How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Turn the components of the problem into real people, and imagine them
interacting.
For example, if you’re trying to work out how Factory A’s
output should feed into Factory B’s production schedule, try thinking of the
factories as Anna and Bob, who are trying to coordinate their workload.
Imagine a real person walking through the situation or process.
For
example, if you’re looking for ways to improve customer service, picture a
friend going through each step of the interaction with your company. What
would he or she find frustrating or difficult?
This kind of social framing might just give you some extra brainpower to play
with, or at least reveal perspectives you hadn’t previously considered.
LOOK AFTER THE SMART BASICS
There are four themes I’ve mentioned earlier in the book that I’m going to recap
here, since they’re especially powerful in sharpening your mind when you need
to rise to a challenge. They involve scheduling blocks of deep thinking time,
engineering your environment, prioritizing your sleep, and doing a short burst of
aerobic exercise.
Undistracted Thinking Time
In 
Chapter 4
, I talked about the importance of reducing distractions, given the
way that multitasking increases the number of errors we make. So if we want to
be on our game, we need to give ourselves uninterrupted time to work on our
most intellectually challenging tasks.
But, you might be thinking, doesn’t exposure to new information make us
more creative? In 
Chapter 8
 we saw how fresh thinking comes from encouraging
the brain to explore new perspectives and make new connections. But it depends
on 
how
you take in that new information. Genuine insight isn’t helped by

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piecemeal attention. Teresa Amabile and her colleagues at Harvard Business
School evaluated the daily work patterns of more than nine thousand people
working on projects that required creativity and innovation. They found that the
likelihood of creative thinking was higher when people focused on one activity
for a chunk of the day. Conversely, when people had highly fragmented days,
their creative thinking decreased significantly.
5
This probably relates to
something that neuroscientists call the “preparatory period” just before we have
a moment of insight, when our neural activity actually goes strangely quiet.
6
If
you get a pinging email alert at that moment, your mental quiet evaporates—
along with the chances that you’ll hold on to the big breakthrough you were
about to have.
Like many people, Peggy, our advertising art director, often finds herself
working in open plan offices, where it can be harder to avoid interruptions. Her
solution? “I go to a conference room if I can. And even if I can’t, I eliminate a
lot of distractions by turning off alerts and putting my phone on ‘do not
disturb.’
” Peggy also realized that her daily calendar quickly gets filled with
meetings. “That leaves me doing my thinking around the edges of the day, when
I’m often tired. So instead I decided to start scheduling my thinking time just
like any other meeting, to give it proper priority.”
If you carve out some focused thinking time and successfully manage to
protect it, it’s worth explicitly rewarding yourself in some way after you finish—
perhaps with a walk or a talk with a favorite colleague. The reward will make it
easier for your brain to repeat your virtuous focused behavior next time around.