Training Your Brain to Work More Effectively

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Generative artificial intelligence is bringing a new focus on efficiency at work. Some organizations see it as a way to replace employees and to squeeze more productivity out of the ones they have, to be more efficient that way. But others see GenAI as an opportunity to free workers of mindless tasks and rote drudgery, so people can engage with more complex problems and come up with better ideas and valuable breakthroughs.

That’s how our guest today sees it. She uses brain science to learn how to train our minds to become more efficient, and she defines efficiency as more quality over quantity. Mithu Storoni is a neuroscientist, a physician, and the author of the new book, Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, and she joins me now. Mithu, welcome.

MITHU STORONI: Thank you so much for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: How do you define hyperefficiency, just based on the neuroscience background that you have?

MITHU STORONI: So our idea of efficiency really stems from the era of assembly line work, where the more products you assembled on an assembly line, the better your output was. The concept or the definition of efficiency rested on productivity and was measured on how much quantity you could produce per unit time. But right now, we are going through a period of tremendous change in AI and in technology, and the productivity of a company is no longer proportional to the quantity of output of its human workers, because the realm of quantity is being taken over by AI and technology.

Humans now influence the productivity of their organization by the quality of their output. And so my definition of efficiency is really the definition I think we should adopt in this era – this era where Knowledge Age work is driven by AI and automation, where efficiency should come from not quantity, but the quality of human work, the quality of ideas.

CURT NICKISCH: So it’s almost like artificial intelligence may be able to do a lot of the, call it rote work, repetitive tasks, busywork, some people call it that, right? The work that takes time. You may actually have to do less of that now, and actually spend more of your time doing harder, higher-level thinking. I guess the premise here is that if you want to be able to perform well, you need to have your brain in better shape? Is that a too simple way of thinking about it?

MITHU STORONI: You know, a good way of thinking about it is we have spent a very large part of the Knowledge Work Era being the tools that we are now using. Because of this, we have now effectively all become AI managers.

So we now have at our disposal this entire armory of tools, of methods with which we are able to produce intangible products. We’re able to produce good work. And so we now all need to really think like senior executives, like managers, no matter where we are in this hierarchy. And the way to do it is by not just working in a consistent, constant assembly line like way, which we have been doing, but by really adopting the right states of mind that allow your work to be of the highest possible quality.

As an example, if you’re doing a presentation, if you’re gathering data, doing some kind of a presentation, you can do it in most frames of mind. But if you think back to the last time you came up with a really insightful idea or you just had that aha moment, and you just solved that problem in your head, chances are you were not sitting in front of your computer, looking at a screen. Chances are you were not working to a deadline. Chances are you were not working to complete a presentation at 2:00 in the morning, but instead, you might have been doing something maybe unrelated, maybe taking a break, even, or going for a walk.

The reason why the idea emerged at that point is because what you were doing and how you were doing it set the right conditions for your brain for that idea to hatch. The problem with the way we work right now is, if you are working in this uniform, continuous way, you’re not giving your brain the chance to enter those optimal states within which it can think, it can produce, it can come up with ideas, the very kind of work that we now, as humans are going to increasingly have to do.

CURT NICKISCH: So you’ve used this term states of mind. What are those frames of mind, those states of mind? What should we be aware of?

MITHU STORONI: So a good rule of thumb is to remember that the mind is not like muscle. It rests while it works, and it works while it rests. So when you’re doing any kind of work, say you’re carrying out some kind of very complex problem solving, your brain does not just work at the same pace, in the same state continuously for that entire block. If you look inside your brain, there are different… You can call it sort of states the brain enters into. Some of these states are decided or influenced by the neurotransmitter, neuromodulator, norepinephrine. Other neurotransmitters also come into it.

But very broadly, there are different states your brain enters and leaves during this process. So for instance, when you are in a state of pure focus, there are certain neural signatures of brain waves through which we can tell that the brain is in the state of pure focus. If your brain is then, once it meets a problem, it encounters the problem, and it wants to work its way around it, there’ll be moments when it needs to just detach its attention and let its thoughts wander, let its attention wander a little.

CURT NICKISCH: If you can’t concentrate, what should that tell you?

MITHU STORONI: So that should tell you that your brain state and your body state are incompatible, but also that your brain needs a different environment to now approach the problem from a different avenue. So for instance, I have some clients, and they’ve adopted a rule, one managing director has adopted a rule of if he’s sitting in front of his computer with a problem that he hasn’t managed to solve for 10 minutes, he leaves his desk, he goes for a walk.

