Nausheen Shahzad, executive director of the Neuropsychology Center in Karachi, Pakistan, a privately-run clinic with a special focus on educational psychology and training, likens ‘warming up’ to a primary school teacher starting her lesson by asking children to sing their ABCs. “The learning objective isn’t to revise the alphabet. It’s to retrieve that file in their brain related to language so they can be more receptive to learning,” she says. That ‘brain activation’ can be applicable to busy adults, too. “Say you want to write an ode to flowers. You can start thinking about it even while you’re washing the dishes,” points out Shahzad.
Clearing our minds also helps us access deep concentration, so if stray worries or thoughts persist, computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in University College London, who is also the author of Models of the Mind, recommends doing a quick ‘brain-dump’ – something as simple as scribbling in a notebook, or even sending an email to yourself about everything on your mind. “We know we can't hold a lot of things in our mind at once. While you’re focusing on deep work, minimise the number of things in your mind. Don’t connect to everything else.”
Plan for interruptions
Of course, finding slots for uninterrupted blocks of work may not coincide with the time of day we feel most naturally productive, according to our individual circadian rhythms. That means we either have to try and adapt our natural rhythms or start on a tough task in a slot where interruptions are inevitable.
Leroy, who studies both cognitive and emotional impacts of interruptions, says one strategy is to accept that interruptions will happen and thereby reduce their capacity to derail us. “Frustration, anger, stress and anxiety are the usual emotional responses to an interruption, and these negative emotions can easily spill over and make it difficult to focus following an interruption, impeding progress. By accepting [the fact that interruptions may occur] as our paradigm, we mitigate the likelihood for these negative emotions to occur. It’s never going to be, ‘Yay! I was interrupted,’ but it’s a very pragmatic approach,” she says.
April 29, 2021 at 02:00PM
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How the busiest people get 'deep work' done - BBC News
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