Eliminate Work Fatigue and Optimize Your Productivity with Neuroscientist, Dr. Mithu Storoni
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You ever feel like you're just grinding away at work? You're just putting in the hours. You're grinding through the ups, the downs, the fatigue, the burnout, the stress. And you know there's a better way. You know this isn't how we were meant to work, but what can you do about it? Or how were we meant to work?

Today, we're going to shatter the myth that productivity is just about getting things done. Our guest this week, Dr. Mitu Storoni, is the author of a brand new book called Hyper-Efficient, Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.

She's going to reveal the neuroscience on how to work in harmony with your brain. Think of it as the power of perfect timing, how to time box your tasks to spark innovation, boost efficiency, but also maintain performance in the way you were meant to. And yes, that means taking breaks. Literally, we give you a minute by minute schedule that is optimal based on the brain.

We're going to talk about how to synchronize your work rhythms with your brain's natural gears, the precise intervals for focus work and rejuvenating breaks, techniques to eliminate burnout, and how to actually do it at work. This is not fluff. This is not, you know, your, oh, productivity. I promise you.

Excited to bring this one to you with Dr. Mitu Storoni, who is a neuroscience researcher turned author who writes about, talks about, and studies efficiency, productivity, and the brain. Forward this episode along to somebody who you think is just grinding it out and needs to do it differently. I'm sure they'll thank you. We are at smartpeoplepodcast.gmail.com or you can find us at smartpeoplepodcast.com.

Let's get into it. Our discussion with Dr. Mitu Storoni about her brand new book, Hyper-Efficient. Optimize your brain to transform the way you work. Enjoy.

Are we being productive in the workplace these days? You know, especially as we talk about these office jobs, this white collar environment, are we, are we actually even being efficient? So I'd argue we're not. We have reached a sort of a ceiling of what we call efficiency of working in the old way. And we are trying to almost overcompensate for that by

by assuming that more action equals better output. And we're saturating our time, ourselves and our days with just increasing action, increasing busyness and equating that with increasing output. But the problem is,

But, and this hasn't just happened now, but it's, it's accelerating now. After the Second World War, when we switched to doing knowledge work in a large, in a large kind of portion of the, of the, of the working landscape,

we forgot to change how we worked when we changed what we worked in. So before the Second World War, we had this amazing boost in production through assembly lines, following the Industrial Revolution. So Taylorism, Fordism, assembly lines, etc.

And we had this massive boost in productivity where literally products dropping off the assembly line massively multiplied and they had an extraordinary effect. After the Second World War, when we switched to knowledge work, we tried to do the same thing with our minds. So we worked in the same way. We assembled things with our minds in a nine to five sort of structure, working continuously and

And just as you would work faster on an assembly line to manufacture more products, so, you know, the faster you're screwing bottle tops, the more bottles you're producing in the end. We assumed that the more hours you're putting in, the more meetings you're putting in, the more emails you're writing, the more output you are producing. The problem is with knowledge work is your mind doesn't work like muscle.

With muscle, you work, the faster you contract your muscle, the more work it does. You stop and it rests and it relaxes. The mind doesn't work like that. The mind works in rhythms. So if you force it to work faster or harder or just carry on working, it's never going to produce work of quality. So what do you do? You overcompensate and you say, work more, work longer, have more meetings, write more emails, etc.

make more plans that in turn reduces the quality of output even further. So it kind of turns into a sort of vicious cycle. And I think that's why we've hit the ceiling. One thing I've said over the past few years is I feel like so many people are staying busy to justify the paycheck. So if somebody says, what have you been doing? They can point to all the activity and far less interested in pointing to the productivity.

Are businesses incentivized to maintain this structure? Is there somebody who's going to go out on a limb and start truly changing the way we work? It feels like that's a risky bet to take right now. It is a risky bet to take, but the time has come when we really need to take that bet. And the reason is, if you think of the traditional organizational hierarchy in any kind of knowledge work organization, whether it's

accountancy, banking, any other company that deals with knowledge work products, you have a hierarchy. The people at the top of the pyramid carry out work that involves learning, complex learning, decision making, making kind of strategic plans, finding solutions.

But most of the people on the pyramid from the bottom layer upwards would do the kind of routine work, data gathering, data presenting, data processing work. For instance, you know, PowerPoint presentations to show what, to kind of present the data. And before you do the presentation, you acquire the data. So all that kind of work was done by people making up the bulk of the pyramid. And you could do that kind of work in a way

by forcing your mind to work in an assembly line fashion because it wasn't important to do that work well. It was just important to do that work, to get it done, to meet the deadline. We're now in an era where the majority of these kinds of work from PowerPoint presentation to data gathering can be done and is increasingly being done by machines.

