Your Brain Is the Ultimate Productivity Tool. Here's How to Optimize It

Neuroscientist Mithu Storoni shares 5 key insights from Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.

How do you get your brain to work? When it’s time to get things done, most of us just try to shake off the fog of sleep and get after it, maybe guzzling some caffeine to kickstart our thinking. But these are crude tools, and in this day and age we deserve smarter methods for sharpening our focus. We’ve got some for you by way of Mithu Storoni, author of the new book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. Mithu is a physician, surgeon and neuroscience researcher who advises corporations on mental performance and stress management. You can read or listen to 5 big ideas from her book below.

The 5 Key Insights

1. Efficiency needs a new identity in the AI age.

2. The concept of mental “gears.”

3. Changing your mental gear.

4. Working in rhythms.

5. Sustainable drive.

1. Efficiency needs a new identity in the AI age.

Most of the strategies we use to make ourselves more productive come from a time of assembly lines and mass production, when the hands worked much more than the head. Now, in the era of automation and AI, the mind has become the most valuable worker in the room. The mind, however, works in a very different way from muscles. You can’t craft ideas on a moving assembly line, and working faster does not improve the brilliance of your thoughts.

Working efficiently used to mean making more products for every hour you worked. But this definition was born at a time when the manufacturing landscape was dominated by tangible products that could be assembled in parts, like cars and hairdryers. Today’s knowledge workspace is dominated by intangible products, like solutions and designs. If you are manufacturing solutions and designs, you don’t become efficient simply by producing more. Instead, efficiency comes from honing the quality of your product: having one genius idea instead of a hundred mediocre ones.

Most workplaces continue to promote productivity in terms of quantity, focusing on how many hours we worked and how much we got done, when we should be focusing on quality—how well we worked and how good the work is. Efficiency should be defined by the brilliance of ideas instead of their number, and by the ingenuity of solutions, not the time spent working on them. It’s time for a new approach to efficiency in this AI-assisted phase of the knowledge age.

2. The concept of mental “gears.”

When trying to develop an original idea or find your way around a complex problem, the idea and solution will only hatch when the conditions are right. You create the right conditions by putting your mind in an optimal state for the specific work it is doing.

While you work, your mind changes its configuration and drifts across different mental states. It might race ahead, gently daydream, or focus hard. Each mental state is perfect for a specific kind of mental work. For example, a slow, wandering state of mind invites creative breakthroughs, and unwavering focus helps with reading a complex report.

“Each mental state is perfect for a specific kind of mental work.”

Think of your brain as a car and your work as the terrain it is driving on. Your mental states are like the car’s gears. You change gear to suit your work terrain. Your mind performs best if it is in the right gear for what it must do. If there is a mismatch between the state of your mind and your work, it will feel more difficult to do—think of how hard it is to daydream while you sprint!

3. Changing your mental gear.

The dialogue between your brain and the world shapes your mental state, and you can choreograph your work, routine, and workspace to help you enter the optimal mental state for a given task.

One example is the effect of time of day. It is easier to enter an optimal mental state for focused work in the morning than right after midday when we experience a dip in alertness. If you schedule meetings in the morning and tackle focused work early in the afternoon, the focused work will feel difficult because the time of day is acting against your efforts to stay focused. If, instead, you do focused work in the morning and hold routine meetings early in the afternoon, your circadian rhythm will help you stay in the right gear for both jobs.

Another example involves playing with the workload your brain is under. A heavy mental load can push you out of an optimal mental state by making you tired, but it can also have the opposite effect and nudge you into the perfect gear. If you are struggling to concentrate and keep drifting away, making your mental workload heavier (for instance, by multitasking or by forcing yourself to work to a deadline) will help you focus. But if you happen to be lost in deep, creative thought and are about to stumble upon an a-ha! moment of insight, the reminder of a deadline and a sudden increase in mental workload will snap you out of that optimal state.

4. Working in rhythms.

Fatigue pushes your mind out of an optimal mental state and sets in faster the more intensely you work. The key to efficiency lies in being able to ratchet up the intensity of work without falling out of an optimal mental state through fatigue.

One way to achieve this is by working in “sprints,” where you work hard, then stop completely to take a break and repeat. However, a better strategy is working to a kind of “power law,” where you work intensely for short bouts, moderately for longer, and lightly for the rest of the time. This allows your mind to recuperate without stopping work completely and maintains an optimal mental state for longer.

“A better strategy is working to a kind of “power law,” where you work intensely for short bouts, moderately for longer, and lightly for the rest of the time.”

Most knowledge workplaces impose a routine reminiscent of the assembly line era of continuous, uniform work. But as knowledge work becomes increasingly complex and the mental load continues to rise, a power law way of working is a better strategy for mental productivity.

5. Sustainable drive.

It is easier to get into the right state of mind and produce your best work if you feel happy and motivated, but as AI redraws the work landscape, the rewards that workplaces have traditionally used to keep workers happy (such as progress up a career ladder and long-term financial incentives) are slowly disappearing. Instead, we are left with the prospect of constantly learning new skills and solving unfamiliar problems without a clear goal in sight—or risk losing our jobs.

This new work terrain needs a different kind of drive: here, our drive must come from the process of what we are doing and not its outcome because its outcome may not be guaranteed. A new language model that you have struggled to learn for weeks can become obsolete as soon as you master it, or a problem you have taken months to solve can suddenly disappear when new technology enters the scene and brings with it another larger problem.

One way to ignite an authentic and powerful inner drive tied to what you do is by incrementally assimilating a skill or knowledge as fast as possible, a process termed Learning Progress. Infants use this mechanism to fuel their drive to learn about the world, and it works so well that researchers are even using it to motivate artificial agents. You can use the Learning Progress mechanism to sustain motivation and stay in the right mental gear through uncertainty, change, and challenge.

Mental efficiency ultimately comes from working in harmony with your brain’s rhythms. The best thoughts, ideas, and solutions can never be coaxed out; they spontaneously appear when the conditions are right. Mental efficiency happens when you create those right conditions.