← This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil
This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil
How To Become Hyperefficient with Mithu Storoni | 268
00:32:01
Discover how to work smarter, not harder, with Dr. Mithu Storoni, physician, neuroscience researcher, and author of Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work. In this episode, we explore actionable tools to boost mental performance, avoid burnout, and rethink productivity through the lens of efficiency.
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- [00:00]
A
This is a psa, or public sock announcement. Experts have declared Bombas socks as the best way to warm up chilly feet. These pairs are super cushy, soft and designed for maximum coziness. Plus, for every pair purchased, another pair will be donated so someone in need of essential clothing can stay warm this winter. Go to bombas.com listen and use code listen for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M b-s.com listen and use code Listen at checkout. I am Nicole Khalil, and I often share pet peeves and the occasional rants on the this Is Woman's Work podcast. But I also have things that I love, obsessions I could gush about all day and a laundry list of favorite things, from gorgeous hotels to products I wouldn't want to live without. Great books I can't put down to a stalker like obsession with all things confidence, an unparalleled enthusiasm for cheese, and buzzwords that speak to my soul. And on today's show, we're going to dive into one of those buzzwords, and that is efficiency. Did it do for you what it did for me? It's basically like time management porn, right? I mean, you can talk all day long about morning routines and ideal schedules, work ethic, time blocking and hustle culture until you're blue in the face. But if you want to get me interested, talk dirty to me about efficiency. Because here's the thing. My obsession with efficiency might be a little weird, but I think it's rooted in the coaching that I do. Because over the years, I've discovered that results and success always come from what I call the three F words, not because they start with an F. I only have one favorite word that starts with that letter. These three F words all start with eff, and they're effort, effectiveness, and this word that I love so much, efficiency. When it comes to effort, I'd say that people pretty much have that down. You can't swing a crossbody bag without hitting a podcast, business book or motivational guru shouting about hustle, grind, and working harder. So my secret is that I focus on the other two. I help women be and become more effective at the things that they're doing. And we're constantly searching for ways to make those things more efficient. And guess what? It works. So why don't more companies, leaders, coaches, and cultures get on board? I honestly don't know. But I've heard from more women than I can possibly count that they're tired of working in environments and with people where the answer to every problem is always do more or work harder. I'll go a step further and say that if you hire a woman who is also a mom and you're not supporting or prioritizing efficiency, you're probably going to end up losing her to a place that does. Which brings me to our topic and guest today. Someone who may have doubled down on my obsession as she's here today to talk about being not just efficient, but hyper efficient. And if that just made your heart skip a beat like it did for me, then you're going to love this conversation. I'll also note that her team sent me the most efficient bio, so she practices what she preaches. Dr. Mitu Staroni is a University of Cambridge trained physician, neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon. Did I even say that right? I'm not sure. She advises multinational corporations on mental performance and stress management and is the author of the forthcoming book Hyper Efficient Optimize youe Brain to to transform the way you work. Mitu, as you can tell, I'm more than a little excited about our conversation, so I'm gonna rapid fire questions at you. So thank you for being here. And my first question is what does it mean? What does it look like? What does it feel like to be hyper efficient?
- [04:01]
B
So when you think of hyper efficient, I want you to step back from the image that we just talked about of doing more with working harder and just expecting more. Now, the brain is not like muscle. It doesn't work when you tell it to. It often needs to rest in order to work and it often needs to work in order to rest. So you can't tell the brain or the mind to simply work harder for you to produce better quality work. Hyper efficient is a play on the word efficiency. Now we are moving into a stage, into a workplace world landscape where a lot of the stuff we're needing to do actually involves the quality of what we're doing. We have, you know, ChatGPT, we have lots of AI and automation increasingly doing a lot of the easier stuff or the sort of the more monotonous, the lower level mental stuff for us. And we're moving into a world where we need to produce better quality ideas, solutions, plans, restructuring problems, all of that. So when we're talking about the quality of our mental output, we want to talk about being hyper efficient, where we want to create an ecosystem in them for the mind, where what the mind does isn't just more or quantitatively lots, but everything it thinks, every idea it produces is incredibly good, high in quality. So when you're talking about producing better quality mental output, that's when you talk about being hyper efficient, that's the difference.