And so even if you are at the lowest layer of the pyramid, if you're the most junior analyst in your organization,

You now have your own personal assistants to do all this work. So you, what will be required of you and what will be required of us as humans generally in the workplace is to do the things that the people at the top of the pyramid were doing so far, namely planning, solving, creating and innovating. Now, when we do that, we have to think about the quality of our output.

A hundred mediocre ideas are just as bad as one mediocre idea. But one extremely good, innovative, sellable, actionable solution is a thousand times better than a hundred mediocre ones. But if you want your mind to produce that kind of output, you cannot force it into working like an assembly line. I think you...

just articulated the inflection point we're at better than I've heard. And I talked to a lot of people in this general space. So I want to spend some time here. First, I love this idea of in the knowledge worker age, which most people listening have spent most of their life in, you have the people at the top who are the ones setting the course. But the vast majority of

Their job was to simply gather the things to provide those people at the top what is needed to make the right decision. And then a few would actually go implement the decision. Is that a summation of what you're saying? Exactly. I haven't thought of it like that. It's like we're all at the bottom. We're just gathering. So now even the most junior analyst has in a way become a senior executive. Yeah.

They have to think more like a senior executive in the sense that they now have machines doing the work that they would normally do. As a practical, as a real-life example, since machines, since AI programs can now create PowerPoint presentations for you, your edge as a junior analyst is to justify why your creative use of those tools is

is worth, makes your output more worthwhile than simply using the AI version of PowerPoint. So your bonus points, your USP will depend on your originality, your innovative use of these incredible tools that you have. And you cannot get to that level of thinking, of innovative thinking, of creative thinking,

If your mind does not have the right ecosystem to generate these ideas. So this is why we have to start thinking about changing how we work to create the best conditions. Along with this, do you think that the structure of an, of organizations in general is going to change? Because now what this sounds like is all of a sudden you need far less managerial levels. You need far less, uh,

very bottom of the pyramid? Because of course, some of those people can move up, but it doesn't sound like it would be a one-to-one. Do you feel like that's what's going to happen? Basically, a condensing of people and organizations? I think there will be some degree of organizational change. And I think one way of looking at it is as an enhancement of the organization. So

People will no longer be required to do these mind-numbing jobs at the lowest level of the pyramid. So when you enter an organization, the most junior level will be higher along the hierarchy, along the current hierarchy.

than it is at the moment. So I definitely see a sort of a reshuffling of that. The human factor is always going to be important, but not to do work that any machine can do. So there will be a restructuring, but I feel optimistic in that after an initial bump, when change always causes a little bit of chaos,

Following that, I think organizations can become more streamlined. So humans actually do the kind of work that the human brain is good at, rather than simply trying to mimic an automated system.

kind of thought mindless output driven work. Are people actually this good at that kind of work? Because I don't see it happen much. I feel like we have trained our brains out of creativity, out of innovation. And I don't know, I'm not feeling too good about people coming up with these brilliant ideas. So you're saying that our brain is good at this.

Correct. And I think we're both correct, actually. It is absolutely true that if from a young age you're put into the system and you're working, you know, day after day, year after year in a way where your output is expected to be consistent, but the quality of your output is not required to be any good. I mean, you have a very basic standard, you know, as in quality control in assembly lines, right?

you have a very basic standard of output. But really the important thing is how much you're producing. So that's kind of the way we've been trained. And how do we do that? Well, we work in a way where the brain is supposed, the brain naturally has an inherent rhythmicity about it. So it works in pulses, it works in bursts. If you think about it, you know, the last time you were working really well, you had some great ideas, you had great focus,

After a little while, you would have noticed that, hang on, I was focusing so well a moment ago. That's just gone. What happened? I'm not doing anything differently. That is the natural rhythm of your brain. And so as an example, you know, after about 30 minutes, an hour, 90 minutes, depending on how intense your work is, your mind gets tired and naturally wants to draw away. But if you're in an office, if you're in a general knowledge workspace, you're

What we tend to do is we ignore that. We drink a cup of coffee and we carry, we think of our deadline and we push the mind to carry on. But as soon as you do that, the mind does carry on. But normally it has these peaks of brilliance and these lows, these troughs of rest or slower pace. We erase those troughs of rest, those dips of rest. And so we force the mind to carry on.

