The ten minute brain boost
Ian Browne
Early careers professional - Apprenticeships - Helping rising leaders nail your first 90 days
MEETINGS AND OUR SPAN OF CONCENTRATION
When it comes to productivity you'll probably have heard about a tactic of setting your meetings to be 25 minutes or 50 minutes. The exact science of why meetings generally default to 30 minutes or 60 minutes isn't really well understood except a sneaking suspicion that we fell into doing things way because that's how calendars are designed.
It's not how our brains are designed. Sure as building more lanes on a highway, extend a meeting to 30 minutes or 60 minutes and they get filled right up to the last moment. If you're unlucky like I am sometimes, even with a 60 minute meeting all the good stuff appears to be rushed in at the end.
The average human attention span for attentiveness in meetings ranges from an amazing ten minutes to maximum 18 minutes. After which people will start to wander and drift. So it pays to be short and snappy when it comes to your meetings, particularly if you're the chair and the person with the shortest attention span.
CLAIMING BACK A PRECIOUS TEN MINUTES
Today's Thriving Leader is all about what to do with your time back. Assuming you've mastered at a minimum organising the 20 or maximum 25 minute meeting, you'll typically have five or even ten minutes left. Oh the temptation of what to fit into those precious five or ten minutes.
The five or ten minute window becomes a tempting place where we can tick a few things off that to do list.??But from the perspective of brain power, what we do is make the executive function part of our brain run at full speed within the preceding meeting.??Then we switch into emails that actually require quite complex problem solving as well as emotional control.??Then we jump straight back into the next meeting.
As the day progresses although we are physically present, we know that we’re running a little slower, not quite as sharp as we were.?Coffee can only get us so far and it’s the point where we reach for chocolate, snacks and sugar treats to give us a quick jolt of energy that often just results in a deeper slump just when we need that energy boost.
UNWISE CHOICES
My challenge to you is to choose your ten minutes wisely, deliberately choose activities that are designed to allow your brain to rest and recharge for the next challenge ahead.??This means generally avoiding regarding the ten minute break as;
·???????A buffer for when the meeting runs over so you’re not late for the next one
·???????Time to call the boss as you move around the building to get to your next meeting
·???????A chance to have the meeting after the meeting with someone
·???????A space to read up on the notes just before you walk into the next meeting
·???????A place to peek into your inbox to see if anything urgent has come up or a few things you can tick off
·???????A space to return a few phone calls building on your voicemail
Ten minutes is not enough for most of these but more importantly most of these tasks are cognitive load heavy. They won't let your brain rest. They are also highly likely to be stimulating (we use this word neutrally as this can be good / bad stimulation) so creating new thought patterns of things you’ll now be aware of, unable to resolve, emotions to manage and contain right before you walk into your next meeting. And in your next meeting you're carrying the remnants from the last one plus fighting a short attention span. Not a great recipe.
领英推荐
If you want to use the ten minutes for a brain boost then also consider there are tasks outside of work you could switch in to that'll still tax your brain. Using your ten minutes to catch up on the news, personal emails, social media are highly likely to stimulate your brain just like work does with pretty much the same result. Pick what you do in your ten minutes wisely.
RE-TRAINING THE BRAIN TO CHOOSE WISELY
Your brain is bombarded every minute with more things that it can reasonably process so it does some amazing filtering to figure out what's important and what's not. It's not infallible and is designed to protect you and two things can happen to all of us that's a result of your brain working hard for you but not always helpfully.
First up is to protect you from threat. High up on your brain's priority list is what it takes to keep you safe and the way it does that is prioritising resources to anything that looks like a threat. In an age where you might have been gobbled up by a sabre toothed tiger this was super useful. Your brain isn't necessarily perfect at detecting threats, when it senses the unusual, out of the ordinary or a triggering of fear, resources are prioritised to see the threat off.
Why is this relevant to your productivity strategy - well it's because in your precious five / minutes recharge time if you take the call or dive into emails then likely is anything your brain sees there as potential threat will sit at the front of its priority list until it is dealt with. That means no ten minutes rest and very likely distracting you from the next task you need to deal with until the threat or perceived threat has been handled.
The second is part of the brain's way of stopping overwhelm is by identifying patterns and kind of going on auto-pilot. If you remember IF THEN statements from basic programming, think along those lines. This is usually fine except we all have patterns that obey IF THEN but aren't going to preserve that vital ten minutes. Example, you may have an IF my meeting finishes early THEN I will open Outlook and dive into my inbox.
To achieve your goal of the ten minute brain boost you'll need to retrain your brain into a better habit so you'll have a task of undoing a habitual behaviour and then building a new ritual. Just saying something will happen doesn't mean it will.
BUILDING A BETTER RITUAL
To build or rebuild a new habit you need to have a trigger and an action. Training your brain to recognise a trigger - meeting has ended and action - I will now do my ten minute brain boost which consists of (whatever you have chosen). Instead of IF THEN, we're after WHEN THEN.
I appreciate as we all head back into offices and start travelling again that you're now going to be in unfamiliar surroundings or ones you can't control. So it helps to have a few variants of WHEN THEN. The less your brain has to contemplate what to do when faced with the ten minute downtime, the more likely you're to do it and get the rest you deserve. Here are a few ideas for you to have in your toolbox, making them really specific will make them real. Pick five and see how many you manage in a day.
WHEN my meeting finishes early and I can see the ten minute break THEN I will:
If you don't have some mindfulness tracks sorted here are some from Alfred James https://www.pocketmindfulness.com/6-mindfulness-exercises-you-can-try-today/
And there you have it – the most powerful ten minutes of the hour is the one that gives you the energy to run the next race and make it a winning one for you. Why not share some of your ten minute rituals so we can all learn together.
Season 2 of Thriving Leader which is all about harnessing creative energy is coming soon but to catch up on all the blogs or even listen to me read them out whilst you take in some fresh air head over to www.theenergyleader.com