And the reason why this works is you can use your physiology to change your brain’s thinking patterns. And there are actually reasons, neuroscientific reasons why it works. Taking a walk, for instance, first of all, it aligns your brain and your body’s physiology. Second is it keeps you in the right alert mental state, so you don’t just drift off, you don’t just fall asleep, or feel lethargic, or looking at your phone. But at the same time, it keeps your attention moving, because your surroundings are moving while you walk, so your attention can’t really fix on anything. So it drifts into your head, and explores your problems, and tries to solve them from different avenues.

But at the same time, you can’t ruminate, because your attention can’t stick to one problem for too long, because you also have to pay attention to where you’re walking. So there is this mixture, this very interesting, very helpful condition created by the process of walking. The body and brain are so connected in this way that you can actually use your body to create, to nudge your brain into optimal states for the different kinds of work you want to do.

And the analogy is that there is a reason why we can’t daydream while we sprint. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but it’s impossible to daydream while you sprint. You can daydream while you run slowly for long distances, but you can’t daydream while you sprint.

And in many ways, when we are sitting at our desk and performing what is the equivalent to a mental sprinting, we are forcing our bodies to stay in a very different physiological state to our minds while we’re working. And this is, again, a consequence of the way we work, the way we’ve been used to working for the last 100 years. If you’re going through tons of emails, if you’re just looking through, reading through data you’ve just collected, and you are designing a PowerPoint, but not really designing it, just putting the bits and pieces together, then you can still do it in any kind of state of mind.

But if you have all the tools, if you have someone who designs PowerPoint presentations for you or you have all the data in front of you, how are you going to actually use that data? What is the optimal way of creating a PowerPoint presentation for maximum impact? What creative way can you actually present something? So those are the ideas that will only emerge if you’re in the right state of mind.

CURT NICKISCH: So we’ve described this, what in your book you call gear two, as sort of an optimal state of mind, where you are able to focus for an extended period of time. Can we go through the other states and just talk about the benefits, and why gear two stands out as maybe the most productive one?

MITHU STORONI: Just a little bit of background, we’ve known for the best part of a century now that there’s a hormone, there’s a neurotransmitter, neuromodulator in your brain called norepinephrine, and it has a kind of upside down U-curve, in terms of how it influences the way your mind works, when you’re doing cognitive work, in the sense that too little is bad, too much is bad, and there’s a Goldilocks zone in the middle where your alertness level, your ability to focus your attention is absolutely optimal. That’s what I refer to as this gear two state, in my gear metaphor.

The reason why it’s important and significant is that our method of working at the moment, which is quantity focused, shifts us towards a higher norepinephrine state. So we kind of move to the right of that upside-down U-curve. We think faster, we react. We react to emails instead of actually sitting down, and planning, and thinking. We process information quickly. At the moment we receive information, we tend to react to it, we tend to respond to it.

And this reactive state pushes us into this higher gear, which I call gear three. In that state of mind, your mind cannot wander. There’s a region in the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the front of your brain. That region of the brain cannot be fully engaged when you’re in this high-gear state.

CURT NICKISCH: Are you highly distractable in that state? What characteristics do you have?

MITHU STORONI: So the way you would feel in that state is you would have a very low threshold for being distractable. Your thoughts would come faster, you would feel your thinking quickly. You’re reacting fast. You can probably carry out simple maneuvers very quickly. You can type very fast, but you will miss the nuances. You’ll miss kind of second- and third-order consequences of the problems that you’re trying to solve. You will be very easily distracted. So it’s a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Your speed becomes faster, but your accuracy goes down. That is the high-gear, gear three state, and you will make mistakes, errors, and you will miss nuances, and you will miss subtle aspects of anything you’re going through.

It’s deadline pressure, it’s needing to scroll pressure, it’s needing to reply to the next 100 emails that have suddenly arisen in your inbox pressure, that sort of state of put-out-fires pressure. So there’s a spectrum. So at the lower end, it’s simply reacting, reacting. So you’re getting 10 messages, you’re getting messages on Slack, you’re getting messages on email, you are responding and replying to them as they arrive. That puts you into that state. And the extreme, that sort of higher end of this state is when you are reacting to an emergency situation, reacting to things breaking down, reacting to a massive error in your software that is causing a disaster to all your clients globally.

CURT NICKISCH: Got it. And gear one – we have to round this out.

MITHU STORONI: Right, so gear one is the opposite of that. Gear one is the kind of very slow, hazy state of mind you’re in first thing in the morning when you wake up, last thing at night before you go to sleep. And ideally, when you’re taking a break, when your attention is very loose, very easy, you’re not able to focus it, but your mind feels very rested and your thoughts are very slow.

