Our series on reducing mental effort continues.

Do less

One often overlooked way to reduce mental effort is simply to do less. Pull back from obligations. Decline invitations. Withdraw from projects till your plate is less full.

Working with a very full plate can be stimulating, but it’s best as a short-term condition. In the long run, it’s great to have excess capacity, especially for developing fresh creative ideas, investing in some long-term projects that will never be urgent, and rejuvenating yourself.

When everything on your plate becomes a have-to, especially when there’s constant urgency involved, you never get around to those important but never urgent items that could make a real difference in your life. Yet those are the projects that often grant the greatest feelings of satisfaction.

Remember the high cost of saying yes. You can only fit so much into your life, so make each yes as high-value as you can. A good standard here is to ask whether a yes is closer to a “hell yes” or a “mostly yes.” If you fill your plate with the latter, you may not have the capacity to accept or even to recognize when a true “hell yes” comes along.

Consider that one really good “hell yes” opportunity can produce greater results than lots of “mostly yes” obligations combined. Saving some capacity for the occasional “hell yes” could save you a lot more mental effort in the long run.

Make planning time sacred

Doing even a modest amount of planning for your weeks and days can save you a lot of effort later. Whatever you invest in planning, you’ll usually make up for many times over in saved execution time.

When we get overly busy, planning is often one of the first activities we cut because planning doesn’t immediately appear to more workflow forward. However, to reduce mental effort, it’s important to do the opposite. When the time crunch is coming up, carving time out for some sensible planning can make a big difference.

Sometimes when I feel exceedingly busy, I pause for a few minutes to sketch out a simple plan for how to achieve what I’d like to achieve. Often this involves deciding which aspects are truly important and need to be done soon versus those aspects that could wait or be cut.

A tip I learned from Brian Tracy is to occasionally pause and ask two questions:

• What am I trying to do?
• How am I trying to do it?

If all you do is ask and answer those two questions, you have the basics of a simple planning approach.

Ideally it’s wise to make planning a long-term habit. Many people map out their days the night before, which is a good start.

As Stephen Covey noted in the book First Things First, weekly rhythms are usually the best for routine planning because a week is a long enough time frame to address most (or all) of your important roles. You can’t necessarily give much attention to every important role in a single day though.

Do your best to treat planning time as sacred, even when you’re tempted to skip it or cut it. You may carve out an hour or two on a weekend to plan your week as many people do. I often like to begin the week with a planning session on Monday morning because that’s a time when I’m freshest mentally and emotionally, after I’ve taken some restoration time over the weekend and let go of the previous week.

Decide first; then do

A simple but powerful habit for smooth workflow is to separate deciding from doing.

Work in two phases. First, take some time to decide what you need to do and how you’re going to do it. Write down your action steps in order, and make them pretty granular. Don’t worry about doing any of the steps yet. Just figure out what they are, and write them down in order.

I use a daily work journal for this, which is just a basic spiral notebook. Each day, often multiple times per day, I make short lists of the action steps for whatever I need to do next. This usually takes a few minutes.

Sometimes I may list only enough steps to carry through the next 30 minutes. Other times I may list a few hours worth of steps. And sometimes I may list enough action steps to last 2-3 days.

You may wonder if it’s enough to have a typed to-do list on one of your devices. I think that’s fine, but I still recommend writing down the action steps with pen and paper as part of your daily flow, even if you’re just copying them directly from a screen. I’ve experimented with this a lot, and for some reason I find that handwriting the action steps and crossing them off as I do them is way more satisfying than checking off or deleting items on a screen-based list. I also find that writing the steps makes me feel more committed to doing them. The handwritten list feels more personal and makes me feel like I own it. A screen-based list feels a bit more distant. A handwritten list on a screen (like with an Apple Pencil) still doesn’t quite feel as good as simple pen and paper. I suggest you do your own experimenting here to discover what gives you the best feelings of commitment, progress, and flow.

Once you have your steps listed, you can focus on doing. There’s no need to occupy part of your brain with figuring out what needs to be done once you’ve already made those decisions. You can just do one step at a time, checking each one off as you complete it.

You may even gain a small sense of accomplishment just from creating the to-do list – a boost which can help you flow into the action phase with a little more motivation.

