New Neuroscience Reveals 6 Secrets That Will Make You More Productive
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Some days it feels impossible to get anything done at the office. (There’s a reason Susan in marketing has a voodoo doll of everyone, neatly labeled, in her desk drawer.)
What can we do about it? Well, neuroscience — yeah, that thing you vaguely remember hearing about in a TED Talk you half-watched — has some answers to our office productivity problems. With a few simple tweaks, we can take a miserable workday from “soul-crushing marathon of existential despair” to “hey, this isn’t so bad.”
So who has the answers we need?
John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. His book is “Brain Rules for Work.”
Let’s get to it…
Zoom Fatigue Is Real
Videoconferencing allows you to wear professional attire from the waist up while rocking pajama pants and fuzzy slippers unseen. This, my friends, is the modern-day equivalent of the mullet: business in the front, party in the back.
Unfortunately, science has confirmed something we all suspected: videoconferencing fatigue is real. In the physical world, if you stare at someone’s face for that long without a break, you’re either deeply in love or about to throw down. On video calls, it’s just Tuesday. And to your gray matter, that’s weird and unnatural.
Then there’s the sheer, unbridled joy of trying to decipher body language when all you’ve got to work with is a floating head. It’s a bit like trying to read a book with half the pages torn out. Your brain hates this. And that’s just with one person. If you’re on a group video call, your brain is forced to juggle the nonverbal cues of multiple people at once. Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson calls it “nonverbal overload.”
You’re stuck in front of a screen, staring at a mosaic of faces that resemble a less exciting version of “The Brady Bunch” opening credits. Except here, Alice doesn’t solve any problems with a wise crack and a meatloaf recipe; instead, you get Kevin from accounting freezing mid-sentence, eternally trapped in digital limbo.
The solution? It’s simple: don’t videoconference every meeting. Mix it up with phone calls. Yes, old-fashioned phone calls. They’re like a spa day for your frontal lobe. The phone forgives all sins of appearance because it cannot see, and in that blindness, there is a kind of mercy.
Your brain will thank you. It’s been begging for a break ever since you spent an entire call staring at your own reflection in the corner of the screen, wondering if that’s what you really look like or if Zoom just hates you.
(To learn how to finally stop procrastinating, click here.)
So taking the Zoom out of Zoom calls can help. But how can we make all meetings more effective?
Meetings Should Have A Point
Here’s a fun fact: 90% of people admit to daydreaming during meetings. You know what that means? 10% of people are liars.
And more than 70% use meetings to get other things done. No, they’re not taking notes on your brilliant insights. They’re catching up on email, checking their bank balances, or deep-diving into Wikipedia to figure out what happened to their favorite 90s band.
Meetings take up to 23 hours of a manager’s week, costing companies roughly $37 billion dollars per year. If that doesn’t make you want to light your hair on fire and move to a cabin in the woods, I don’t know what will.
How do we make meetings better?
Silicon Valley guru Paul Graham described the ideal meeting this way: “There are no more than four or five participants, and they know and trust one another. They go rapidly through a list of open questions while doing something else, like eating lunch. There are no presentations. No one is trying to impress anyone. They are all eager to leave and get back to work.”
In the end, the main reason work meetings resemble a circus of the damned is because they often have no purpose and when they do, they don’t stick to it. The only thing moving forward is your blood pressure.
Here’s a thought: What if we actually knew what we were supposed to be talking about before we started talking?
So if you want to run a good meeting, have a clear idea what it’s supposed to be about. Write that down in one sentence. Then construct agenda items with one ground rule: nothing varies from that sentence. Send that to everyone in advance and make sure they read it in advance.
This is the difference between a meeting that’s a soul-crushing exercise in futility and one that might, just might, end with you feeling like you’ve accomplished something other than aging.
(To learn how to improve your memory, click here.)
You’re going to like this next one, I promise…
Take More Breaks
Research shows people who spend less time on work statistically do their jobs more effectively than people who spend more time. Huh?
Taking regular breaks reduces errors, improves focus and increases task engagement.
So every 90 minutes, make sure to step away from the computer. And if you’re working intensely, the breaks need to be even more frequent. Your brain can only handle so much before it starts throwing up the neurological equivalent of a “BRB” sign.
(To learn how science can make you smarter, click here.)
Taking a break sounds wonderful — but how do you get anything done if the office is a minefield of interruptions?
You Need A Refuge
Studies consistently show open-concept offices turn what could be a functional environment into a communal anxiety chamber where productivity is murdered in broad daylight. They reduce creative thinking, crater the ability to focus and send stress levels into the stratosphere. It’s like someone thought, “What if we took the worst aspects of a junior high cafeteria and made it your daily work environment?”
What’s the most detrimental aspect? The “half-a-logue”– that demonic auditory phenomenon where you can hear half of someone else’s conversation. You don’t want to eavesdrop on Cheryl in HR talking to her dermatologist, but now your brain is hooked. It’s already started spinning an entire soap opera out of this incomplete info. “So what happened after the rash?!”
This phenomenon is so disruptive, researchers found it increases errors in concentration by 800%. Eight. Hundred. Percent. That’s not a typo; that’s a statistical slap in the face.