CURT NICKISCH: This is all very interesting, because I think of a lot of just regular concepts I have, like somebody who says they’re a morning person, through this framework, I can kind of think of that as somebody who most easily hits gear two, and is productive in what they’re trying to do, and what they like to do during those morning hours. That means that it’s just easier for them to hit gear two and do that during that time. Is that also kind of how you think of it?

MITHU STORONI: Through my research, I’ve discovered that there are actually optimal times during the day when certain cognitive functions or states, if you like, peak. And one of the problems with the way we work is we enforce a pretty consistent work hour schedule on everyone, regardless of the kind of work people do.

So there is research to suggest that when you first wake up in the morning, you go through this time window, this sort of very couple of hour window where your mind is in this transition area between being very daydreamy, very kind of wandering, not able to really focus hard and just being able to focus hard, and just being able to focus.

And practically, it means that there is a time window every morning, just after you’ve woken up, before you’ve taken your four espressos or gone for a run, when you’re in this slightly mind wandering, slightly slow-thinking state of mind, which is optimal for creativity. And this creativity window, you’re almost out of it by the time you go to work, if you start work at, say, 10 o’clock or 9:30 in the morning, because this time window tends to hit before then.

Similarly, there is another time window, creative peak late in the evening, in the hours when most people are no longer at work. And if your work does involve innovation and creativity, and you start your work at 10 o’clock, or you start your work sooner, but you fill that time window with meetings, you’re actually robbing yourself of the peak moments in the day when your creative ideas are most likely to emerge.

In the same way, if you think about focused work, so focusing requires a slightly different state of mind than the state you need to be in when you are creating, and we know this, because we talked about how creative ideas come to you when you’re walking, when you’re in the shower, when you’re mowing your lawn. Whereas, when you focus, you need to focus on a target.

It sort of restrains your attention and glues it. That state of mind tends to be more optimally achieved at a different time of the day, namely from around 10 o’clock in the morning to around lunchtime. There’s a dip after lunch, and then again, the latter half of the afternoon, going into the early evening. Some people who are morning people, others who are night people, their schedule will be slightly shifted sooner or later.

But these are broadly the times when work peaks. So instead of imposing the same or using the same work schedule on everyone, regardless of the kind of work they’re doing, one way to really achieve those peaks in quality is to work according to these rhythms.

CURT NICKISCH: What do you do if you find yourself bored by something that you’re doing, or you’re even bored in a meeting? Your mind is not focused. What can you do and how would you approach it?

MITHU STORONI: So the reason why many people tend to get bored or boredom arises is because you don’t have enough on your plate to grab your attention, and so you are actually having to expend effort to keep your attention fixed to what you’re doing. So if you’re doing that kind of work, it can feel quite tiring. So one way to help you mitigate that is by actually expanding what you have to do, so making your work more difficult.

And though it runs counter to the advice that many people hear, actually doing something like multitasking, where you have more channels of information to process, to engage with, that keeps you alert enough to be in the right mental state. One other thing I’d add with boredom, the concept of boredom and the way, although automation AI is very helpful, it’s also creating certain types of work which become sort of oversight jobs, where you’re supervising or you’re just watching something being done.

One of the ways in which we can curate that kind of work to reduce boredom is by adding some element of feedback. So there’s a great study done some decades ago on air traffic control simulations. So for instance, if you think of air traffic controllers, it’s a situation where you are watching data, but you’re not really acting, and you may not have to act at all across an entire day. But in this simulation, they found that doing something as simple as a mouse click every time new data appeared actually kept people more engaged and less bored with what they’re doing. So incorporating some element of feedback can also help.

CURT NICKISCH: Mithu, what’s happening in your brain when you are learning at work?

MITHU STORONI: So learning a very interesting relationship with the tension you feel, when you feel things are uncertain. When you encounter a situation that is not as predictable as you want it to be, your brain learns itself out of it. So if there’s an element of knowledge missing and you can’t predict what’s going to happen next, your brain steps on the accelerator and tries to process information, grab information, and process it as fast as possible, to immediately reduce the uncertainty.

Now, when it steps on the accelerator to do this, that’s what you feel as a kind of tension, as a kind of slight edginess. The trick with learning, especially when you’re learning something complex that you need to think about, you need to analyze, so you’re not just learning that, you know, “Don’t cross the road without looking both sides next time,” but what you’re learning is something like you’re learning, “Okay, this is how this new language model is working,” you’re learning about the bits and pieces of it, that state of learning is actually optimized when you feel this ever so slight tension in yourself, this apprehension.

