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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
All right, so using your mind, yes, perhaps to play some games on folks, which is not always so nice. Are using it to be the best you get the most about of what you do. Not always easy and a highly distracting and increasingly short attention span world, which is why we are super eager to hear from our next guest with us as neuroscientists and physician and author of a new book that came out just this week
with us is doctor Methu Sterni. Her new book hyper Efficient Optimize your Brain to transform the way you work. She joins us from London. Doctor Sterni, it's great to have you here with Matt and myself. Tell us a little bit about the work that you do, because sometimes I feel like when it comes to the brain, I often hear like we've only just scratched the surface and understanding how it works and what it can do for us. But kind of set the record straight here or what you have been aware of?
Well, I've been very interested in how we have been really ignoring the brain's dynamics when it comes to looking at mental performance and working in general. We know quite a little bit about the brain now, but we've ignored much of that in the way we impose and we impose work routines on ourselves and we just follow the structure of work as it is. So the biggest, my biggest learning curve has been figuring out the disparity between the way we work and the way the brain actually works.
So when I look at your book hyper Efficient, optimize your brain to transform the way you work? First of all, I google this kind of thing like all the time. How can I stop procrastinating? You know? How can I become more efficient? How can I get more organized? Because I am such a disorganized add procrastinator. Is it about changing my habits? Do I need to develop new habits? Or is it actually about changing my brain chemistry? Or like,
what is wrong with me? And where do I start to try and fix it?
It's about changing the way you look at work. So we have been working and expecting our own brains to work really like a machine on an assembly line, because we started adopting the pattern of assembly line work back actually during forty en times and when knowledge work came into the territory, we didn't really change the way we worked,
although we changed what we worked on. And we continue to impose this pattern of assembly line efficiency on the brain, which was all fine while the brain did a lot
of simple level cognitive work. But now that AI and automation has come onto this scene, we need to think about working in a way that really takes the brain to its peaks of qualitative output so that it really works well, creates those ideas, makes those excellent decisions, comes up with innovative ideas, original ideas, and for that to happen. You know, the brain doesn't put pieces together on an assembly line. The brain has its own rhythm of working.
So instead of just following the nine to five, continuous, monotonous and constant paced work that we usually do, it's time to reframe work and work according to the brain's rhythms.
Well, help me understand that, like I understand. I remember being out a Pixar and doing a deep dive into the company and they basically were like, we don't care when you work, as long as you get it done. We know, creative types might wake up in the middle of the morning or middle of the night, and so people were some high out during the you know, at lunchtime, playing volleyball or having a barbecue. This was years ago, and then you know, they just didn't care as long
as the work got done. So I am curious how to apply what you are saying. And first of all, I want to understand what do you really mean by an assembly line kind of way of using our brain? What does that mean?
So what I mean by that is, normally we have this structure of work where we go to work at a fixed time in the morning, we leave work, whether at home or officially in the office, at a sort of fixed time in the evening, and we expect our brains, we expect ourselves to work continuously during that entire time at a constant pace. But if you actually look at how the brain works, you will know intuitively that you cannot churn out really good ideas continuously assemble them at
the same pace throughout the day. You will have peaks of moments where you are really good at coming up with ideas, and there'll be other times in the day when you just feel this slump, and that's your brain naturally slumping. So, for instance, we know that after lunch,
everyone has something known as a post lunch dip. We also know that creativity seems to peak first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and so really kind of harnessing these peaks and these natural peaks and troughs in the brain's natural rhythmic performance actually allows your output to be much better. So you know, you can write lots of emails, you can make you know, do reports without really working at your peak. And that's what
most people, most of us do. Now that machines have come into the landscape, they will do that kind of work for you, for us better and at larger volumes and faster. So we are now left with these incredible array of tools, and it's up to us to actually now use the brain for what it's for. How it's different from machines. So in terms of working with equality of output in mind rather than focusing on quantity.
Have there I mean, obviously you're talking to two people who cover finance in New York. So the idea here is you pay someone to work as hard as that person can all day and all night and expect everything. Are there societies or cultures that have adapted work to the way the brain functions. Do you see like anthropological cases of you know, a good use of the brain or a good work schedule.
