Optimising Mental Energy; Focused-mode and Diffuse-mode thinking
Switching between the two to do more with less
Introduction
“Are my decisions helping me live the life I want to live?”
That was the question I had in my mind as December rolled in.
By taking the time to look back on the past year, I get to think about how the life I’m living now is building towards my goals. Whether it’s my career, my relationships, or my personal goals, I want to be sure that I’m on the right track and that my daily actions are aligned with my long-term vision.
This is the first part of a series of posts regarding personal lessons and insights from 2022. I will be posting my insights on productivity, creativity, personal relationships, and happiness.
Today’s post is about the most important change I’ve implemented into my working habits to improve my productivity.
Goals
My goal this year was to avoid feeling drained and exhausted after every workday.
I like to do things after work. Whenever I’m too tired after logging off at the office, the experience of post-work activities takes a serious nosedive.
Could I achieve the same amount of value to my employer (or exceed them), without “emptying the tank”? Could I get more done with less effort?
Mapping out energy levels
Early this year I mapped out the tasks I do on the regular at work and rated them with corresponding energy levels: high, medium, or low.
My list after a month or so:
- High: Generating insights from reporting data, justifying new processes to other departments, evaluating different ad creative options or strategies
- Medium: Creating visualisations based off cleaned data, updating payment profiles, ad operations or tag management BAU processes
- Low: Pulling raw reporting data from ad platforms, responding to meeting invites, updating website scripts
With this list, I managed to conclude that decision making activities consume the highest energy for me personally. Brainstorming or evaluating different options come a close second place.
Another trend that I realised during that initial month of gathering data is that the high-energy tasks don’t just limit itself at work- it happens also as I’m not at work.
Inability to log-off
I remember listening to a podcast a few years back that a major cause for work-related burnout was the tendency to ruminate about work, even when not at work.
Off-work hours are the time for us to recuperate, do activities that fill us up and reinvigorate our personal selves. If work is a primary factor of stress for a person, ruminating about work incessantly has the same effect as working constantly.
My work is similar to what most knowledge workers face; we are paid to solve problems by making decisions on things we have expertise about.
There is a time and place for thinking deeply about problems with the intention of solving them. I myself enjoy such work, and fulfils the part of me that loves chasing after solutions. But my Always-On thinking mode, even during my downtime, resulted in a semi-permanent feeling of mental exhaustion.
This problem further compounds when there are a half dozen problems to think about concurrently, as most people usually have.
Shifting from Always-On Thinking to Focused- and Diffuse-Mode thinking
Barbara Oakley, author of “A Mind for Numbers”, writes in her book about the concept of focused-mode and diffuse-mode thinking.
Focused mode thinking is when you are concentrating on something. This takes energy and consumes active working memory. This mode of thinking is great for processing things in great detail.
Was I unintentionally depleting my mental energy by being in Focused-mode thinking all the time?
Focused-Mode Thinking
Focused-mode thinking, as Oakley describes in her book, is a state of thinking that most people come to when they are “focusing” on something. This mode of thinking is useful as it allows us to process things in great detail.
Unfortunately, it consumes a lot of mental energy. According to Oakley, we have two types of memory; active working memory, and long-term memory. Experts generally believe that the average human brain can only hold up to four concepts in our working memory.
Think of it as our brain’s RAM. Its very limited in space, but it’s lightning-fast. It’s also volatile, meaning that it constantly needs power to store data.
Diffuse-Mode Thinking
A key theme in “A Mind for Numbers” was that alternating between modes of thinking was crucial to learn new things and problem-solve effectively.
The other type of thinking mentioned by Oakley was Diffuse-mode thinking. Diffuse mode thinking is “passive” thinking. This kind of thinking is likely to be done by your subconscious, when the problem at hand is not present in our active working memory. It allows us to wander, to play, to explore different avenues.
To enter this mode of thinking, you have to let down your focus, and your mind to relax. It’s important to push the problem or task at hand away from working memory. It is mentioned in the book that doing repetitive, simple physical tasks like walking or doing chores helps to stimulate the parts of the brain that enable this mode of thinking.
The main advantage of Diffuse-mode thinking to me is that it just… “happens”. It doesn’t consume active working memory, hence it sidesteps the extra power consumption demanded by the brain when processing the problem.
It’s secondary advantage, which some might consider Diffuse-mode thinking’s true purpose, is that it circumvents the “Einstellung Effect.”
The Einstellung Effect
In short, that feeling of reaching a mental dead end when trying to solve a problem is called the Einstellung Effect.
The Einstellung Effect is a common by-product of Focused-Mode thinking. It happens when you are unable to find the solution to your problem because the solution does not lie within the scope you are searching in. Focused-mode is very good for thinking about concepts deeply, but not very good for linking two diverging concepts together.
Diffuse-mode thinking allows you to circumvent this by getting you to mentally step away from the problem at hand, allowing your brain to generate fresh new insights by piecing together diverging concepts related to it.
Managing Mental Energy by Switching Between Focused- and Diffuse-mode
I theorized that my tiredness from work was a result of wanting to think in Focused-Mode all the time. This even happens outside work hours. Could I trick my brain into “getting out” of such thinking mode, and back into it when it was time to work?
How to get out of Focused-mode and engage in Diffuse-mode
To get out of Focused-mode, the problem that you are focusing at hand must leave your mind. When you are no longer consciously thinking about it, then you have succeeded.
Oakley mentions in her book that light, repetitive physical activity provides benefits to Diffuse-mode thinking. It “activates” it, or enhances it. Activities like chores are great for this because you get stuff done while stimulating your brain to solve your current problems.
Walking is another such activity. There are countless stories of great thinkers and writers doing their best thinking while on regular walks. Friedrich Nietzsche was one such man; he would walk the same route daily, and write his thoughts down at the end of his walk.
Incorporating Thinking Mode Switching in Daily Workflow
In her book, Oakley suggests that for “a problem you are looking to solve”, you should focus intently on it at least once a day, and then let it leave your mind entirely.
For me, what I did was to set aside time to intensely focus on the problems I was tasked to work on. I don’t pre-schedule blocks of time, but I just write in my task manager “make progress on project A” or “think about Project B.” I’d spend about 20 minutes on it, then let it leave my brain by doing other work.
I don’t smoke, so I take walking breaks. I’d walk outside the office compound for a good 10–15 minutes. I do this to increase the chances of Diffuse-mode thinking.
The effects are very immediate. Since I write down in my task manager what I have to think about, I can be sure that I will come back to think about the problems. It’s freed my brain from ruminating too much, because it knows that whenever it ruminates on a work problem, it realizes “oh, now’s not the time to worry about that.”
The walks are very effective too. Not only is it good for health, most of my good ideas come about during my walks.
Productivity Journey in 2023
I feel that I have just scratched the surface when it comes to mental energy management in the workplace. In recent years my productivity goals have shifted from “getting more stuff done in shorter time” to “identifying what are the right things to get done, so we only do things once”.
It’s gone from focusing on workflows and tools, to mental clarity, decision making and framework thinking. In short, I wanted to set myself up to deliver high value as a knowledge worker, that would translate into better career opportunities in the future.
What began as a simple question of wanted to know how to feel less tired at work became a year-long experiment surrounding different thinking modes. Recently I’ve read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is a about the value of snap decisions; how are we, as humans, able to make accurate decisions based on the tiniest of “gut-feel” data? Sometimes even more accurate than with a long study?
I’ll be exploring what stood out for me as I read the book in a future post.
