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.
We have all done it. And most likely still do.
What am I talking about, and can we learn to understand how to deal with this more effectively?
Let’s define this by considering an all too familiar scenario:
You have been given a new department to manage, and are on your way to your first meeting to put forward your thoughts on improvements to the Executive Team. You are unsure where the room is, so you ask for directions from another member of staff you pass.
As you start to follow the directions, your phone rings, and it is a supplier who is looking for an update on a proposal, and you have to tell them they have been unsuccessful.
You realize you have not been paying attention to where you have been walking and are lost, not knowing where the room is, and you rush to end the call, and after getting your bearings, eventually arriving 5 minutes late, and annoyed with yourself.
You make your apologies and join the meeting.
A few minutes in, and your phone vibrates (you feel you have to be ‘always on’ after being promoted because you worry you might miss something urgent if it is turned off) with notification of an email from the successful bidder, needing the contract meeting rescheduled, and you reply immediately, half-listening to the current meeting.
You feel a little anxious and sick, trying to do both activities. Your brain is showing signs of struggling.
The supplier sends a response quickly, to which you type a quick reply, only to realize the room has gone quiet, and the execs are looking at you, waiting. The CEO has asked you to give a brief introduction and a summary of your initial thoughts around how you might improve the department you have taken over, and is waiting.
You stumble out some vague introduction, already concerned about how this is looking as you are a typically a clear and concise speaker. Your first meeting has not gone well!
So, what is going on here?
Firstly, your pre-frontal cortex limitation has been the culprit here. There is a limit to how much information you can hold in your focus at any one time, but also a limit in what you can do with that information, and stretching these limits will result in reductions in the accuracy and quality of the outcome.
You can hold several ‘chunks’ of information in your mind at once, however, you can only perform one conscious process on them at a time, without a serious performance impact.
In fact, your pre-frontal cortex performs the following conscious processes:
Understanding
This involves new maps being created in the pre-frontal cortex of the new information and connecting these to existing ones.
Deciding
This requires the activation of a number of existing maps and selecting between them. The number of maps involved is in the billions, if not trillions.
Recalling
This requires searching billions of maps involved in memory, in order to bring the correct ones into mind.
Memorizing
This requires these maps to be held in your pre-frontal cortex long enough to embed them into long-term memory.
Inhibiting
This energy hungry process involves preventing certain maps from getting activated and wasting vital energy and space. Think of this as the security guard, keeping unnecessary thoughts and information out, to avoid interruptions and overloading.
Each of these 5 conscious processes involves complex manipulations of billions of neurological circuits, and generally, you have to finish one process before you can begin the next, because each uses an incredible amount of energy and, many of the same circuits.
Now, this is all getting a bit technical, so to bring this to life, let’s think of the brain as an operations room, overseeing the factory floor workforce, and we will apply this metaphor regularly, as we go through the rest of this topic.
The operations room (your pre-frontal cortex) takes a lot of energy to run, is powered by battery units that run down quickly, and can only hold a handful of ‘operators’ who can only carry out one scenario at a time.
You will recognize this, when you consider the act of driving; you find it easier to talk with a friend in the car if the route is well known and you don’t have to pay attention to it. Try this on a new route across the city, and you will either struggle with the conversation or find yourself lost. Your pre-frontal cortex is overwhelmed with trying to maintain a conversation, at the same time as paying attention and focus on a new route.
From a scientific aspect, in the 1980’s Harold Pashler showed that when he set people to doing two cognitive tasks simultaneously, their cognitive capacity dropped from their being university educated professionals, to that of an 8-year-old!
This is known as ‘Dual-Task Interference.’
A further study by the University of London, found that constant use of digital messages with no break, reduced normal mental capability by an average of 10 IQ points, which is similar to the effect of missing a night’s sleep. Not a fun prospect and a little ironic, considering digital messaging is widely considered as a so called ‘productivity’ tool, yet it can actually reduce your IQ, if not used in an appropriate manner to support or be sympathetic to your brain’s way of working.