So anthropologically, historically hunt to gather communities in the past and present hand together communities. For instance, if you look at the way they work. If you look at the way we used to work before the pre industrial era, we never really worked continuously as in an assembly line. We used to work in sort of bursts, almost in kind of power law patterns, worked really intensely for short periods of time and less intensely for longer. And I think really the thing we need to do is we
need an attitude. We need a kind of an attitude and emphasis change, because eventually each organization, each individual will have their edge based on the quality of mental output. Given machines, automation AI, they'll be doing quantity of output
better than we are. So we need to start looking at work and looking at productivity in terms of how many meetings did it get to come up with a really good quality, sellable, unique idea, how many hours did it take to come up with this quality of output. So if we start visualizing and looking at measuring output in that way, that can lead to a step change.
Doctor Stornie. One thing I want to ask you is my parents were this way. My dad was, you know, an early bird, early riser and just cracking jokes and wide awake. My mom was a night owl kind of same for my husband night owl. And I'm like, really prime in the morning.
So is it?
You know, you kind of gave us some general trends, and your book says the state of mind is most suited to creative thinking and happens from waking until around nine to ten am, from around eight to ten pm until bedtime. But I'm assuming there are variations. I mean, Matt, you and I both have done early morning schedules. I came in at three thirty in the morning for the morning. For a long time, I did too. I was like
on fire. But I do wonder, like, what do you think of those people like us in the media business who come in at kind of odd hours, or people who you know, I don't know, are opening up stores in the morning or like different things where they're on kind of crazy clocks. Are we not at our prime or optimum?
So there are two ways of looking at this. So first of all, we all have a slightly different rhythm and shift towards the morning or the evening. This is known as being a night owl or a lark. And whatever your tendency, your whole this whole cycle is shifted that way. So if you are naturally happier waking up early in the morning, you perform better in the morning, then your likely your whole kind of cycle is likely
to start sooner. So your creative window will be sooner during the day and slightly slightly earlier in the evening. And if you're a night out, it happens the other way around. Yes, of course we have this problem with globalization and shift work and working at different times, and yes they will be affecting how optimally productive you are. I mean, our ancestors did not go for a hunt at three in the morning usually, and so we are
not mentally geared to do that. But if that is your if that is what you have to do, then there are ways still of manipulating your creative time windows, the way the period within which you can focus.
How do you.
How do you help somebody who is locked into a shift? I mean, Carol and I were assigned shows at certain times that they can't be changed. I can't call my boss and say, listen, I'm more of an evening person, so I'm going to have to skip this morning show. What kind of tricks can we use?
So the one way to think about it is if you imagine your brain as a sort of engine that works on different gears. And this is a metaphorical way of looking at it, and you can imagine that when your brain is in gear two, it's performing really well. So you want to get into gear too. Now, if you wake up very early in the morning, your brain is naturally still sort of in a sleepy state until you train it to be able to do that on a regular basis. And really they're the hacks that we
all know about, things like coffee, things like exercise. Your mission there is to kind of get your brain into gear sooner in the day artificially, so using I'm sure you drink I'm not going to say I'm sure, but I would. I would guess you probably do drink caffeine, things like lots of bright light, things like ways, which as these are, these are ways of kind of gearing
up earlier in the day. So you're trying to just push your cycle forward and then towards the end of the day I would assume that you go to sleep quite soon. I would hope you do in terms of, you know, at the end of the day. And if that's the case, then you would wind down sooner using all the hacks that I've described using.
You use a lot of hacks to wind down, hacks with quotation marks, Doctor STRONI, we're gonna come back with you in just a moment. We're gonna continue with doctor methu Uh Steroni her book hyper Efficient, Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. This is Bloomberg Business Week. I want to get back to our guests. We're talking with neuroscientists and physician doctor Mithu Staroni on her new book just out this week, hyper Efficient, Optimize your Brain
to Transform the Way You Work. I have to say thank you because you call out seasoned live TV anchors, although I don't. Yeah, we're seasoned.
We're pretty darn Carol.
But you note that they are especially adapt at processing
too synchronous streams of information. At the same time, it happens when they listen to their producer or we don't as our producer Paul Brandon sometimes knows, but this happens when they do listen to their producer through an ear piece when speaking to the camera, they you know, and if we all have them in right now, they don't attend to one stream first and then the other, but somehow seem to fuse both streams into one source of reality. But then you go on to say that.
Finally we get the props that we deserve.