- [05:50]
A
Okay, so I'm trying to wrap my brain around this because I think we've all been somewhat taught that the purpose of being efficient is so that we could do more. Right? And what I'm hearing you, you say is the value or the purpose of being efficient is to do what matters better.
- [06:12]
B
That's exactly right. So simply doing more is no longer going to be enough to get ahead in, at work, even at home, even outside the workplace in this era. You know, a hundred years ago, when we had the industrial revolution, we had assembly lines, we were producing products. The majority of the industrial landscape involved things you could touch. Refrigerators, cars, hair dryers, toasters, all those stuff. And when we were living in that sort of environment, working faster, working for longer, taking fewer breaks, putting in more hours, always led to bigger quantity of output. And that output was significant because it increased financial gain. It was profitable. But when you're working with the mind, especially in this era, just producing more does not equal producing better. In fact, it's the opposite. If you're making the mind work in a way where you simply produce more of something, you're forced to work at a lower cognitive level. So you might be brainstorming a hundred ideas, but none of them will be any good. We need to think about the brain in a completely different way to the way we've been structuring the workplace and the way we work for the last hundred years. Because now, since what we are doing, the quality of that matters so much more. We need to think about what we can do to not produce a hundred bad ideas or brainstorm 100 bad ideas. But how do we brainstorm one absolutely life changing or company changing or business changing idea. And in order to do that, we have to look at efficiency in a different way. We have to look at how few meetings do we need to brainstorm that one impactful solution? Or how few hours can I really squeeze or can I kind of shrink my workday into. That produces an equally, you know, that produces an abundant amount of work. So for instance, just to explain myself, imagine you're sitting at a desk and you have to come out, you have to write a report for, you know, your company and you are sitting there looking at the screen and you have until 5:00 to compose it. It's 3:00 and you've written, let's say, a thousand words, actually probably a few more. 5,000 words, but then when you read it, none of them are any good, and you just cannot make any progress. So you've wasted eight hours looking at a screen. You've produced lots of words. But ultimately, what your report will look like is not something you're proud of, and it will not bring any change. If you want to work hyper efficiently, it's about what can you do so that you can sit at your computer for as little as an hour or even two hours and produce an every line that you type out is impactful and is just really, really good. So instead of wasting spending eight hours doing 10,000 words, you can write 10,000 really good words in just two hours. So that's what being hyper efficient is all about.
- [09:35]
A
Okay. And I clued in from the title of your book that our brain is a big part of being hyper efficient and making sure that the quality of our work or what matters is high. And you said this earlier about resting our brain. I think all of us, regardless of gender. But, you know, I talk to a lot of women and we talk about brain fog or being tired and exhausted or overstimulated. There's so much going on. How important is acknowledging when our brains are tired? And what does it look like to rest in this space of being hyper efficient?
- [10:15]
B
So it's incredibly important to acknowledge when the brain is tired. And one of the problems with work in general, with workplaces in general, is that we have no setup. We have no recognition that that is the case. We know that the brain grows tired if it works continuously beyond around 90 minutes. And often it starts growing tired in a much shorter period of time. Depending on what you do, it can grow tired in as little as five minutes even. And often it grows very tired after 20 minutes. Now, when your mind is growing tired, two things happen. The first is your brain very subtly sends you a couple of nudges, which we've learned to ignore. The first nudge is your mind starts drifting away from what you're doing. So you are paying attention really well, and you don't know what you did differently, but all of a sudden, your attention just cannot stay on the screen. That's the first thing. The second thing is that which goes hand in hand with the first thing is that you suddenly lose the motivation to keep doing what you're doing. So what you're doing felt really good and really engaging. And suddenly, not only does your attention drift, but you kind of start feeling a little more bored. It feels more difficult. So these are the subtle ways in which your brain is Signaling to you that stop what you're doing, take a break. Now if you look inside the brain and we now have really sophisticated scanning technology to be able to do this, we actually find that within the brain, the sort of the pathways that information flows across starts becoming more inefficient as the brain grows tired. So if at this point you do what we've been doing for at least 100 years, which is a reach for a coffee because you really need to finish this report, what happens is your brain isn't any less tired. It's still tired, it's still inefficient, but, but your brain simply presses down on the pedal and almost shifts you up by a gear of the power of processing. So you just use more horsepower to keep going despite the fatigue. And that's the way we've always managed it. The problem is if you do that all throughout the day, so you do that a few times in the morning, you do that after lunch, and in the afternoon, then this paralyzes your brain's ability to do a lot of the things that the workplace now requires, like creative thinking, like thinking outside the box, like, you know, having a kind of a very light, mind wandering, floaty state, which lets you appreciate problems and have aha moments. So it's paralyzing your ability to do what the human brain does, will now increasingly need to do. In this AI dominated world 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, this was fine. Because what the brain was mostly doing, what most knowledge work involved was, you know, typing reports, writing, delivering sort of information, collecting data for that level of cognitive, lower cognitive work. It was okay to continue working, you know, pushing yourself on beyond your tiredness. But if you do that now, your brain, you're not giving your brain the chance to perform as well as it could do.