In addition to this IQ drop, the concept of ‘always on,’ touted as another hyper-productivity tool, is not actually productive either, because you are forcing your brain to be ‘alert’ for far too much time, increasing what is called your ‘allostatic load,’ which is a measure of your stress hormones relating to a sense of threat.
The resulting constant feeling of crisis or threat perception, by being ‘always on,’ has an inevitable impact.
Consider also the fact that as a concept, accepting being ‘always on’ into your operations room, is easier, or sits easier on your anxiety meter with regards to potential perceived consequences, than switching off digital messaging for periods of time.
In actual fact, the impact of a 24/7 always on behavior, is a highly negative effect on your mental performance, exacerbated by the higher number of messages you will receive, as people realize you are always available, thereby worsening the impact.
This extended, almost never-ending, day for your brain, and the above compounding effect of increasing messaging and activity, typically trends towards what people consider as ‘multi-tasking’ (which is actually mentally impossible, because of the previously explained conscious processes limitation), which is really rapid constant switching of focus, which uses up additional working memory as you try to hold all the things not being focused on, in the background, thus reducing any energy and resources for the thing you are focusing on.
In our metaphorical operations room, imagine having 4 shifts of ‘operators’ constantly running in and out, each shift working on a different activity, with ‘handovers’ on the way in and out.
Clearly not efficient and burning through those battery packs rapidly. Something will have to give.
So, what can you do to improve this?
You could:
Automate more of what you do. This is like getting menial, repetitive tasks to be carried out by the factory floor workers, so this is removed from the operations room.
An example is setting up email response templates that are linked to key-strokes and can be issued rapidly, such as “I have received your message and am looking into it.” This will become a habitual response when trying to focus, and so will be embedded as a reaction in your system 1 limbic brain, which uses very little energy and has huge resources available.
Get the information into the pre-frontal cortex in a better order, allowing it to be there when needed and then released from using energy when not in use.
This is scheduling your operators to be in the operations room only when they are needed and on shift, thus optimizing the way your pre-frontal cortex and conscious processing works (which is serial, not parallel), to avoid the bottleneck. The sets of unfinished connections an unprioritized system creates, takes up mental energy as they wait for all prerequisite information to be available, often coming from other decisions not yet made. Use dependency mapping to determine decision order, to ensure data is readily available for those decisions as they need to be made. Those ‘operators’ can then leave the operations room after their input has been delivered, keeping it uncrowded and free-flowing.
Mix up your attention, to consciously limit the time you spend across a number of activities, deciding how long you can split your attention before returning to a primary focus.
An example is having a set period(s) when your email/messaging is on, when you would not schedule any activity which would require focus. This would effectively be like having a break on the factory floor, when operators can come in and out of the operations room, without impacting any focused factory floor activity. Basically, don’t allow distractions whilst concentrating.
Replaying our original scenario using these techniques would see a different outcome; the call whilst looking for the meeting room, could have been left to voicemail, enabling you to be on time for your first executive meeting. You could have looked at the meeting agenda to work out when, if it was absolutely necessary, you could split your attention and check messages whilst keeping a partial focus on the meeting, switching off devices again for those agenda items which need your full attention, such as presenting your introduction and improvement plan to the executive team, creating a much better initial impression.
In short,
Notice when you are trying to do too many things, and consciously slow down, focusing on the prioritized things.
Get as many repetitive tasks embedded as a habit, moving them into your powerful system 1 limbic brain, to move them out of your energy hungry, limited resource system 2 pre-frontal cortex.
Prioritize and get decisions to be made in the right order to avoid bottlenecks.
If you have to do multiple task switching, combine heavy cognitive load ‘thinking’ tasks with those less demanding reactionary tasks, like checking email and messaging inboxes.
Next time we will look into how to survive the morning email avalanche.
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, 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, 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, supporting this as a certified and attuned Reiki Master Teacher and a Certified Meditation Teacher.