when it feels a little bit distracted. And when we do, the mind can no longer reach those peaks. So it kind of flattens into this tepid 60% or, you know, 70, sometimes 50% output quality. And it can carry on working like that for hours, days, weeks, years on end. And if you train yourself, if you are used to working in that way, then you don't, you forget that

just what your own mind can achieve. You know, if you go back to pre-industrial times,

The very act of hunting and gathering required so much creativity, creative thinking. It required innovation. Every instance, every day, every moment was a novel setting. You needed to think, problem solve, create, innovate new ways. So it's really in our mental DNA, but we just have squashed it and flattened it. But it's all there. So if you force yourself back,

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Can you give us the nerdy details here? The details that like the average person doesn't know about

How do we know this about the brain? And like, why? Why would it work rhythmically? So if you zoom into your brain with a microscope, powerful enough, while you're working or into a person's brain while they're working, when your mind is working, so first of all, your brain has different departments. The front part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex, which sits just behind your forehead,

That is what makes us human. That part of the brain is responsible for memory, working memory, for doing math problems, for solving murder mysteries, for thinking analytically. You know, the kind of very complex thinking processes that our distant cousins in the animal world are not able to do.

This part of the brain is very, very energy dependent. And what we know, so there are a couple of angles to this. So what we know is that when you're working intensely, so especially doing something that requires sustained attention, intense attention, your little nerve cells are essentially using energy from factories, mitochondria, and they're

Every time nerve cells signal to each other, they use up energy, they use up resources and they leave behind byproducts, which are waste byproducts. Just like, you know, whenever you have, you grab a sandwich, you have the wrapper to deal with. So that's what's happening when your mind is intensely at work, especially in this front part of your brain, which is very energy intensive.

Now, if you're working very, very hard, you have natural housekeeping cells, if you like, or systems that clear away the garbage and that replenish the resources. And by resources, I mean the transmitters, the building blocks for the transmitters, the energy sources, all of these things. So if you're working very, very intensely and you carry on for too long,

we now have a way of looking into the brain that gives us a glance at what seems to be going on. So one thing that seems to be going on is there is either an accumulation of too many of these toxic products or a reduction in the things that the brain needs to break down in order to signal. As soon as this housekeeping becomes damaged,

It appears that your brain changes its information traffic configuration and information crosses your brain using different routes, routes that presumably avoid this imbalance in housekeeping.

And as soon as it does that, you can tell that the connections, you call it functional connectivity. So your brain has got these hardwired highways and it has softwired traffic. So the traffic along the highways really follows the highways that are most efficient at any time. The traffic can change, but the highways stay hardwired. So the traffic crosses around your brain using inefficient routes.

the more tired you become. So if you follow someone doing something that requires intense attention, you look into their brain and there's a process called graph theory through which you can analyze these connections. You find that as they become mentally tired, so within 20 minutes, 30 minutes, depending on how hard they're working, these traffic connections in their brain actually become visibly inefficient. And so as soon as you let them have a rest, take a break,

you actually prevent this decline into inefficiency.

And we can guess because when the inefficiency comes in, people complain that they're mentally tired, that the mental fatigue we feel that we tend to push through is the brain becoming inefficient from these imbalances that are developing by working too hard. So a much better way to work is to work, first of all, if you're working really intensely to limit that,

And second is to work in pulses where you do a bout of intense work, you then slow down and then you rest and then you start that again. So that's one angle to it. A second angle to it is that everything in the brain and body

many people will be familiar with this, some of these cycles have rhythms. So we have a circadian rhythm, hence we're all talking about light exposure, darkness exposure, wearing blue light, blocking glasses, all these trends are coming in. So that cycle exists, the 24-hour rhythm. We also have rhythms within the 24-hour rhythm. So there's a 12-hour rhythm,

And if you actually look at the different cognitive abilities, kind of processes that take place in the brain, attention, for instance, your attention doesn't just stay there.

in a straight line throughout the day or through the morning or afternoon, it waxes and wanes and there's a rhythm to it. And the rhythm is around between 60 and 100 minutes. You can approximate it to 90 minutes, which means that your attention will naturally drift away from

at regular intervals, suggesting that you should work in a rhythmic way so that you're working when your attention peaks and when your attention has come to the end of its cycle, you stop or you pause or you slow down. So this isn't a second angle to it. So all of these things interact and suggest that sitting down, working continuously, pushing through fatigue,

Of course, your brain can produce stuff, but that output is not going to be optimal. That really logically makes sense about both the way the brain works, why it works that way, and why we've screwed it up. Because to your point, machines, they don't operate that way, right? If you give them enough fuel, they can just kind of keep going and going and going. I don't know. I love the way you described that. I love the analogy, and it helps me understand that.

why it's finite, why these ideas are finite from an energy perspective. I think then the next question becomes, how do we break the cycle of our continual 60% work that we've been

convinced and we've been scripted to execute for the past however many years? I would suggest that the first thing to do is to take a fresh look at work and measure it in terms of quality of output, not quantity of output. So in every organization, there is a way of measuring your performance with discretionary targets.

