How to gather your thoughts when you have a lot of tasks in front of you and your head is foggy? What motivation is important for the brain? What can help to overcome forgetfulness and quickly retrieve the necessary information from memory? Let’s understand the peculiarities of the brain’s work.
What do you do if in the middle of the working day you realise that you can’t take on any work? If you reread an email from a client for the hundredth time and still can’t make sense of it? We have to adapt to the demands of the time, which requires us to multitask, to focus as much as possible, to pay attention, to be able to switch quickly from one problem to another. Sometimes it’s too difficult. Recommendations from neuroscientist Takashi Tsukiyama will help you mobilise the brain’s hidden resources and keep you productive.
1. START WITH SOMETHING
When you don’t feel like working at all, you should still sit down at your desk and try to do something that seems interesting and/or simple. I start with simple tasks: going through our hospital’s income and expense statements, sorting through emails. All of this is done to stimulate the activity of the contiguous nucleus. Psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin called the principle that some activity puts the brain into a state of emotional arousal ‘action stimulation.’
2. SET A TIME LIMIT
Don’t make your brain work on one task for a long time – it tires quickly. Divide your work into short, time-limited intervals. What do you need to make the restriction work even more effectively? Be sure to give out results. You can not sit for two hours and just think about solving a question. You need to get the information out of your brain, at least by sketching out the main thoughts on a draft. Since you have created an exam-like environment, be kind enough to hand in your work on time, even if it is not perfect.
3. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T REQUIRE LONG PERIODS OF CONCENTRATION
When you’ve been doing something for a long time and realise you’re at a dead end, distract yourself with tasks that you can finish quickly. Just not something that doesn’t require any thought at all, like brushing your teeth or doing the laundry – they’re unlikely to help. Choose only activities that don’t require long periods of concentration and can be completed quickly with only a short time of concentration. You can put your desk in order, sort your papers, do some arithmetic calculations. Quick actions make the brain more active.
4. PLANNING
The brain is lazy and tends to be idle. Determine exactly what you want to spend its energy on. For example, sketch out a plan for today, for the first half of the day, for the next hour. When you feel yourself losing concentration, look into it. Make it clear to your brain what you are going to do next.
5. MAKE THE TASK ‘VISIBLE.’
‘Making visible’ means not trying to organise your thoughts solely in your head. You need to get the information out of your brain, put it in a visible form, and solve the issue in a substantive way by physically interacting with the information – for example, by writing it out on paper. When we ‘can’t see’ our ‘enemy,’ we overestimate its danger and feel panicked. Separate information from emotion by verbalising it.
6. SOLVE RIGHT NOW WHAT CAN BE SOLVED QUICKLY
Often the source of our anxiety is unresolved problems that can be dealt with in five minutes. They steal our ability to reason soberly. For example, we should have given someone some information but didn’t. This includes promises to get in touch, requests, responses to emails. Such issues either resolve immediately or write them out on a piece of paper and put it in a conspicuous place. Once you’re done with them, cross them off your ‘Things to Do List.’ This way you will get rid of any number of other concerns.
7. CHANGE YOUR APPROACH OR ENVIRONMENT
If you have to think about the same tasks for long periods of time, periodically change your approach or environment. For example, if you spent the first half of the day at the computer, alone thinking about a solution, in the second half try to share your ideas with other people, get their opinion. Then transfer the ideas to paper. Or, for example, in the first half of the day you worked on the task, creating text, then in the second half try drawing diagrams and illustrations. This will engage different areas of the brain. A lot depends on whether you’re sitting in the office or walking in the park – the brain works slightly differently in different situations. That’s why it’s a good idea to get out of the office and take a walk.
8. FOCUS ON ONE SPECIFIC TASK
When we try to force ourselves to think about two things at the same time, we miss both and become distracted. To prevent this from happening, you need to be able to deftly shift your attention from one to the other. It’s not as easy as it may seem. What helps? Put away all the things and documents that you don’t plan to work with now and that remind you of ‘other business’.
9. PUT THINGS IN ORDER
Sorting things is also about sorting the information in your brain. For example, if you put document ‘A’ and document ‘B’ in the same folder, it means that your brain has decided that they have some common items or these documents are somehow related. If you put folder ‘A’ and folder ‘B’ on the same shelf, it means you saw the similarities in the information they contained. By doing this sorting every day, you will notice for yourself in what slender order your thoughts will soon find themselves.
10. MAKE AN EFFORT TO MEMORISE INFORMATION
It is not enough just to read or hear something so that this knowledge becomes yours. You definitely need to make a conscious effort to memorise them. A simple way to help make someone else’s knowledge your own is to take the information out of your brain. Summarise what you have read or heard orally or in writing (or preferably both), write down what you have encountered, or try retelling it as if you were telling someone. You will only know if you have the information in your head when you try to play it back.
11. EXTEND THE ‘SHELF LIFE’ INFORMATION
No matter how much valuable knowledge you have learnt over the years, at some point you will no longer be able to willingly extract it from your brain and use it if you have not repeated what you have learnt at least once in a while. Information that you have never used will sooner or later become invalid. It is better to update it in different ways: write it down, recite it, apply it in practice.
This will help you better understand the essence of what you have learnt and effectively extend the ‘shelf life’ of your memory, as well as share your knowledge with people. I think that the practical application of your knowledge is one of the greatest pleasures in our lives.