Because the tension, the apprehension you feel is caused by the sudden burst of norepinephrine in your brain that makes you feel tense, but it also, at the same time, primes your brain for plasticity, for learning. Now, this is relevant in today’s work landscape, because new models, new large language models are arising, evolving in a matter of days sometimes. And many of us are having to change jobs, many people are having to re-skill. The landscape is highly, highly uncertain. And learning is probably the only tool, the most important tool that many workers can embrace to navigate this landscape.

Now, because this landscape is uncertain, people are feeling uncomfortable, but at the same time, it’s that feeling of discomfort that is priming their brain to learn these tools faster and better. So one skill that I think will be very useful and really, really critical for success in this era is being able to stay in that gray area between feeling apprehensive, very slightly anxious, and falling into a state of panic and stress.

So learning how to control yourself, regulate your brain from tipping into gear three, that sort of anxious, panicky state, and just staying at the top edge of gear two, where you’re still slightly apprehensive, slightly jittery, but you have enough self-control and focus to be able to sit down and learn, that is the state that, if we can train ourselves to embrace it, will last us and take us far through this era of rapid change.

CURT NICKISCH: What does all of this mean for managers and organizations? And the reason I ask that is that it’s one thing to do these things yourself, to try to optimize your own work, it’s another to go against company culture, right? When there are meetings on the calendar at the times that you don’t want them to be, when certain team or company norms don’t really jive with how your brain optimally works, from an organizational standpoint or a managerial standpoint, how do you implement some of these practices more collectively?

MITHU STORONI: So I think there are three things that I would advise organizations or managers to do for their team that could go a long way to helping team members be in this optimal state, in this optimal state for high-level cognitive work. Given how we’ve just discussed how the states of the brain can be influenced by the time of day, by the type of work you’re doing, by the way you are working, whether you’re sitting, whether you’re walking, by this heterogeneity of the kind of work you are doing, the first way would be to give teams or sub-teams a very flexible schedule that’s tailored to the kind of work they’re doing.

So for instance, if your sub-team or team is working on a creative innovation aspect of your project, let them come in earlier in the day, protect their first half or first few hours of the day, as that’s when creativity tends to peak, and then give them a longer lunch break, and repeat in the second half of the day. That gives this team the flexibility to really do what they’re assigned to do in their best possible way. Similarly, if you have a team working on something that requires focus, concentration, sitting down, and thinking, their schedule can be geared this way, so they can perhaps come in a bit later, and they would have these peak focus times protected.

And meetings can be held, so you have recurrent meetings, which generally tend to be routine meetings, the best time for routine meetings would be just after lunchtime, when neither creativity nor focus peak. If you’re having meetings that are brainstorming sessions, then you can schedule them in accordance with the creativity slots. So it depends, again, on the nature of meetings.

I would also suggest that managers adopt another practice, which some organizations already do, notably Google has, 3M has, and that practice is embracing the importance of letting workers, giving workers, giving your team members the independence to pursue something relevant to the organization, relevant to the overall goal of your company or your organization, but to pursue something that they themselves feel curious about and they want to pursue, without necessarily there being any guaranteed result or guaranteed outcome.

And this concept of making rapid progress in something – in neuroscience the process is termed the learning process mechanism. And it’s being increasingly shown that this process generates intrinsic motivation, so that a worker feels pleasure, inherent pleasure in what they’re doing. And the reason why giving team members the opportunity, maybe a time window to be able to do this is because we’re now going through tremendous change, and the old promises of job guarantees, career progress, even financial incentives are becoming very fluid and very uncertain.

And so I think by giving workers the opportunity to get into these states of being able to learn continuously for its own sake keeps workers in a state of mind where they feel happier, less burnt out, more engaged with not just the thing that they’re pursuing, but with work overall. So I would suggest that more and more managers, if possible, adopt this opportunity for learning progress.

And we think that you’re working only while you’re working on what is relevant, but actually, the brain is working on whatever is relevant even when it is doing things that are not relevant. And so having a work environment that allows the brain, that allows your workers to get into these states of working, of deriving pleasure from the whole process of just making progress in something that is a good fit for their own personal skills, can put them in the right mental state.

CURT NICKISCH: Mithu, this has been really interesting. It’s been so great to have you on the show.

MITHU STORONI: Thank you so much for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Mithu Storoni, author of the new book, Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.

And to feed your hungry brain, we have nearly 1,000 episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back on Tuesday with our next episode. I’m Curt Nickisch.