So these are targets that are not real targets, but they are sort of pseudo targets that show you're making some kind of, you know, you're doing work at every point. We also measure work in terms of email traffic. We measure productivity. That's one of the markers of productivity.

We also measure work in terms of how many hours are we working. We're having this debate about four-day work weeks or five-day work weeks, which really come down ultimately to the number of hours you're working.

The problem is, if you keep measuring work in that way, those are all measures that would be excellent on an assembly line, because on an assembly line, as long as you're on the assembly line and working consistently, you are going to produce the goods. If you stop, if you pause, you won't. And if you're creating 10, I don't know, bottles an hour or something, I hope you're producing a bit more, but 10 bottles an hour, then that

that becomes your marker. So these are all things that really we've inherited. When it comes to your brain, you have to remember your brain is a kind of a web of interconnected non-linear processes. So input does not result in an output. You can't push a button and decide on the quality of output.

So the first thing we have to do is we have to look at output in a practical way and say, OK, so we have output.

We have to develop, let's just say you're a company, your strength lies in innovation. You really need to develop a new product. Or the time has come when you need to think about innovating in something new. What do you do? You think, okay, so we're going to have two meetings every day until we come up with something. And in between those meetings, of course, be flexible, be

We'll be doing, you know, other types of research, collaborating, finding new avenues. You'll be doing all of that. So instead of doing that, what you should do is think about, OK, how little time do we need? How can we optimize the time?

How few meetings we need to come up with one really innovative idea. So instead of thinking, OK, well, we're doing eight meetings a week. We've been doing that now for five weeks. We still haven't come up with an idea, but we're really we're working on it. We're doing eight meetings a week. We're doing, you know, five hours of brainstorming a day, if you like. So we're doing everything we can.

What you want to do instead is you want to say, OK, how can we optimize tomorrow's meeting? How can we optimize tomorrow's four hour brainstorming session to be able to come up with one brilliant idea? And the answer is you don't sit in a room. You don't sit at a boardroom with other people brainstorming to come up with an innovative idea. Very few of the really innovative ideas have come up in that way.

People come up with their ideas when they're not working, when they're not looking at a screen, when they're not sitting there with other people staring into each other's eyes under pressure, trying to come up with a new idea. The way people come up with an idea is you know the problem, you then go offline and you let your mind sort of, you know, mull over.

And then you come up with avenues you want to explore. Then you sit down and you explore those avenues. And eventually that leads you to the right idea. So rather than structuring your day as sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen, moving to your meeting room,

Along a table with other people, shifting back to your desk. Why not say, okay, this is our mission. Everyone's going to go, and I'm just giving you an extreme example here. Everyone's going to go for a one-hour walk. We're going to come back and we're going to sit and brainstorm after that one-hour walk. See what everyone's come up with. Maybe there's something good in there. Maybe there isn't.

Let's pursue what is good in there by breaking up the day again, repeating it, or everyone going into their own offices, brainstorming by themselves and coming back. So you're not measuring, okay, we spent eight hours having meetings, three hours doing brainstorming. You're saying, okay, how does everyone get into the right brain state to come up with this? Because the target is not the hours. The target is the idea.

the quality of the idea. I think the biggest impetus to that at the moment is that we're being asked to do both. Like I am consistently being asked to come up with new ideas, present new things, create new strategies, create new, all these types of things. However, then there is a full day job of that hour meeting. Now there's 10 emails. So

I'm basically, I'm hoping you can provide the what's happening neuroscientifically. And then what I do about this is I go into an hour meeting. We brainstorm things or we, maybe it's not a meeting. Maybe it's some creative endeavor, but I'm pretty tired. Like I've always said this to the point of I'm trying to get our company to have nap pods. Like napping for me is fantastic. Great idea. And, and then, okay, everybody back to your desk because you've got 37 minutes before your next meeting. Okay.