- [13:49]
A
So what I'm hearing is we're sacrificing quality and productivity, whether that's on an individual or corporate or global level. And the point that you're making is well taken. The work we do today is wildly different than what we did even 20 or 50 years ago. And the skills and knowledge and curiosity and all the things that are really important in today's world require our brains to be functioning at a much higher level. And we're still applying old principles that are basically making our brains function at lower levels. Am I hearing you right?
- [14:31]
B
Yes, yes, correct. So, you know, if you are working in this traditional setup where you're working continuously throughout the day, your workplace measures your output in terms of email traffic, the hours you're putting in over time, then you are working in the same framework as an assembly line template, which is what we inherited our work patterns from. So before the industrial era, no one worked like this. During the Industrial revolution, we found that working like this massively increased productivity and profit. When we shifted to working in shiny offices, we changed what we did, but we didn't change how we did it. For a while that sort of worked because the level of work we were doing, a lot of it involved kind of mental, manual labor, if you like, sort of very low level mental labor. But now, as the landscape is changing so drastically, if you carry on making your brain work as if it's on an assembly line, it's going to keep producing the same level of quality for long periods of time. But you're paralyzing, just as you say, the ability for the brain to really have those highs, to really kind of go out of the box and produce its best, kind of have an undulated way of working. So that's, you know, we've inherited it, but in this era, we now have to change it. I mean, as an example, I know so many people now, lots of workplaces, who are now embracing co pilot and various other AI mechanisms where they no longer need to send out or read lines and lines of hundreds of emails anymore, especially emails that involved very low level mental processing. So that's now all being delegated, which means you have all this mental capacity to do other things that these AI generators or AI machines cannot do. But all of this work really requires more mental processing power. And if you want to utilize, if you want your brain to be in the best sort of state to be able to do that kind of work, you have to give it elements of rest. You have to work in a rhythmic way. You have to completely throw away the notion that taking a break is bad. You have to embrace the notion that you have to change your pace while you work. Because if you carry on working at a very high pace and take coffee or other forms of caffeine to carry on, you are no longer putting your brain in the best possible state for it to do this kind of work.
- [17:14]
A
Okay, all of that is fascinating and I think so counter to, as you said, what we've inherited in the environments that we're working in. We've talked quite a bit about work, but I know for many of us our brains are firing before we even walk into the office doors. I think for so many women we have decision fatigue first thing in the morning. Any thoughts about ways that we can Reduce some of the demands on our time and some of this decision fatigue that I think plagues a lot of us.
- [17:52]
B
Yes. So decision fatigue is now an even bigger problem than it used to be because simply because there's so much more information being exchanged that we're having to make more decisions. A few things have been found to be useful for decision fatigue. So when you're taking a decision, or rather making a decision, it's a little bit like a court of law. So you gather the evidence, you sit like a judge, you go through the evidence, and then you deliver your verdict. So the gathering the evidence part, it's quite laborious, but actually making the decision is also really, really exhausting. So one thing that's been shown to help is if you try to split the two. So it's a bit like going window shopping without actually buying anything. So the first day you go and see what there is, but you don't really make the ultimate decision. You do that at a later time. So if you break up your decisions into gathering the data, sitting on it, and making the decision later, that's one way of making it lighter another way. And this applies to everything really, you know, which we all tend to do at home and at work, which is always, always cut your options. You know, it's an. It's. It's something we all experience. When I was, you know, many, many years ago, when I went for a. When I used to go for a coffee, I used to have two options. You know, a coffee, a normal coffee, or a cappuccino. And then came all the others. Now you go there. There are 16 options of coffee. So actually, while that's great in one way, it's really, really fatiguing in another. So if you. If you really narrow your options down, and you can do that in many ways, if you have 10 options and, you know, maybe you can get those 10 into two categories, you know, with milk, without milk, if you're thinking about coffee, for instance. So narrow your options down. Because if you're making a decision between two things, it's much, much easier for your brain than if you're having to decide between 10 options. And of course, the third thing is take lots of breaks. The more breaks you take every time you detach your attention from the work you're doing, you're giving your brain a chance to rejuvenate its resources. And it really needs to rejuvenate its resources every time your mind grows tired. That's what your brain is calling for you to do. It wants to rejuvenate its resources. Because every decision, every thought, every problem solving period involves your brain using up energy, producing waste, byproducts. And all of this has to be cleared up and rejuvenated. And that's really important to remember.
