counterproductive, as you find you can’t focus on either sufficiently. Then you accidentally erase a voicemail from your manager.
The realization sends a dump of adrenaline through your system in a panic response, and your attention snaps back to the present and all the work to do.
You need to prioritize, but your brain has been overloaded, and you can’t recall the methods of doing this from the training you had. In frustration, you return to trying to deal with the email pile.
Another 30 minutes go by, and despite your efforts, the number has now climbed to 125, with the new ones coming in thick and fast. All thoughts of your new idea have been lost, and attention is struggling to focus on anything particular.
To understand what is happening here, remember the ‘operations room’ analogy from my last article (read it again if you need a reminder), and consider the small staff of operations managers in their small room, which runs only on battery power, trying to deal with the line of warehouse staff members (the emails) knocking at the door, each looking for attention from the operations managers, who are trying to focus on keeping the warehouse processes running as well as creating an idea and presentation for a new process (your new idea).
The effort to keep this activity going in the operations room is burning through battery power rapidly, and the lighting and equipment in the room are slowing and dimming as the batteries run down.
As the power drains, the effort needed for cognitive activities like analyzing, decision making, and impulse control, all competes for less and less available resources, leading to an increase in ‘distractibility.’
Your pre-frontal cortex, where any ‘thinking’ about your present situation is carried out, is your ‘operations room & managers’, and their power is getting very low, so your ability to concentrate your attention and use any higher functioning cognitive capabilities is severely hampered.
The brain’s batteries need to be recharged.
If you don’t do this, the ‘backup system’ of your limbic brain will assume control from the pre-frontal cortex. Any decisions will be impulse-driven and based on previously stored ‘crystalized intelligence’ with no current information applied to make it relevant and appropriate. The result is reactionary, ill-conceived, and historical-based poor, usually costly, decision-making.
Tip No. 1:
Important items should only be admitted to your ‘operations room’ by invitation, through prioritizing, and as prioritizing is a very resource-hungry cognitive activity, it should be what you do first before tackling anything else, and energy levels start to deplete.
Prioritizing is energy-hungry because it involves ‘imagining’ and moving around concepts that have not yet happened (so cannot be in your powerful crystallized intelligence of the limbic system) and of which you, therefore, have no direct experience to draw on. Doing it first allows you to order your day to ensure you have sufficient ‘recharging’ time between high load cognitive activities, helping have the pre-frontal cortex fresh for when it is called upon.
Tip No. 2:
Use visual representations wherever you can because they are much more information-efficient constructs, carrying more information in smaller numbers of neural maps. The brain has been using visuals for significantly longer throughout its evolution. Its processing is more energy efficient.
Tip No. 3:
Use lists! Get the nagging things in your head, which are using energy to stay in mind, down onto paper (physically writing things has been proven to increase the ability to store and recall), or digitally if necessary. This removes them from trying to interrupt the operations managers in your control room so that they can focus better.
Tip No. 4:
Have a disciplined approach to what you ‘don't’ let into your ‘operations room.’ If you can, delegate. If not, make sure you use time doing non-urgent routine tasks as a chance to recharge the brain by not thinking about other cognitive heavy problems or activities. Do the mindless stuff mindlessly!
Things you could have done to improve the scenario above, including:
Use a voice recorder to capture your ideas when you have them, or at least when traveling to your desk,
On seeing the email tsunami, set about prioritizing your day’s activities, on a pad, or whiteboard, with all devices on silent so as not to distract you during this.
Compare the potential cognitive load of the activities to make sure you have built in sufficient ‘recharging’ breaks during the day, and know how many of the heavy load activities you can realistically fit in the day, so as not to leave yourself trying to make important high-value decisions when your decision-making process/systems are too depleted to make good ones.
Schedule your time into blocks of similar modes of load. For example, have set times to deal with email, another for a single complex thinking task, etc.
Next month I will be continuing the theme of dealing with overload, with the first part of a 2-part series on ‘Managing Distractions.’
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Laurence Nicholson, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Laurence Nicholson is the CEO and founder of the N Cubed Group, My Better Life – Mind Coaching, and Exec Mental Health Solutions, through which he works with both Corporate clients and individuals to improve and optimize mental health, performance, and resilience, in order to realize measurable improvements in business and personal productivity and decision making.
A Mind Coach, certified as a Corporate Mental Health Facilitator, holding 'Distinction' grade certifications in Life Coaching, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Depression Counselling, Anger and Aggression Management Counselling, Criminal Psychology, Forensic Psychology, and Corporate Wellness Coaching, Laurence is also trained in Corporate Coaching and Mentoring, Behavioural Analysis, and to the expert level in non-verbal deception detection and analysis.
He had spent over 35 years working across corporate environments as both a consultant and leader, and when he was first sent abroad for work way back in the 1990s, he became fascinated by how different people and cultures think and behave in different ways under the same conditions, and quickly became addicted to immersing himself within local environments, in order to get a true experience of thought processes and event-behavior associations.
Human psychology and behavioral patterns became his passion, and he used his corporate consulting work as a way to enable him to travel extensively and to study wide and diverse behaviors, and investigate the ‘how and why’ of our brain’s processes, and more importantly the impacts of stress and change on people, universally.
His business education and experience as an advisor and consultant in procurement, finance, law, information technology, organizational change, and executive management, combines with his life experiences and numerous culturally immersive experiences from working in over 14 countries around the world, to provide what his clients consider as a unique appreciation of their individual circumstances.
Laurence aligns himself with Jungian psychodynamic theory, with its spiritual element, and supports this as a certified and attuned Reiki Master Teacher and a Certified Meditation Teacher..’