I can knock out six emails that have come in in that 37 minutes. It's the do the short and the long term. How do we do both if that is what's required? So the way to go about this is by changing how you structure a day. Normally, we have a mental structure of a day, which slightly varies between organizations, but it's about the same. Where you start work in the morning, you begin with a few meetings,

After the meetings, you go to your desk, you know what you have to do, you have your list and you carry on doing it. Of course, you'll have meetings along the way, whenever they arise, whenever they're scheduled by other people, but you essentially carry on working the same way at the same pace until your day is over. And even after your day is over, when you get home, you might have some stuff that you want to finish before you go to bed. So what we have to do is we have to structure the day differently.

to align with the way the brain naturally likes to work. And through an entire day, you're going to have periods when your brain is at its most creative and when your brain is at its best when it comes to focusing. So if you're doing both, that's perfect because that's how your day is naturally scheduled for you.

But what you have to do is be clever with the timing. So there is data that suggests that your brain is at its most creative at the first part of every day and at the last part of every day. So soon after you wake and just before you fall asleep. These are the two windows of creativity. The second window might be compromised if you're too tired. So it's much better to make use of the first unless you do get your nap pot, which can prolong your second window.

So you have your two creative windows and then the ability to focus or your general alertness naturally rises from the middle of the morning all the way up to lunchtime. Immediately after lunch, whether you have eaten or not, and that's really important, it's not dependent on food. Everyone has a slight dip in their attention.

So if you've saved up all the work you have to do to, you've saved up, let's say two hours, a block after lunch to just sit down and focus, you're actually working against your biology. So that period after lunch should be devoted to things that are not requiring focus, where you kind of, you can be a little bit, you know, in a sort of mind wandering state. Ideally, you can take a nap, but you do kind of light intensity, light cognitive intensity work.

And then from the middle of the afternoon onwards, you have your second peak of focus. And then that dies down into your second creative window in the evening. So that's how you should ideally schedule your work. Now, if your creative work at the moment is more important than your focused work, then any meetings you have first thing in the morning, push them into the afternoon.

If your focused work is most important at this moment, then do not schedule meetings between the middle of the morning to lunchtime. So if you can align this with your own sleep-wake cycle, so if you are tired, things can get pushed in one direction or the other.

But if you can follow this way of working, then you can actually combine both creative work and focused work. So when you're doing creative work, for instance, your attention mustn't be entirely glued. You should be able to control your attention, but it should also be allowed to be slightly loose, so not very sticky, so that it can wander, it can kind of

peruse all the ideas, the fragments of ideas in your head. It can go off on a tangent. You don't want to kind of restrain it and restrict it and tie it to what's in front of you. That's your creative state of mind. And then when you focus, your attention has to be glued down to what you want to focus on too. So different times of the day make each of these things slightly more optimal. You can play with this to shift from one kind of work to another.

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If I'm imagining this correctly, it seems almost like a, what is it, like a wave sign type thing? Does it kind of peak and then dip? So as you're going up, you can be creative. And then as you're going down, do the more basic work. And then when it's at its peak,

lull is when you might want to recover. Is that kind of how it is? So like two, two mountains almost. So there are two ways of looking at it. So, um,

First of all, with creativity, you can have, and I couldn't get into this a bit more detail in my book because I talk about kind of a low energy creative state and a high energy creative state. A low energy creative state is when your mind is sort of drifting gently, when you just need an aha moment, or you just want to withdraw from a problem that you just cannot get around. And you want to kind of let your mind just investigate other avenues without pushing it too much. You want to just let it stray, let it wander. And you want to let it wander.

A high energy creative state is when you're brainstorming, when you are focused on the problem, but you are also pursuing kind of lateral avenues and new avenues with determination, with a lot of mental energy. But in both of these cases, your attention is still quite loose and wandering. So coming back to your point, when you look at an entire day and one way to look at it is if you look at natural light, okay, so

Think of the way your daylight changes as the day moves on. When you first wake up, daylight is shifted to red light intensity. So it's shifted towards red wavelengths. We know that red wavelength light is better for creative thinking processes.

So nature naturally starts you up, wakes you up. If you've ever camped outside or, you know, woken up outside, you'll know that when your eyes are still closed, you get this red hue before you open them. So nature kind of shifts you towards that creative state first thing in the morning. Then as the sun rises higher in the sky,

daylight shifts towards bluer wavelength, peaking around about midday, so just before midday, depending on your geography, of course, where in the world you are. And

That point when you're blue shifted, we also know that blue light increases alertness. So if you're doing night shifts and you're working on the emergency conditions and you don't want to fall asleep, having blue light actually keeps you alert. And so as the sun rises in the sky, blue light increases as well. And so this naturally shifts your mind towards greater alertness, away from that kind of creative, gentle, creative state of mind.