- [20:35]
A
So I love all three of those. They make logical sense. I'm excited to test them out in my life. I'm curious your thoughts about earlier when you were talking about work. We were saying like how AI has created a situation where some of those lower level tasks have been delegated. Could the same principle be applied to some of our decisions? For example, if these are low level decisions that don't really matter much in the grand scheme of things, or is it something that can be delegated or let go of? I sometimes think we hold on to far too many decisions as if they all matter where. Like the example of what are we going to have for dinner tonight? Why waste so much time and energy worrying about that? You could narrow it down to two, as you said. But even delegating or letting go of a decision, Any thought reactions or thoughts about that?
- [21:26]
B
Yes, I think, you know, you've really hit the nail on the head here because we're in a, we're in a world now where everything we are doing, or, you know, more and more of what we're doing is involving huge amounts of choice because of all the information, the cheap communication of information, and because a lot of the stuff we're doing is becoming so complex and sophisticated and we're having to do it with our minds. So actually a great principle is why even stop with decisions? Narrow down your decisions not just in terms of the options you have, but as you say, try to figure out where do you need to make a decision and where can you just delegate or even let it go? Because the less pressure you put on your mind to make decisions or to, you know, make plans even, or to solve problems, the more capacity you're freeing up in your mind. You know, our brains are really small, they're, they're finite that, you know, there are finite capacity in these little cranial skulls that we all have, which are actually quite small compared to what we actually need to do. And now that we have this explosion of information, salient information around us, we, we are already carrying a very heavy mental burden. So actually lightening the load as much as you can. And, and this actually brings another really important point, which is a lot of us fear AI and automation because of course they will be challenging jobs, they will be doing a lot of these things but if you can look at the other side of the coin, I think they're a great way of really lightening the load on the mind. Because we are currently having to make decisions and to solve problems at the most alarming pace. You know, in terms of the information we're having to learn. If you look at the number of stories and the equivalent, you know, the number of words, the number of news reports we're having to take in every day and compare that to what we had to do 300 years ago, it's absolutely astonishing the way, you know, our mental processing power is creaking under the strain. So, as you say, keep it light. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Use the AI revolution to your advantage. Even if there is no AI, delegate your decisions to someone else in the home and really keep your mental load light. Always remember, your mind is a finite organ. Keep its load as light as possible whenever possible.
- [24:13]
A
So this sounds like exceptionally good advice. And yet I know there's someone listening in that's like, okay, me too. Okay, Nicole. But I have deadlines, I have goals, I have pressure, I have people counting on me, and responsibility. Like, how do we take this very important concept and deal with it in the face of urgency and deadlines and responsibilities that we are all feeling right?
