Do you ever feel as if you have too many things going on at once? Do you find all these things make it hard to concentrate on anything?
I answered yes to both.
The inability to focus, concentrate or prioritize is a big complaint for accounting professionals. David Rock’s "Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long" is an easy to follow, easy to execute guide to dealing with the vast overwhelm that bombards us and challenges our ability to get things done each and every day.
The book focuses on the “I can relate” lives of Paul and Emily, both of whom are trying to navigate that work/life balance. One is self-employed, and the other has just received a promotion at a large corporation.
Each chapter relates another crisis of overwhelm that plagues either one or the other. It also explains why they have been overwhelmed, and what they could have done in terms of prioritization and focus to minimize or even eliminate the stress.
"Your Brain at Work" offers some interesting and useful facts about our brains, including the various components and what tasks they govern, and how to optimize our use of them:
- The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain required to plan, think things through and make decisions. It houses the contents of our minds that are self-generated (rather than those that are from external sources or from the senses).
- It makes up only 4%-5% of the volume of the brain and is the last part of the brain to develop during human history.
- This means that as a race, we humans have not yet evolved to a point where the prefrontal cortex can meet the increased informational demands of modern times.
- Conscious mental activities such as decision-making that use the prefrontal cortex take up a lot of energy and metabolic fuel. As these resources are limited, when we make a difficult decision, the next decision is harder to make. (By the way, introducing glucose when our mental reserves are low has been shown to fix the problem, as long as our bodies can deal with glucose in a healthy way.)
- Scheduling takes up precious mental energy (so we should use a scheduling app—this will pay for itself in no time).
- Memory is overwhelmed and ultimately will fail us when we try to multi-task or to keep more than one idea in our heads at the same time
- We can focus on one conscious task at a time. Multi-tasking is a myth. (But I think we all knew that already.)
- Switching between tasks uses energy and causes mistakes.
- When deciding between options, the optimal number of options to compare is... wait for it…two.
- The maximum number of different ideas we should hold in our minds at once is no more than three or four.
There are several good tried-and-true techniques for diffusing the overwhelm that plagues us these days, including:
- Scheduling attention-hungry tasks such as tough decisions for when we are fully rested.
- Prioritizing work is very important, and that too should be done when we are fully rested.
- This will seem trite and obvious, but it bears saying anyway: shutting off distractions such as email, social media, and phone when we need to engage in deep thinking.
- Breaking up our workday into blocks of time based on the type of thinking required (for example, creative writing, meetings or answering emails), rather than the project.
- New ideas take up more brain power than ones we already know about.
- Chunkify: Break information into chunks whenever possible if there is too much of it to handle.
- Create visuals for complex ideas: Get those overwhelming thoughts out of your head by listing your projects. keep a pen and notepad by the bed at night, which will help write down late-breaking ideas.
There is so much competition for your attention—and it is increasing exponentially. We are bound to drown in the resulting overwhelm without a user’s guide to the brain.
Try this one and let me know what you think.
Esther Friedberg Karp is an internationally-renowned trainer, writer and speaker from Toronto, where she runs her QuickBooks consulting practice, EFK CompuBooks Inc. Consistently in Insightful Accountant's Top 100 ProAdvisors, she has been named to the Top 10 twice.
A ProAdvisor in three countries, she has traveled the world with Intuit, spoken at QuickBooks Connect in San Jose and Toronto, among other places, and has written countless articles for Intuit Global.
Esther has been named one of the “Top 50 Women in Accounting,” a “Top 10 Influencer” in the Canadian Bookkeeping World, and is a repeat nominee for the “RBC Canadian Women’s Entrepreneur Awards.” She counts among her clients many international companies, as well as accounting professionals seeking her out on behalf of their own clients for her expertise in multi-currency and various countries’ editions of QuickBooks Desktop and Online.
She can be reached at esther@e-compubooks.com or 416-410-0750.
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