And then you have the reverse happening at the end of the day. So as the sun falls, it shifts again towards red light. And that puts you, that creates the right lighting conditions and that aligns with the tendency of the mind to shift into a more creative state. There is something you mentioned that I imagine most people listening struggle with, which is that second period of time we're all exhausted. So, yeah.

Is that because of the force of, hey, do so much during the day? And how do we reduce that without going completely offline, which is pretty much not an option for most of us? So a couple of ways. The ideal option would indeed be to have a nap. And in Japan, there are some companies that do encourages. I mean, I'm all for it.

Something as short as 20 minutes can actually prolong your ability to stay sharp late into the evening. So what happens is the moment you wake up in the morning, from that moment onwards, you start gathering sleep debt. And that sleep debt increases cumulatively across your whole day. So by the time you come to the evening, the harder you work, the more it increases. By the time you come to the evening, you will want to go to sleep. You will grow very tired.

So one way to minimize that, you can never completely prevent it unless you do take a nap in the post-lunch period, is by working in cycles. And what I mean is as follows. If you imagine each work block as a 90-minute work block, because remember, attention wanes at around 90 minutes. This can be shrunk to 60 minutes if you're sleep-deprived. You can go on to 100 minutes if you are feeling very fresh. So if you imagine a 90-minute block,

Within that 90-minute block, if you're working, if you're doing something really, really difficult, so, you know, making lots of, just say you've opened your email and you have three or four really critical emails where you have to solve issues that affect your entire organization. The decisions are extremely critical. You have to think very carefully, carry out some, you know, more research before you get the answer, make the decision you want to make. That's hard, tough work.

If you have an email inbox full of that, devote only about 20 minutes of your block to doing the really tough work and then shift to doing something easier for the rest of the 90 minute block. In a perfect world, you would do the shift in a sort of inverse power law. So you would do really hard work for 20 minutes, easier work for about 40 to 60 minutes and

and then really easy work for the rest of that session until you go into a 20 minute break. So that's your ideal way of working. And physically, energetically, that actually makes sense. You know, as a comparison, in pre-industrial societies, when people go on their hunting, gathering trips, that's how they tend to move around. That's how our ancestors used to move around. And current hunter-gatherer populations still do,

Because moving in this way, doing physical work in this proportion where you do the toughest work for the shortest period of time, you don't then just sit down and take a nap, but you carry on working, but you slowly ease off the pedal very gradually. That actually preserves energy. It's the most energy efficient way of working.

So if you apply that to mental work and you work in this way in 90 to 100 minute blocks across the day, then what happens is your mind does do the tough work, but it then also is able to get its foot off the pedal. So you can reestablish, remember the housekeeping I mentioned earlier, you can reestablish the right conditions, right?

reestablish some degree of efficiency, reestablish the right conditions in your mind to carry on without getting exhausted. And so you can kind of prolong your effort. So approximately 20 minutes up front on the hardest thing, then call it 40 minutes or so on less hard, and then maybe 15 on even less, and then 15 on very easy. That's a 90-minute block, and then a 20-minute break, and then potentially repeat the cycle. Correct. Great.

Let's talk about this break. What is an optimal way to structure this break? Especially, let me give you even more of a scenario. You're at work. You're surrounded by colleagues. The modern day workspace often is open space, you know, open seating, openness. There's people everywhere. It's hard to get away. You can't nap. We'll just throw that one out the window. What do I do for that 20 minutes? So,

Ideally, you want to get as far away from a colleague as possible simply because you don't want to think about work. So let's take a step back. So remember, the mind is different from muscle in the sense that when your muscle stops lifting weights, it rests. But when your mind, when your body moves away from the chair, your mind doesn't move away from the chair. Your mind is still there. So the first question to ask yourself is, what effect is the work having on you? Are you simply just exhausted?

Are you stressed? Are you somehow emotionally affected by the work in the sense that you're thinking, oh, I have to get back to it or, you know, something terrible happened. I need to solve this problem in the back of my mind. These sort of issues which draw on your emotional reaction. If you have an emotional reaction in this way, then the first thing you have to do during a break is to force your mind off that office chair.

