Is Now the Best Time for Change?

“Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties. ”

— Emil Nolde

Last week we looked at some of the reasons why it can be difficult to create change in your life. We'll continue the same line of inquiry this week with some information about how our brains function and how we can best set ourselves up for success given their needs and limitations.  In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock lays out the conclusions of a wide array of scientific studies on brain functioning. If you're someone who wants to be highly efficient and productive, you might want to read it yourself, but I'll let you in here on a few ideas it offers that are relevant to this discussion.  This is just a quick summary, so some of these concepts may not seem self-explanatory, but the evidence for them is there.

• Completing actions you know how to do on "autopilot" is easy for your body as it doesn't require the expenditure of much energy. Learning new things, on the other hand, is an energy-intensive activity that can quickly drain your brain's reserves
• Even processing new experiences when you're not trying to learn anything at all is taxing. Evolution has encouraged us to be wary of the new because anything unfamiliar might be a threat. Too much newness tends to ramp up our fight/flight/freeze response, which quickly exhausts resources and switches off our reasoning functions
• Dialing down internal distractions, otherwise known as "inhibition," is another demanding task that burns through resources quickly. Deliberately focusing on something to the exclusion of all else takes effort, so you can only do this effectively for a relatively short time before you'll need to take a break to refuel. Rock does not immediately specify, but food, sleep, deep breathing, and exercise all help us to recover from such efforts
• Switching focus back and forth  rapidly as we do when multi-tasking is also draining, and doing this decreases our efficiency such that studies show no net gain in efficiency.  Multi-tasking takes the same amount of time and energy as doing each task separately because of the efficiency we lose. It also decreases the quality of our work. The only exception to this is when one of the tasks is so ingrained as to be an "autopilot" task for you
• As much as we'd like to think that we can work at full attention all day, studies show that we only get a certain amount of highly effective thinking time per day.  This makes it essential to be smart about how we prioritize the most important tasks so they can be addressed during our most energized moments

I hope you're noticing the through-line that when we try to work against our physical needs, we make the likelihood of our success in creating new habits much harder than it has to be. I think there's a reason why so many people find that exercising or adding a daily practice to their lives works better first thing in the morning. Not only do scheduling surprises tend to get in the way less, but we tend to have the most physical/mental resources available to us before the day's onslaught of requests and requirements starts to bombard us and use them up.

How can you start to be more strategic about moving your most important and most demanding tasks to your highest-energy times of day? (Maybe these aren't typically morning for you—we're all different, and you should absolutely notice what works for you most consistently and leverage it for yourself as you continue to learn.)  How can you protect these times from random interruptions so that easier tasks only land outside of them?  Maybe that means turning off your phone during these periods of more intense work.  Maybe that means putting a Do Not Disturb sign on your door so that everyone in your house knows that this is private time.  Maybe you'll decide to get up a little earlier so that you can get started on your day when the world is quieter, or wait until after coffee and a healthy breakfast before attempting deep concentration.  I encourage you to start thinking about this and experiment with how these principles can help you move more quickly, and with less friction, toward your most exciting goals.  Life is busy, but with some intentional planning, we can often carve out more ways to be productive than it might seem if we just blunder through our days putting out fires.  And when you find a scheduling pattern that helps, celebrate it!  Small victories add up to bigger ones over time.