Time to review how you work? Which of these habits do you already follow and where are there opportunities for you to adopt new habits into your everyday?
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Struggling to keep focused? Especially when doing systematic, logical and methodical tasks? This should come as no surprise to anyone. The very nature of the thinking processes involved in this type of activity are effortful and slow. Our brain often kicks against it, craving distraction and ease from effort. A simple technique that recognises this reality is the ‘Pomodoro Technique’. It proposes that we break down effortful thinking and activity into bite-sized chunks.
When was the last time you wasted time? When did you find the space to start thinking about something, not knowing what will come of it?
It’s well known that being exposed to lots of noise is harmful – it raises blood pressure, increases stress levels and hampers performance. However, in contrast, the benefits of silence for our brains are more recently being established.
How often do your thoughts become clearer once given a bit of time to settle? Or an idea emerges from what originally seemed like a confusing mess of information? If we understood what occurs in our minds, perhaps we wouldn’t be so surprised when this happens.
Rubber ducking is a concept that is likely to be most familiar to those in the computer programming world as a way to help debug codes. The term comes from a story in the book ‘ The Pragmatic Programmer'* in which a programmer carries around a rubber duck and forces themselves to explain their code line-by-line to the duck, with the aim of helping find the bugs.
Even if we don’t write code, many of us will have had the experience of explaining a problem out loud, only to be hit by an idea for a solution part way through. Somehow, simply talking the problem out loud and in detail helps get to a new idea.
What's your typical doodle? Flowers? Houses? Stars? Faces? These are amongst the most common. Or are you someone who finds themselves scribbling the same abstract or geometric shapes over and over in different ways? Whatever your preference, you’re not alone in your doodles.
While scribbling in the margins, shading in the shapes and creating random patterns doesn’t sound particularly productive, there may actually be cognitive benefits of doodling.
When was the last time you were bored; when those little moments and tiny cracks in the day were left unfilled – while waiting for the lift, queuing for a sandwich or arriving early for a meeting? Do you allow boredom to creep in, or are spaces quickly filled with snippets of news, a quick text or a catch up post?
We crave stimulus and it’s only when we can’t find it externally that our minds tend to create it internally; sparking innovative ideas and solutions.
Drawing can help reveal patterns more clearly, explore ideas more fully and imagine alternative outcomes more easily. We are not talking about being an artist or drawing a piece of artwork, we are talking about visualising what we are trying to make sense of – whether through diagrams, sketches, flow charts or visual representations. It’s not about aesthetics or creating an outcome in its own right, it’s about tapping into visuals as an alternative to language.
Asking questions is a deeply human thing. We are born asking lots of questions. In fact, pre-school children ask an average of 100 questions a day but by the time children are half way through their education asking questions dramatically falls and this trend continues into adulthood.
New ideas can come at any time - the week or weekend, day or night, at work or at leisure. Our brains do not make a clear work-life balance distinction in the same way as we might.
Be prepared for helpful ideas to happen at any time. Get into the habit of writing down your ideas in the moment and capture them before they slip away!
Multi-tasking makes us less efficient and productive because our brains don’t have the capacity to process everything at once – we can only focus on one thing at a time.
We can switch attention from one task to another, but when attention is overloaded we miss things and take longer to complete activities.
Growth isn’t just a matter of learning new things, but also unlearning old limits. When faced with a challenge, actively consider what previous ideas may be getting in the way of thinking about your new situation differently.
When tackling complex problems or chunky pieces of work – don’t binge it in one go. This means avoiding the temptation to procrastinate and then work like crazy to hit a deadline. Equally it means not getting something done and dusted early in one go. Instead, plan your work differently. Start early and then deliberately build in time part way through where you step away. Then come back for a second bite.
Neuroscientists have linked alpha brain waves (the slow, electrical activity in the brain) to an increase in Click Thinking moments – that 'ah-ha!' when ideas suddenly come together in a ‘click’.
While we can’t make these happen on demand, we can help ourselves by finding enough time when our minds can wander and we are truly task-free.
When hearing new information or ideas, encourage yourself to write down your immediate ‘gut feel’ thoughts before they are lost, overshadowed or influenced by others.
Is it better to specialise and focus on one thing or broaden your activities and interests? It turns out that having at least one stimulating hobby or interest outside of work, or more than one area of focus within your work, is likely to increase your career success.