One way to do it is to distract yourself with something that's completely work unrelated. So this can mean something like playing a game on your phone for a bit. Enough, the game should be so absorbing that you forget your work, you forget everything for just a moment. And as soon as you've forgotten everything, you can then take a proper rest. Okay, so the first thing is detaching your mind if you're still, if your mind is still on that office chair.

Then the point of the work is I talk about gears. I use the metaphor of the mind being in different gears in my book. And the idea is slow, medium and fast are the three gears. And when you're working, you want to be in gear two. Every time you take a break, you want to just get your foot off the pedal.

So after you've detached your mind, you want to do something incredibly light where you're not forcing your mind to do any sort of heavy processing. So no intense podcasts, no politics, no people, three Ps to be best avoided.

Now, if your mind is empty and you're constantly wandering back to your work, then it's better to do something slightly distracting, like going for a walk where you're forced to appreciate your surroundings, you're detaching yourself physically from your office. So you can do all of these things. But the bottom line is you want to slow your pace. You want to remove the mental load.

But above all, you want to force your mind off your office chair. Yes. Yes. You're speaking to me. You are. You're speaking to me. You're speaking to the people listening. I can feel that. I was going to say, even when you leave, often you don't leave. That's the thing that I find so difficult. In fact, when I'm in the office...

I feel like I can never disconnect. When I work from home, I can walk into the backyard, much more quickly disconnect. And that's why I am, I believe, more productive at home.

When we are structuring our work this way, often I find when I start a task, it takes me a little bit to like zoom into it. So let's say I have to build a PowerPoint deck, which I find very difficult and I want it to be perfect. And I know it's going to go to something important. That to me is one example of really hard work. It takes me.

five, 10, 15 minutes to like prepare my brain to get ready to dive in. Is that part of my 20 minutes or is that part of my, my break? What's happening there? So that's part of your work session. And if you are doing work of that in that way, then

Then when you're tailoring your breaks, so first of all, if you're working very hard, you can, within each 90-minute block, you can have shorter breaks to break up that 90-minute block itself, especially if your work is really hard. And when you're doing that and you don't want to lose the momentum, then limiting your break to between 3 and 10 minutes can help you keep the momentum of what you're doing just before.

But your question here is that's not part of your break. That is part of your brain reconfiguring itself to fit neatly into its current demands. So that is actually your mind is working in order to be able to do this. One other thing I'd say is that when you're sitting down to work,

You want to be in the right mental state for the kind of work you're doing. And, you know, I described this metaphor of three gears and gear two, which is kind of the middle zone, the Goldilocks zone of mental states is,

is the kind of mental city you want to be in when you're actually sitting down to work. Because if you're in that mental zone, it becomes much easier to actually get into whatever you're doing, whether it's preparing a PowerPoint deck, whether it's preparing a talk or anything else. So you can actually...

Create the right circumstances for you to get into gear two by what you're doing just before you start. So, for instance, if you're starting work in the morning, say you're doing this focused work time slot and you've started work at nine o'clock.

And you really want to be in the right mental state to just get into that PowerPoint deck without kind of struggling and waking yourself up and forcing yourself to pay attention. At that point, chances are you are at a slightly lower gear and you want to shift upwards to this optimal gear two state. And one way in which you can change your mental physiology to adjust better to that work is

is by changing your physical physiology. So for instance, there is data that shows that doing a 30-minute bout of exercise, mild to moderate, so brisk walk, gentle jog, even a moderate run depending on your fitness level, makes it much easier to start or get into any work session where you're having to multitask.

You can also raise your alertness and find it easier to focus on something that's slightly boring by forcing your physiology into a slightly more alert state through your body, through exercise. So you can also kind of hack your mind's state by acting through your body. What I feel like you're doing is providing not just, you know, the truth behind what's happening in the brain and the roadmap, but

You're affirming what we feel, but we don't think is okay to feel. So I just think that a lot of the way you're describing this is helpful so that when we're in these moments, we know this is natural, this is normal and required to do good work. And then you're also providing the scientific backed way of optimizing

optimizing it or being hyper-efficient, which now makes a lot more sense for the title of the book. Correct. I mean, one of the examples I love to give is imagine you're a writer and you have to come up with a really good piece for a magazine, newspaper, something like that. So you sit at your desk, you know, the deadline is five o'clock. You have to come up with something with your first draft by five o'clock today. So you sit at your desk at nine o'clock and

And you sit there staring at your screen and you just see the blank screen. There is nothing coming out. You then know, you know, you have these tricks, these tips that you just write something, anything, and it'll kind of start making sense. So you do that. You come up with 10 lines, 20 lines, 30 lines. Let's say you come up with 100 lines or, you know, even better, 300 words.