Mixing deciding and doing tends to be less efficient than separating these phases. The mind goes into different modes of thinking for each phase, so it can devote all its best resources to one type of thought.

What if you run into a snag in your doing phase, and you realize that your original action sequence won’t work? If you no longer have good cause to trust your existing list, go ahead and switch back to decision mode. You may be able to modify the remainder of your current list, or you may feel that it’s best to drop the old list and create a fresh one.

We’ll continue with Part 7 of this series tomorrow.

Our series on reducing mental effort continues.

Minimize context switching

During a normal workday, it’s easy to begin new tasks without fully finishing previous tasks. Sometimes we do this for the sake of variety, but this can be a very inefficient approach.

Each time you switch contexts, your mind has to release the previous context and load in a new context. Think of a context as all of the key ideas that link with the task at hand.

It often takes 15-30 minutes to load in a new context well enough to feel like you’re in the flow of good productivity. Before you’ve loaded the relevant context, a new task tends to feel a bit alien or complicated, so you can’t work as fast. It’s like learning the contents of someone else’s kitchen when you’re staying in a new AirBnB. It takes a while to figure out where everything is. Once you’ve fully loaded in the new context though, you can work a lot faster.

For this reason it’s wise to fully finish one type of task or project – or at least drive it as far as you can – before switching contexts.

You have to balance this with your fatigue levels though because working in the same context for too many hours in a row may eventually lead to diminishing returns due to tiredness.

So while it would likely be inefficient to work on 8 different types of projects in a day due to excessive context switching, it may also be suboptimal to only work on one project all day long due to fatigue (unless that project has some decent variety, like creating a bunch of different web pages for a website). Working on 2-3 different projects may be closer to ideal. Then you’re only switching contexts a few times, and you’re switching before the fatigue of doing one type of work becomes a limiting factor.

I suggest experimenting to see how much context switching during a day is best for you. I usually work very productively with about 2-3 contexts per day, usually not more than 4. And sometimes I can be very productive working in just a single context, but then fatigue does tend to be higher at the end of the day – it feels like I’ve burnt out some circuits by overloading them a bit.

Even when you feel fatigued or burnt out doing one type of work, you may find that you still feel pretty fresh when switching to a different type of task afterwards.

Drive small projects to full completion

This suggestion is related to the above as well as to the section on solving problems fully from yesterday’s post.

To minimize context switching further, it’s often wise to drive a small project all the way across the finish line when you have its context fully loaded.

In other words, once you’ve made the effort to load the context for a project, don’t unload that context till you’re 100% done with it.

A bathroom break is fine, but try to avoid a longer break such as for a meal (unless it’s just a quick 5-minute snack).

When writing blog posts, for instance, I usually try to go from idea to publication of a new article without taking lengthy breaks in the middle. I develop the idea and do the writing, editing, and publishing in a single stretch of continuous work time, even if it’s a pretty long article. If it’s 4000+ words, I may have to break it up into multiple sessions, but I always try to at least finish a context-dependent chunk in a single stretch. For a long piece, I’ll still try to write the whole piece in one session, and then after a meal break, I may do the editing pass and then publish it. I hardly ever work on a single article across multiple days.

So the idea here is to avoid having to load the same context more than once. Whenever you take a longer break from a task or project, especially if it’s overnight or over a weekend, you have to do extra work to reload the context to get back into a productive flow. So if you can possibly drive a project to full completion with a single loading of the context for it, do your best to make that happen. It can save you a lot of mental energy – and time.

We’ll continue with Part 6 of this series tomorrow.

Our series on reducing mental effort continues.

Solve problems fully

Incompletes and stress go hand-in-hand. When we’re stressed, we often want to race to the end of a project or task and call it done when it’s really 90% or 95% of the way to done. But even 99% done isn’t actually done.

Some projects – like Disneyland – are never fully done because they’re ongoing and always evolving. But other projects like writing and publishing an ebook can be fully completed. And of course there’s a gray area in the middle with some projects having a reasonably well-defined completion state along with long-term maintenance activities.

To the best of your abilities, try to clearly define the completion state for your projects. What is the very last action step, the completion of which marks the true finish line? When do you really get to call it over and done? When do you get to celebrate? When does your mind have permission to let go of thinking about it?