- [24:46]
B
So one way to. There's a short and longer answer. I'll try the shorter first, and I'll expand as long as you have time. So ultimately, it really helps to see your brain and I discuss this in the book in a lot of detail. As an information processing engine. And whenever we're in the optimal zone for working or for dealing with our lives, we're just existing and processing information. It helps to think of the brain as working in three powers, which I call three gears, and in gear two, which is kind of the middle power zone. That's when your ability to process information, to do work, to do whatever work you're doing, make decisions, all of those things is optimal. It feels, you put in. It feels sort of in terms of effort. It feels the lightest, and you get the most output for the effort you're putting in. So you want to be in this middle zone called gear two. Now, when you're trying to navigate your workplace, whether it comes to lots of information, lots of workload, whether it comes to deadlines, whether it comes to boredom or anxiety, all of these things, you are drifting from the middle zone up to the higher zone. So from gear two to gear three, or you're drifting from gear two to gear one, and what you want to do Is you want to navigate your workplace by playing with a couple of things. Whether workload, whether urgency, whether your perception of time, your perception of uncertainty, all of those things to stay in this middle zone of kind of mental processing. And when it comes to deadlines, what happens is your brain thinks, oh, there's a deadline, so I need to process information faster. So it starts pressing down on the pedal. At that point, you have to do everything else to undo that. So if you have a deadline, take a whole bunch of work out of the equation. So cut the number of tasks you're having to do. Second thing you can do is while you're working to the deadline, create a perception of time going slower. Listen to very slow beat music. Move to an environment where things look very slow. So these are some of the ways in which you can kind of push down, let your foot go off the pedal. Once you're your, your brain has pushed down on the pedal and you know, you can also flip that to boredom. So say you're working, you have to do whatever work you're doing, and it's very boring. There you come out of the gear 2 zone and you want to do something that makes your brain push down on the pedal. So to be really efficient at work, you want your brain to be in this gear 2 state, and you can play with different elements of your environment and work to stay in there.
- [27:47]
A
Okay, this is all fascinating and I have so many questions, but I cannot let you go without asking. I think one big question, which is, if we've inherited this sort of work structure and environment that no longer really works for us and our brains, how could we, or should we structure work to maximize efficiency, to stay in that gear, to, to state as long or as much as needed? What are your thoughts about what work structure and sessions and all that should look like?
- [28:24]
B
So however intense your work is, you have to always remember that when you're doing intense work, you have to always push down on, let your foot off the pedal at regular intervals in order to give your brain the chance to rejuvenate itself. So if you want to stay in this gear 2 zone for as long as possible, you need to regularly come in to bouts of being in gear one. Okay, so that's the first thing, and the way you do that is by first of all taking breaks, but also by appreciating that it can really be helpful to work in 90 minute work cycles. So whenever you're doing anything requiring focusing or sustained attention, which is quite tiring, work in a way that you will work no longer than 90 minutes at a time. If you need a little break Even within those 90 minutes, go ahead, have a three to ten minute break, but otherwise you will work no longer than 90 minutes at a time and within those 90 minutes. This is if you have the flexibility to do so, and I appreciate many people don't. It is really, really helpful to do really tough work in intense work for a short part of that 90 minute block at the start of that block. So you could do, say 20 minutes of you enter the 90 minute session. The first 20 minutes you spend addressing or replying to really difficult questions, really difficult emails, trying to sit down and solve a really difficult problem. And then after 20 minutes you shift to something slightly lighter and then by the end of the 90 minute cycle you go into a break. So this sort of gives you a graded way of putting in effort and if you work in this way, you're more likely to stay in gear two without exhausting yourself out. It's a compromise between sprinting and having a marathon.
- [30:20]
A
Okay, so I know I'm not the only person who's like, okay, I need to get the book. I need to read it. I need to give it to all the people I work around and with and all the people I care about. So let me remind our listeners, the book is called Hyper Optimize youe Brain to Transform the Way youy work. And Mitu's website is mitusterony.com we will put that in show notes along with, you know, all of the LinkedIn links and everything else, all the ways you can find and follow Mitu. Again, this has just been a fascinating conversation and my love for efficiency. It's so different than I think the advice we've been given on all along the way. But something deep inside me knows that it needs to be heard and listened to and followed. So thank you for doing this great work and for being on the show today.
- [31:09]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [31:12]
A
It's my pleasure. Okay, if you're anything like me, today's conversation has given you plenty of new ways to obsess over efficiency and maybe even rethink the way we're working. From structuring your work to 90 minute blocks to avoiding decision fatigue, we now have some seriously actionable tools to make our brains work smarter, not harder. And effort is important. You won't catch me saying otherwise, but it's when all three F words work together that you maximize results and still have energy left over to live and play and find joy in your life. Because efficiency isn't about squeezing every last drop out of ourselves until we're running on fumes. It's about pacing ourselves and taking time to actually enjoy the work that we do. And if you're so focused on one of the F words that it costs you the other two, you're most likely not accomplishing more or better and you're ending up with burnt out, disengaged humans who just need a fucking break. The more you do, the less effective you are. The busier you look, the less productive you're being. Value effort, develop effectiveness, and bow down to efficiency. This works for just about everyone, but I still like to call it woman's work.