You know, we are very grateful because it is a skill. It's I kind of love having I like having your voice in my head. But having said that, the thing I wanted to get to is multitasking. And Matt, I like, we think about it all the time when we're doing something. We're working on a show, people come over to us, we're working on other stuff. We're getting emails, we're getting phone calls. Everybody deals with multitasking. I'm not as good as I used to be a multitasking.
Multitasking does it? What's your thoughts on that and how we deal with it? And how do we I don't know, how do we.
Deal so the multitasking in terms of what you as anchors do or what normal mortals do.
We're pretty normal, okay.
So when we're talking about getting simultaneous pieces of information, that is really a special skill, and for that you have to think about it as an information bandwidth issue. So you're getting a huge, wide variety of bandwidth and
you're somehow fusing that together. Another way in which we actually refer to the words multitasking is when we are attending to different tasks at fast in quick succession, and they're all very different, so answering an email, then switching to a phone call, then switching to something else, and all of these are usually urgent, they're usually high in
terms of information content. And again for all of that, you need your brain really needs to sort of log on clock in attached to that information source, process that information source, detach again, reattach and detach, and that really results or it really requires the brain to be quite agile, but also it requires your brain to have quite a large,
quite a wide information bandwidth. And again, if you imagine your brain as an engine that's constantly processing information and it works at these different speeds, different powers, you're having to really step again metaphorically, you're having to step on that pedal to really process that information as fast as possible, and that results in your brain working at pretty high power, which really leaves you prone to exhaustion, prone to developing
mental fatigue, And if you push on through mental fatigue, then the information you're processing and the higher cognitive function that you're carrying out is no longer optimal. So multitasking when you are quick switching from one thing to another in rapid succession, does not leave your brain to produce its best kind of work?
Does it get more difficult as we get older? Carol and I were wondering what happens, what happens when you.
Get old for those other people who are getting old or the old people out there.
I mean, age is just a number, right, so we know that there's lots of plasticity as you grow older, So there are lots of Every individual is going to be different. But really the bottom line is being able to control your attention and being able to make sure you are not doing it to the intensity that you're getting mental fatigue. So having lots of breaks, making sure you detach from something before you reattach your attention on something,
all of these things can help. What does that make fatigue?
Like?
What does that actually to detach from something be?
Why you? Yeah, go ahead, So if you imagine when you are doing any kind of work. You are really and you're really zoned in. It's a little bit like diving deep into that work. Okay, So diving deep into an ocean, and then if you suddenly have to climb jump out of that ocean and jump into another ocean, you'll get the bends, okay, because you're going to have to. It's difficult. It's difficult for your mind, so you have to kind of come out slowly and then go in again.
So one way of doing that, one way of making that process easier is every time you are switching from one task to another, you have a little bit of time in between tasks, so you actually stop focusing on that, rid your mind of that content by taking a short break, by emptying your mind, clearing your mind, doing something else for a very short space of time that doesn't completely occupy you. So you've kind of let go of that glue with which that mental glue with which you're sticking
to what you're doing. Because the tougher than the more you know, the deeper you were into that that, the more difficult it is for your brain to kind of reconfigure and fit the new task.
I have a curveball, what's that I'm gonna go off script here. Okay, it's dangerous because I don't know how it's gonna work out. Did you watch the Donald Trump Joe Biden presidential debate? Did you happen to see any of that?
I'm so sorry I didn't.
No, okay, just because what are you thinking? I'm just thinking. Biden said that he had a bad night and it was it was really uh, it kind of disturbing. But there are times when he's on point, you know, there are times when he can listen and react, when he can fact check in real time, but he couldn't do any of that on this evening. And he blamed it on a lengthy travel schedule and not getting enough sleep
and you know, overworked. And I just wonder how much that really does affect could affect your performance, all of us.
And just got about a minute left here.
Well, in general, the sharper you are, the fresher you are, the more capacity you have, and the more capacity you have, the better you can delegate your resources and use them. So if your resources are really struggling, then your mind is having to put in more effort to get what it would normally be able to do done and so yes. So if you are struggling with resources, then of course things will feel more difficult for you and your output won't be great. So part of the idea of hyper efficient.
Being hyper efficient is to really create optimal circumstances for your mind to always be able to have the best resources at all times.
Nothing like a good night's sleep for me, I don't know about you, Matt, yeah, or a few weeks of a good night's sleep our vacation, Doctor Sterni, thank you so much, Mithu Sterni neuroscientists physician. Her new book hyper Efficient, optimize your brain to transform the way you work