If you get a project to 99% completion, your mind can’t fully let it go. Some of your mental RAM is still churning over that remaining 1%, and this can continue to be an ongoing distraction.

If you possibly can, drive the rest of the project fully across the finish line, so you can really check it off as fully done. Otherwise if it’s distracting you emotionally, use the method from yesterday’s post to pre-process the distracting thoughts and feelings when they start nagging at you. Better yet is to process this task into a system, so you can continue tracking it outside of your mind.

When incompletes pile up, the background feeling of stress and anxiety can increase as well. Even if you don’t feel it much, you may notice that your mind isn’t as clear and sharp as it is when you’re at your best. Some of your mental energy is being wasted on refreshing all of these incompletes.

Now and then it can be wise to make a list of your incompletes and take a few weeks (or months) to drive as many of them as you can across the finish line.

Even when older items don’t seem urgent, they can still nag at you repeatedly. The best way to bring that nagging to an end is to fully finish them, all the way to 100% done.

When you bring a task or project all the way across the finish line, it’s very satisfying. You can feel this sense of relief in your mind when you’re able to finally let go of the project. Extra energy is freed up – energy that can now flow towards something else.

Pause the inflow

Sometimes we have too much inflow relative to our outflow, and we need to pause the inflow to process the backlog. If the size of your backlog is getting to you, and you’re becoming overly stressed and distracted, it may be wise to reduce your inflow.

Now and then I go into a mode where I say “no more yeses” for a while. I turn down most invitations, and I do my best not to accept or open new projects. I focus on clearing older items off my plate and closing open loops till I’ve freed up more capacity. This eventually leads to the point where I feel ready to start taking on something new, and then I go into a phase of saying yes more often.

I know it’s a good sign when I start feeling enthusiastic about new directions, new invitations, and new creative projects. When I start to dread new items being added to my plate, I know I need to tighten up a bit. If I start feeling a little bored with the routine, I know it’s time to invite some fresh inflow.

We can adjust the inflow that comes into our lives by being more resistant to decrease the inflow or more welcoming to increase the inflow. Of course this may be more effective in some areas of life than others. Sometimes the inflow just happens, and we have to deal with it. But other times we can pull back a little to free up more capacity.

When taking on a big project or dealing with a significant lifestyle change, it’s wise to adjust expectations regarding your capacity, so you don’t overextend yourself. When I’m creating a major new course (like I’m doing now with the Stature course, which is up to 47 published lessons so far), that takes a lot of focus every week. It’s predictable that during such times, I’ll have reduced capacity for other projects. Consequently, I’m more selective in my commitments when there’s a big project front and center. I know from experience just how easy it is to become overcommitted, so I like to be extra cautious about that.

Many new parents learn that having a baby can greatly reduce their capacity to invest as much in other areas of life. There’s a feeling of pulling inward towards the family during the first several months, and this effect may continue for many years albeit to a lesser extent. It’s easy to underestimate just how much a new baby can take over your life, so it’s wise to free up extra capacity and not take on major new projects when the baby is expected. Overcommitting yourself could easily lead to great stress and even more fatigue.

I know it can be difficult to pause the inflow sometimes, especially if you’re an ambitious person, and you like to keep driving major projects forward. It can be hard to slow down sometimes, knowing that some parts of life aren’t going to advance much.

Another issue is when you feel like you’re behind relative to where you’d like to be in life, and you experience a life event like a major illness or a new baby that reduces your capacity even more. This can lead to feeling frustrated or impatient, wanting to push even harder to advance.

But if you can learn to surrender during these times, it can be very beneficial. Often these are times of incubation. When your mind gets a chance to slow down and rest more, you can set yourself up nicely for times of great flow and enthusiasm afterwards.

There’s a certain wisdom to life, and it will often slow us down when what we’re doing isn’t all that effective anyway. If you’re running on a treadmill, and life keeps drawing you away from it, you could see this as an invitation to question whether you want to stick with the treadmill going forward.

I’ve notice the pattern that work that feels aligned still feels aligned when I need to slow down. In fact, sometimes it feels even more aligned when I slow down.

