How Your State of Mind Affects Productivity
For those of you who are unaware, this is Michael Jordan. MJ is the greatest basketball player to ever play in the rich 71 years of the NBA. He won six NBA titles and every individual accolade the game had to offer. His many sponsorships and Air Jordans have made him into the third-richest African-American in the world behind Robert F. Smith and Oprah.
Going back to the GIF shown above. Immediately after he says these words, Jordan proceeded to make the free throw. This wouldn’t be very significant, except he did it with his eyes closed. He was so confident that the shot was going in, he didn’t even need to look at the basket. In my opinion, his state of mind is the most important reason he is regarded as the greatest of all time. His confidence, drive to win, and his single-mindedness about the game he loved are all a part of his clear state of mind.
Distracting Thoughts
The two basketball players shown above are All-Stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry of the Toronto Raptors. The Raptors had the highest number of wins this year in franchise history, and on paper, seemed to be a Finals Contender. Unfortunately, they needed to beat LeBron James.
He has beaten them 13 out of 15 times in the postseason, and crushed their hopes and dreams three years in a row, and most recently, swept them in four. While LeBron is one of the greatest players of all time, I believe that the reason he is able to win, time and time again, is due to the Raptors state of mind. Being beaten time and time again by the same person/team leaves a mental scar, no matter who you are.
I define the clear state of mind as a mental state where you are completely focused on the task at hand, unhindered by extraneous thoughts. These extraneous thoughts could range from “What am I going to eat tonight?” to “Feeling sad I couldn’t go to Coachella this year.” to “Am I going to lose to him again?”. Thinking about anything other than the task at hand requires attention, and these little interruptions can affect performance because it takes both time and effort to recall the primary task after the interruption. Having just one or two such interruptions will not affect performance to a noticeable degree, but if these interruptions are occurring often, the accumulation of time and effort will definitely affect performance. Going back to the Raptors, their performance against LeBron was probably hindered by thoughts of elimination and “Not again.”
Burnout
Another important factor in keeping a clear state of mind is the concept of burnout. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory defines burnout as the degree of physical and psychological fatigue and exhaustion experienced by a person. A few major contributors to work-related burnout are: work overload, lack of control, insufficient reward, breakdown in community, absence of fairness, and conflicting values in the workplace. People experience burnout differently, but common themes include lack of enthusiasm, frustration, feeling overwhelmed/overloaded/overworked, and feeling trapped.
These negative feelings affect motivation and distract your mind from completing tasks at hand. You spend more time thinking about these negative feelings, when this time could be better spent working, resting, eating, sleeping, etc. Those without these kinds of hinderances spend more time improving themselves and their cognitive workload is significantly less than those with negative thoughts.
Conclusions
Focusing on the task at hand has always been my biggest struggle. Beginning projects, essays, etc. takes me an extremely long time to start. For example, sometimes when I have to write an essay (or blog), I find myself thinking about what I’m going to say in the conclusion before I even write the first word. Not the best practice. Similarly, starting a coding project takes an eternity for me to start. I think about all the amazing features my dope app will have and I haven’t even created a git repository. I should be focusing on the beginning steps of the project, like creating a repository, but my thoughts about how awesome my app will be are negatively impacting my productivity by commanding my attention.
I’m in the middle of a personal burnout. I’m feeling stagnant, unmotivated, and much too easily distracted to be productive in any way. Hopefully, having reminders about why I started coding in the first place will fix my cloudy state of mind. Having a clear state of mind is, in my opinion, the most important factor in being a great developer. In Altmann and Trafton’s paper on goal-directed cognition, they found that receiving interruptions during a hard task increases mental arousal and overloads cognitive workload, which negatively impacts performance of the hard task. Writing code demands your full attention, and if you are interrupted by errant thoughts, you will inevitably make a small mistake that you will very much regret later on.
I’m still in the middle of figuring out how to achieve this clear state of mind every day. Some days are easy, and some days are extremely hard. Hopefully, this blog has opened your eyes to some ideas on how to achieve this state of mind. If so, please share. Please.
Resources
http://home.kooee.com.au/yourvisionyourlife/workplace%20stress.pdf