Brain Bandwidth

From the book I'm writing, the antidote to self-help books:

One of the things that I've observed in my work over the years with high performers in a variety of fields is that the real key to productivity is less to do with time, or strategy, than it is to do with bandwidth.

And if you're not familiar with the idea of bandwidth, you can think of it like headspace.

Like, how much bandwidth do you have right now? How much headspace do you have? How full is your bottle?

You can imagine one of those two litter bottles of soda, if it's pretty full, you can't get anything else in there. Whether you're trying to get it in from the top or or from the bottom, and i'll explain what i mean by that.

So when you think of how your head fills up, there's kind of two ways to fill it up.

We fill it from the outside. In others words, we take in lots of input. But then also it fills up from the inside, both, with fresh ideas, and possibilities. And also with the same old habituals stale. So it pops into your head.

The more bandwidth you have, the more receptive, you are able to be. The more you're able to take in. And the more you're able to reflect, and the more fresh thought you're able to allow through.

So when your bandwidth is really narrow like a really narrow straw, or a really narrow hose, not much can get through it. And when your bandwidth gets wider, all sorts of things can come through.

And so, in that sense, noticing where your bandwidth is, is incredibly helpful.

When focusing on being productive, because you have limited bandwidth, there's a lot of things that are probably not worth doing because you're going to get diminishing returns.

But when you're bandwidth expands back out, there's a bunch more stuff you can take on and it's something that you can get a feel for. You start to get a feel for what it's like for you when you have limited bandwidth. And they're things that if you cannot do them now you’re gonna not do them now, it's not going to go great. So you can drop your expectations of yourself a little bit.

But when you do have the choice, you’re gonna just make use of those high bandwidth moments to take on more.

Now, the thing that most people don't realize, even if they have a sense of bandwidth, is that the vast majority of your bandwidth is taken up with your permission.

Think about a browser. If you have a browser open and and imagine having 30 tabs open on your browser. And, there's music playing from one of them. You can't figure out where the music is coming from (written before the browsers would present you an icon for this).

We've all probably had that experience on our computers, but we don't really realize we're having that same experience in our brain. And the reason that all those tabs are open Is because we don't have our own permission to close them.

So, something to look at, when something comes up in your mind, you notice you're of limited bandwidth there. You know what are some open tabs and that it would be OK with you to close them for now, you can always reopen them later. But you don't have to keep them open all the time.?

You don't have to keep thinking about that conversation you had with that person all that time. You don't have to keep worrying about that thing that might happen.?

Maybe one day if you don't or if you do, you can close those tabs anytime you want. But you do need your own permission.

When you start to see how much of a difference bandwidth makes to productivity, you’ll start to realize how cheaply you give it away.

In the advertising world, in print, for example, there are certain places where ad space is more valuable than other places, and more ad space costs more. Or from the digital space, a Super Bowl ad is probably the most common example. You're going to spend millions on mere minutes for it to get a piece of that bandwidth.

Well, news flash, the bandwidth in your head is worth as much as Super Bowl ads. It is that precious because it's the key to increasing productivity, and notice how much these conglomerates are willing to pay for it.

And yet, we give it away to anybody. We give it away to a spam callers. We give it away to a friend who just wants a minute of our time. We give it away to a colleague who says “hey, can you just take a look at this?” We give it away, most of all, to our own habitual thinking.

And so, if you want to play with this, there's a couple of ways that you can begin to play with it that i found pretty helpful.

One is simply recognizing the power of bandwidth. Start noticing this week, when you’re trying to get stuff done with very limited bandwidth and how different is that to your experience of what you can get done when your bandwidth is high, when you get a lot of headspace.

And you can start to look at when your bandwidth is taken up and you have all these tabs open. Ask yourself, can i close these? What do I give permission to close down now? And how did these tabs get open? Anyways, did I open them deliberately or did somebody else just pop it up and I went, “okay, I guess, I gotta keep this tab open”.

How cheaply are you giving this precious real estate away?

And what if you didn't?

And finally, what are your bandwidth bandits and bandwidth boosters?

You see, we all have things that suck up our bandwidth that fill up our headspace really quickly, and other things that give it back.

So what are your bandwidth bandits, and what are your bandwidth boosters?