And then you look at what you've just written and it's absolutely appalling. You think that cannot go into print. Your reputation will be completely shredded if that comes out in print. So you sit there, you keep typing, you keep typing. And then you look at the clock and your whole morning has gone. And it's now just say three o'clock in the afternoon and your deadline is in two hours. You have produced zero. A much better thing to have done

would be at nine o'clock. You know your mission. You know what you're supposed to do. You know the title. You look at your computer screen. It's blank. You know the title. So what do you do? You just get up. It's nine in the morning. Fine. Everyone is at their desk. Fine. You're in an open plan office. Everyone can see you. Fine. But you get up, you leave the office and you take a walk and you just take a walk. No pressure. Nothing.

Then about 20 to 30 minutes into your walk, say you're walking in a local park or something like that, suddenly you think, ah, you know, I think this would be a really good angle. And that just comes to you from nowhere. You don't have the peace, but you suddenly kind of something just gets struck in your mind. You then come back, let's say half an hour later, you sit down and the whole peace just flows out of you in an hour.

So what have you done there? Instead of working eight hours at your desk, you spent, let's say, 45 minutes taking a walk and an hour writing the piece. While you were walking, your mind was working. So in effect, you've worked for an hour and 45 minutes, but in a heterogeneous way and produced work of infinitely better quality, work that will be sellable, work that is of high quality,

compared to if you're working in a homogenous way for eight hours sitting looking at a screen which we know limits creativity and at the end of it you've produced nothing and you will produce words before five o'clock because your job depends on it but those words will be terrible so this is a this is a sort of a smarter way of working but appreciating that actually leaving your computer and going for a walk will bring you better ideas and

I often share the story of a client I know who is a managing director who has a rule that he created based on this, which is that if he's looking at a problem in his organization that he needs to solve and he spent 10 minutes on it in his office in front of a screen, as soon as he hits the 10 minute mark and he has got nowhere, he just leaves his desk, takes a walk.

And, you know, he's a busy person, so he can't go for hour-long walks. But he goes for a walk. And by the time he's back, he may not have solved the problem, but he will suddenly see new avenues which he could not see when he was sitting at his desk. We're not saying then do it three times that day because then you naturally deplete your brain and fall back into, I'm assuming, what is a... We have this finite resource. Correct. And also, at the end of the day...

The eight hour long grind that you've done to produce your story, which is not the best story you could produce, can be produced in five seconds with a chatbot. So your edge. So why should you be employed for eight hours to do something a machine can do? Now, I think you should be because I'm very much in favor of humans, but...

Ultimately, the world is changing. And so this is something we have to factor in. And you cannot be in that creative frame of mind to produce something a chatbot will not be able to produce if you don't create the right ecosystem for your mind to generate originality, to be innovative, to be different, to think laterally.

So we have two big goals at the moment. One is to not try to outcompete a machine by working along the axis of quality. The machines can act along the axis of quantity. We now need to work along the axis of quality.

And the machines actually are making time for us so that we can do this. And that's how we should be working. Beautiful. I love it. I think this needs to be the poster child discussion and the poster child book for corporate executives going forward to recognize everybody knows something's broken. Everybody knows something's going on. We all feel it. I hear it from people constantly. And we can do this in a way that is...

produces better results is more sustainable. Me too. I really appreciate it. The book, Hyper-Efficient, Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, just came out, goes into much more depth on a number of the things we covered, the gears, the type of work and when to do it, the patterns, the rhythms. So if you're in knowledge work and you feel like it's up to you to continue to create

these innovative outputs, do it in an effective way. You know, I couldn't recommend this topic anymore. Me too. Is there anywhere else that, do you write elsewhere? You know, are you, is there somewhere where we can kind of keep up with this? Do you have a website? So I have a website. It's my name, me to stoney.com. I also am on LinkedIn where I do share studies and the new discoveries about the brain in relation to business and work. And,

And yeah, those are the two best ways to stay in touch. Beautiful. Well, we will link to those again, Me Too. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to this week's guest, Dr. Me Too Stroni. The episode was hosted as always by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas.

Dr. Stoddaroni's book, Hyper-Efficient, Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, is available wherever books are sold. Now for the quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or message us on Twitter at smartpeoplepod.

And of course, if you want to stay up to date with all things Smart People Podcast, head over to the website, smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter. All right, that's it for us this week. Make sure you stay tuned because we've got a lot of great interviews coming up and we'll see you all next episode. Go vote.