I understand you can’t redesign the office, but you need a place of refuge where you can actually get things done. Book time in a conference room (or hide in the stairwell with your laptop) for at least part of the day to allow your brain to function normally.
(To learn how to be more resilient, click here.)
So far we’ve discussed the office – but what about work from home? Well, you’ll really benefit from having a home office. And if you don’t have one, you’re gonna need to make something resembling one…
Create A Home “Office”
Have you ever tried to convince your brain that the couch, where you’ve spent countless hours bingeing true crime documentaries and eating cereal straight from the box, is now a place of rigorous intellectual labor? It’s a tough sell. The couch knows too much. It remembers your sins.
Research shows if you’re not able to draw a clear line between work life and home life you’re at far higher risk for burnout, anxiety and depression. If you don’t create boundaries, your brain will turn the entire day into a work-life smoothie.
So what’s the answer if you don’t have a home office? Convert a space to “work mode” and then back to “personal mode” when you’re done.
And you need to perform a ritual to switch between modes. I know, I know — this sounds like a Gwyneth Paltrow wellness tip gone wrong but stick with me. The key to separating work life from home life is tricking your brain into thinking there’s a difference between the two. You need a simple ritual to switch modes, something that tells your brain, “Alright, fun’s over. Time to make spreadsheets.”
(To learn how to be a better manager, click here.)
And what about planning your day when you’re working from home? Without the structure of the office, things can go sideways fast…
When Working From Home, Have A Schedule
Schedule control is key. Know what you’re doing when. A schedule is like drawing a line in the sand between “Me, the Functional Adult” and “Me, the Perpetual Couch Creature.” Want to know the difference between those two people? A calendar.
A schedule gives you the illusion of control. And your gray matter doesn’t care if it’s real control or not. As long as it feels real, that’s all that matters. This gives your brain a placebo pill of productivity.
A schedule also limits stress because it forces your brain to think, “Okay, I only need to worry about this one thing right now.” Not everything, just this one thing. Later has been scheduled, and later is none of your business right now.
And do difficult stuff first thing. Stop fooling yourself into thinking you’re going to tackle your problems later in the day, when your body’s power plant is down to its last lump of coal. Studies show procrastination is more likely to occur at low-energy times of the day. That sweet, naive morning energy? Use it for the tough stuff.
Need a boost in the afternoon? “Regular aerobic exercise improves nearly every measurable aspect of executive function in nearly every age group ever studied.” Get 30 minutes of movement to sharpen your brain.
Exercise not an option? Sneak a nap in. Mark Rosekind at NASA found that a quick bout of shut-eye can increase cognition by 34%. But no more than 30 minutes, okay? Any longer, and you risk waking up in that foggy post-nap wasteland where you can’t remember what year it is or why your phone is suddenly on fire with notifications.
(To learn how to be more lucky, click here.)
Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it all up and learn the simple things that reliably reduce stress…
Sum Up
Here’s how to make your brain more productive…
- Zoom Fatigue Is Real: The malady of the monitor. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of being strapped into a chair “Clockwork Orange” style. Alternate between video calls and phone calls to give your brain a break. (This also has the side benefit of fewer freeze frames where your face locks up in the most unflattering expression conceivable.)
- Meetings Should Have A Point: And they should stick to that goal in order to prevent everyone from fantasizing about the sweet release of a fire alarm. Imagine the glory of it — a meeting that ends before your will to live does.
- Take More Breaks:These prevent you from becoming a walking, talking embodiment of a “before” picture.
- You Need A Refuge: You can’t get good work done in an open plan office. It’s like trying to write the Great American Novel in the middle of a toddler’s birthday party.
- Create A Home “Office”: If you don’t have one, Optimus Prime the living room into your Situation Room until the workday is over.
- When Working From Home, Have A Schedule: You need a semblance of structure. And do the hard stuff early. Writing that report in the afternoon is going to be the literary equivalent of a colonoscopy.
Want to reduce stress? The research is clear: just go outside. See green things and sunlight. For many of us, the great outdoors has become something of a distant memory, a land where things like “trees” and “birds” exist, not just as emojis but as real, living entities.
And if you can’t go outside, bring some of the outdoors in. “People in an office filled with plants experience productivity boosts of 15% over controls and become less fatigued in the process.”
That’s right, a little green buddy sitting on your desk will make you a 15% more effective human, which, let’s be honest, is probably more than the coffee’s doing for you at this point.
If you put the above ideas into practice will you become a perfectly productive worker? Heck, no. Because perfection is a lie. You’re not going to magically transform into a productivity machine because you added a potted plant to your desk. But things do get better when you make these tiny adjustments.
The Zoom calls suck a little less when you’re not doing them 10 times a day. Your brain won’t stage a coup if you take regular breaks. And meetings don’t make you want to lie down in traffic when they actually have a reason for existing.
In the end, life isn’t always about doing more; it’s about doing enough. Enough to create space for the things that matter. Enough to leave room for laughter and love and late-night Googling about whether dolphins have accents. (They do. Look it up.) So yes, neuroscience can make your brain more productive. But the real magic is what you do with all the extra time: you finally have the bandwidth to live.
A little added productivity doesn’t make you superhuman. It gives you the flexibility to be a little more human.
