Your Brain’s Golden Hours: Making Time And Energy Work For You

We are human beings, not machines. We cannot keep working hour after hour and still be doing our best work. We don’t expect Olympic sprinters to keep running at top speed all day long: nor should we expect our brains to be able to perform optimally throughout the working day.

A useful rule of thumb is that our brains have two great hours a day; perhaps four at the most. So how do we make sure we are spending our two great hours on our most important work and not on the mundane tasks? And how do we get closer to the four great hours?

The way we are setting up the world of work is the opposite of what our brains need to focus, think deeply or be creative. Devices sending us alerts, the noise of open-plan offices, back-to-back meetings without a moment to reset and focus before the next meeting, trying to multi-task. All of these (and many more distractions) deplete our mental energy.

Five tips to ‘Top Up’ your Tank of Mental Energy

The good news is that when we understand the brain’s needs, we can use that knowledge to ‘top up’ the tank of mental energy. People’s two great hours might be at different times of the day -some people are ‘larks’ and some are ‘owls’; many might be in between. If you don’t know when your two best hours are, I’d recommend over the next week making a note of when you feel at your most energetic and productive.

Plan your working days

The most important task we have each day is to look at what we need to get done and prioritize. We need to do that first thing, before we look at our emails and check our messages. Reading emails and responding to them could easily use up our two great hours. Once we have our list, it’s a useful point of reference. If we know we have a really important meeting in the afternoon where we absolutely need to be at our best, we can reflect on what we do before that meeting so that we avoid draining too much of our mental energy. In addition, as one leader shared, once he had that list of priorities, it meant if he was asked unexpectedly to join a meeting, he could look at his list and evaluate whether he did have time to join that meeting or whether he should decline.

Take a break between meetings

Many people complain of back-to-back meetings, especially when we are working online and don’t even have the opportunity to move away from our desks, go down the corridor and into the meeting room. Some of my clients are now deliberately starting their meetings at 5 past the hour to build in that breathing space between meetings. It is better to plan the break for the start of the meeting rather than at the end: if it’s at the end, it is very easy for the meeting to run on and the break is lost.

Microsoft looked at the impact on brains of people who were in back-to-back online meetings and those who took a short break between them. The findings confirm what many of us have felt: taking a break between online meetings reduces stress and improves engagement. So, could you look at the meetings you have coming up and schedule them to start 5 or 10 minutes after the typical start time?

Put devices in another room

If you really need to focus, put devices out of sight and preferably in another room. Devices such as mobile phones are very distracting and simply having them in sight can reduce our performance. Research done by Duke and team demonstrated that people who had their mobile phone on the desk (face down and sound off) while performing cognitive tasks on screen performed worse than those who had put their phones into another room.

Make sure to move

Another temptation for many of us who sometimes work from home, is to get to the desk and stay there much of the day. Walking is good for us, walking in nature is even better. Berman and team found that people who took a 50-minute walk in nature did significantly better at a memory test than people who took a similar length walk in an urban setting. The suggestion for the difference might be that nature is more peaceful and therefore is more restorative and aids our cognitive performance.

Think about your week ahead: could you perhaps have a walking meeting? If you are working remotely, could you be on a call while out walking in nature? Could you get outside and let your brain wander, enabling it to have creative thoughts?

There’s something about going for a walk at the end of the working day that feels particularly good: the contrast of being outside and moving as opposed to being at a desk indoors feels like a reward. Being outside marks the end of work and this can provide a useful boundary between work and our personal lives (as the commute home does). This transition period is often the time when many people have those ‘aha!’ moments: a quiet mind allows us to have insights and ideas that do not typically occur to our frazzled brains during a busy working day.

Have a good laugh - Make energy work for you

Some leaders in my sessions mention that they wonder how appropriate laughter might be at work and how it might be perceived by others (“We’re bankers! Work is meant to be serious”). These people are pleased to hear that laughter is good for us, reduces cortisol levels and is a great de-stressor of the brain. Work by Oswald and team showed that the IQ of people who had a good laugh watching a comedian increased by around 12 per cent in the short term. So there is nothing frivolous about having a laugh with the team.

The Brain Must Evolve

Neuroscience gives us insight into how we can best work with our brains and get the most from them. Our brains are brilliant and resilient, but the 21st century workplace provides new challenges for which they did not primarily evolve. When we understand our brains, what they need and what they look for, we can use them more skillfully. This article suggests five things that we can do to help maintain our mental energy, but there are many more small things we can do each day to enable our brains to have more great hours at work.