I hope you’re still enjoying this little series on reducing mental effort. I’m enjoying writing it. 🙂

We’ll continue with Part 5 tomorrow.

Our series on reducing mental effort continues.

Pre-process distractions

What do you do when you’re distracted by emotions or other circular thoughts, and you can’t be very productive?

Some people say to just push through and do your work anyway. I’ve tried this and found that it hasn’t worked well for me. I can work a bit, but if my mind keeps dwelling on something else, I’m certainly not working at full engagement. But nor do I like taking a full day just to deal with emotional processing.

So here’s a good solution: Devote a modest amount of time to pre-process whatever is distracting you. You may not have time to resolve it fully, but you can process those thoughts and feelings well enough to prevent them from distracting you throughout your day.

Grab three pieces of blank paper and a pen, and simply write out your thoughts and feelings as they come to you. Keep going until all three pages are full. Listen to whatever your mind wants to say, and flow it onto the page.

This normally takes me about 45 minutes, so roughly 15 minutes per page. It’s fine to pause and think now and then, but try not to pause too long. Just keep emptying the contents of your mind onto the page till all three pages are full.

You don’t have to solve anything. Again, you’re just emptying the contents of your mind onto the page. Let the parts of your mind that have been distracting you have their full say.

Be absolutely candid. Swear onto the page if you’d like. Be as honest as you can about what you’re thinking and feeling. Assume that no one will ever read what you’re writing. This is for you and you alone.

When you’re done writing three full pages, you can read them over if you like. If you see any actionable ideas, you can capture them on a separate page and later process them into your system that we mentioned in Part 2 of this series.

Afterwards I recommend that you destroy those three page, such as by shredding them. If you establish the habit of always destroying the pages afterwards, it will encourage you to be even more candid each time, which makes the exercise more effective the more you practice it. If you censor yourself as you write, it will be less effective.

The main benefit of this exercise is that it moves cluttered thoughts and feelings into the logical part of your brain. In order to write down these thoughts, you have to linearize them. You have to think about them differently than if you simply allow them to bobble around in your mind. Writing them down helps to move the energy out of the mental circuits that are causing circular thinking. It helps your mind let go and restore a sense of peace.

For really severe cases of circular thoughts and feelings, you may need to do this exercise for a few days in a row. Usually two or three days is plenty to create a serious reduction in the amount of distraction you experience.

When I do this simple exercise, I usually find that it’s well worth the time. If I think I might need to do it, it’s wise to do it. Afterwards I feel calm and peaceful.

You might be wondering if you can just do this on a computer or other device because it will be faster. It will indeed be faster, but my experience is that it’s also much less effective. Handwriting engages more of the brain than typing because you have to form the individual letters rather than just pushing buttons. Somehow this makes the mental processing work much better. It would say that writing is roughly three times as effective as typing, so I’d only recommend typing if you’re really short on time and you barely feel distracted.

Taking 45 minutes to make several hours a lot more productive seems like a fair tradeoff. And if you’d otherwise be worrying about something for days, then the payoff is even higher.

Many problems can arise during your day that knock you off balance. If you can effectively set them aside, then great – do that. But if you’re still feeling distracted a few hours later, and you notice that your productivity is suffering for it, it may be worth the time to pause, pre-process those distracting thoughts and feelings, and then return to your original work. This method is especially helpful when you don’t have time to fully resolve a new issue that comes up, and you need to stick to your original priorities with good focus.

We’ll continue with Part 4 of this series tomorrow.

We continue the series on reducing mental effort.

Distracting thoughts are a major source of wasted mental energy, so in this part we’ll cover a few ways to reduce internal distractions.

Empty your head

One reason we dwell on certain thoughts is that we’re trying to remember certain to-dos, ideas, and items that require deeper consideration. Refreshing these items in our minds sucks up extra neural energy and doesn’t necessarily move much towards completion.

If your brain is using its working memory to continually bring up distracting thoughts, you can often free up extra processing power by allowing your brain to forgot. This helps you feel less mentally and emotionally fatigued as well.

A simple practice for when your mind feels cluttered and distracted is to do a brain dump. Write down every distracting thought you can think of, either on paper or one of your devices. Get the info out of your head, and externalize it somewhere.

