Contents
“You can everything!” – one of the most popular slogans of our time. We try to follow it: we study planning systems and try to get the most out of every minute. Time spent resting or sleeping causes feelings of guilt. We do not notice that in the pursuit of efficiency we lose control over life.
take too much
We let our environment determine the course of our lives. A novice entrepreneur takes more orders than he can fulfill – quality suffers. A corporate employee cannot refuse assistance to colleagues and spends all day working on other people’s projects. The father of the family solves the problems of relatives, leaving no time for self-development. Being mired in other people’s problems, we cannot find time for our own projects and priority tasks. Moreover, we do not even have time to prioritize.
Business coach Greg McKeon suggests taking responsibility for life into your own hands and embarking on the path of essentialism – highlighting priority areas and focusing your efforts on them as much as possible.1. The main principle is less, but better. It sounds great, but it’s not easy to implement it in life: it’s embarrassing to refuse personal requests to friends and family. But we will have to learn to say no, because every time we make a choice in favor of other people’s plans, we give up our own and stop controlling our lives.
Read more:
- Selfishness has its good points
- Essentialist: one who chooses the essential
Reduce sleep
We are trying to cheat time and find additional resources. The obvious solution is to reduce “useless” hours of sleep and dedicate them to work. We forget that the most valuable property of a person is himself.
It seems like 4-5 hours of sleep is enough. People are so used to being tired that they don’t remember how a rested person feels. The situation is aggravated by the myths that all the great people slept little. This is not true. Ludwig van Beethoven, Victor Hugo and Thomas Mann slept 8 hours a day, Albert Einstein – 10 hours a day. Sleep is not the enemy of productivity, but the key to better results.
In the early 1990s, psychologist Anders Ericsson was trying to figure out what separates mediocre musicians from great ones. The scientist conducted a study on the basis of the Music Academy in Berlin and found the answer – practice. The most promising students studied several times more than the rest. By the age of twenty, they already had over 10 hours of practice behind them. The results of the study formed the basis of the famous rule: to become a master of your craft, you need to practice it for at least 000 hours.
Authors of motivational books and articles often refer to this rule, losing sight of another important factor. The second feature that distinguished outstanding violinists was sleep. The best violinists slept an average of 8,6 hours a night, an hour longer than the average person. Also, musical geniuses did not neglect daytime sleep. Thanks to proper rest, the violinists managed to study music with greater concentration.
German neuroscientist Ulrich Wagner studied the effect of sleep on human cognitive functions. In one experiment, a hundred volunteers were divided into two groups: the first group was allowed to sleep peacefully for eight hours in a row, the sleep of the second group was periodically interrupted. In the morning, the volunteers were assigned to solve a difficult intellectual problem. The number of people who found the correct answer in the first group was twice as large as in the second.
During sleep, the brain structures information in order to re-form neural connections in the morning. Good sleep activates the potential of the brain and its ability to solve problems. An extra hour of sleep does not reduce the time of activity, but, on the contrary, adds several hours of productive work.
Cultivate multitasking
Another popular way to optimize time is multitasking. We talk on the phone and answer emails, listen to music and write reports, watch a movie and scroll through the news on social networks. Psychologist Daniel Goleman refutes this approach.2. He explains that, from the point of view of cognitive science, the “split” of attention is a myth. Attention – “narrow inflexible tube”, not “expandable balloon”. We do not split attention, but quickly switch between its objects.
Endless switching depletes attention and makes it difficult to concentrate. It becomes difficult for us to read long texts or listen carefully to a speaker at a conference. We constantly want to switch, like checking email or incoming messages on social networks.
Sociologist Erving Goffman called this “out of office” state, analogous to status in instant messaging services. We are physically present, but attention is scattered and not focused on anything in particular. Focus helps us get through the turmoil and troubles, allows us to direct maximum efforts to a specific problem, without wasting cognitive resources on switching between different tasks and extraneous thoughts. Research results show that people with impaired attention span are unable to draw deep conclusions and make quality decisions. It is important to develop the ability to concentrate on one specific task and save attention from the destructive effect of multitasking.
Read more:
- Unload your head: three effective exercises
- Effective altruism: what is it?
Kill the day
Along with the ability to focus attention, the ability to let go of thoughts into free flight is important. Neuroscientists call this type of thinking the “wandering mind.” It is in the state of the “wandering mind” that creative ideas and non-standard solutions to problems come to us.
French mathematician Henri Poincaré hit a dead end while working on number theory. “Disappointed by the failure, I decided to spend a few days at the seaside,” the scientist wrote. While walking along the coast, the mathematician had an insight that led him to an important discovery.
The idea came to Poincare unexpectedly – the “wandering mind” works outside of conscious perception. We do not notice the work of the “wandering mind”, but he is constantly working on important problems and tasks. The Wandering Mind has a powerful calculation system that gives us sudden insights and creative ideas.
The appearance of “wandering” thoughts is unpredictable. We have a lot of ideas, memories and associations in our heads, when they coincide in the right context, creative solutions are born. It is up to us to create the right context. If we are hyperfocused or tired of distractions, insight can simply be overlooked. In order for the brain to often please with creative ideas, it is necessary to provide time free from fuss and irritants.
Restoring Focus
Intuitively following erroneous principles, we bring ourselves to physical, intellectual and moral exhaustion. An exhausted person, by definition, cannot work effectively, even if he feels very important and busy. Here are some simple tips to take back control of your life:
Highlight priority areas. If you do not identify the most important areas of life, someone else will: the wife, the boss, the state.
Don’t be afraid to say no. Friends and colleagues are not even aware of your true plans and goals. It is necessary to mark the boundaries of personal time. Others will not guess about them on their own – they are not telepaths.
Plan your free time. In order for the brain to please the brain more often with original solutions, provide it with periods of rest. Sometimes it is worth going for a walk without gadgets or driving a car without turning on the radio.
Stop multitasking. Multitasking creates a sense of busyness, but it destroys concentration and brings questionable results. Set aside substantial chunks of time for each task, instead of doing work in fits and starts.
Take time to sleep. It is at this time that the brain restores its working capacity. With a lack of sleep, brain activity is significantly reduced, so that one hour saved at night translates into several hours of low productivity during the day.
See the full article at “Big plans”.
1 In the book “Essentialism. The path to simplicity” (Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2015).
2 In the book “Focus. About attention, distraction and success in life” (Corpus, 2015).