Write down incomplete projects and unfinished items. Write down ideas that keep popping into your mind. Write down any worries or concerns. Write down anything you’ve been trying not to forget. Whatever your brain has been nagging you about, dump it onto paper or a screen.

Really squeeze your brain to get this info out, even if you have to do a few sessions over a few days.

This practice allows your brain to relax more, knowing that it can reference those details somewhere else instead of having to refresh the info internally. Even if your brain dump list is in random order and looks chaotic, it’s still a big step forward. Your brain can let go of having to refresh the info as often, which means less neural energy wasted and more neural energy available for you to use productively.

You may find this experience a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you see that you’ve been stuffing way too much into your working memory. When it all drains onto the page or the screen, you may see that it’s a lot, perhaps more than you can realistically deal with. But you may also discover that your mind feels more peaceful and relaxed afterwards. It’s more restful for the mind when it knows that it doesn’t have to keep refreshing all of this info internally.

Organize your tasks and projects

Another step is to process and prioritize some of that info you’ve just dumped from your brain. Turn those to-dos into tasks and projects, and organize them into a list or a system, so you can track them more intelligently.

There are many tools to choose from that can help you do this. I recommend testing several of them before you choose.

My current favorite tool for keeping track of tasks and projects is Nozbe. Nozbe comes with a free 30-day trial if you want to check it out. I’ve been using it since June 2019 and appreciate the clean, straightforward interface. It’s easy to learn and fast to use, especially for individuals and small teams. I especially like that I can create reusable templates with it. It’s good at hiding complexity, so the screen layout feels restful to me.

Here’s a screen shot of my current Nozbe templates. Each template is a basically a saved to-do list that I can reuse to spawn a new project whenever I want.

Since I have some of trips coming up this year, I could use the “Plan & book next trip” template to add a few projects with these names: Plan Portland trip, Plan Northern Ireland trip, Plan Milwaukee/Chicago trip, and Plan Costa Rica trip. Each project will be pre-filled with the to-do items from the template. And then I can individually customize each project with trip-specific actions.

Using project templates frees up mental energy because I don’t have to remember common action steps for the types of projects I do repeatedly. A new course launch, for instance, has hundreds of action steps, and it’s more restful for my brain if I capture all of those steps into a system. Then I can focus on doing the action steps in the proper order when I’m in the midst of the launch, trusting that the whole plan is solid and that I haven’t forgotten anything important. My brain doesn’t have to waste energy trying not to forget something. All of the details are captured in the system.

I’ve also used Asana for about a year (mid-2018 to mid-2019), but I didn’t like their web-based interface as much, and to be honest, Asana simply annoyed me into looking for a competing option. I started with their free version and soon upgraded to their premium version. I liked the premium version, which provided everything I could want and more. But after a while, their interface started pestering me to upgrade again to a business account, which had features that were overkill and unnecessary for the size of my team. I found this distracting and counter-productive, so when someone told me about Nozbe, I gave it a try, liked it better (especially the distraction-free interface), and quickly switched.

I probably would have stuck with Asana for years if they’d been satisfied to simply let me enjoy the benefits of the premium version instead of pushing for more. I absolutely don’t want a productivity app injecting extra distractions into their interface. That just seems like a ridiculous design choice. What sense does it make to use a productivity tool that increases mental load with extra annoyances?

Your choice of tools is your choice. The best system for you is the one you’ll actually use. Take the time to find something you like, and don’t just go with what’s popular or trendy. I often find that the most popular tools that I hear people buzzing about aren’t a good fit for me – I’m often disappointed when I actually test them. In general I tend to find that the popularity of a tool tends to have more to do with its marketing than with its actual utility. So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve fallen into the trap of acquiring tools that you don’t actually use. Keep looking to find the ones you will use.

A good system should be quick and efficient to use. It should feel peaceful and relaxing. If you feel stressed when using it or if you feel you must push and discipline yourself to use it regularly, dump it. If simple pen and paper would feel better to you, go with that. Don’t overburden your mind with even more complexity when you’re trying to simplify and reduce mental clutter.

I hope you’re enjoying this series so far. We’ll continue with Part 3 tomorrow.