Table of contents:
Problem: you don’t have time to do anything.
What is work? and the t-shirt sewing machine
What is productivity?
Cognitive speed
Cursed math problems
FEEDBACK! FEEDBACK!
Cursed essays
Process more ideas
More feedback = More corrections
Maximize Repetitions for Learning and Productivity
Neuroscience of repetitions
Failure for success
More attempts = better work
Cognitive Speed for Productivity: Mathematically Modeled
How to Improve Cognitive Speed
Premium Productivity
Problem: You don’t have time to do anything.
The emotionally biased mode of bypassing the reality of “I don’t have time do to anything” is by reading 100 motivational quotes and blindly believing that if you truly want to do something, you will sacrifice everything and make time for that thing. This may be true to a certain degree: you will start to make the decision to do that important task that you “don’t have time for” because you will be fueled with motivation and desire. But how about when you get tired? When that motivation– a bodily concoction of dopamine and adrenaline– begins to wane, and you will again regress into your depressed shell, with no motivation, disappointment, poor sleep, anxiety that you can never get anything done, that everything is out of your control, that you don’t have time.
If that is the case, you must approach the problem from a different lens: logic. So the reason you don’t have time to do anything is because you have a lot of work– job responsibilities, homework, chores, etc. But the real reason you don’t have time is because this work takes too much time. Therefore, you must reduce the time it takes to do each task so that you have more time to do other things. The point of the previous sentence is that it is so stupidly obvious. The real question is how can you reduce the amount time it takes for you to do work while retaining consistent quantity and quality.
What is work? and the t-shirt sewing machine
What is work? Regardless of what domain, work is the productivity, or rate of efficiency, multiplied by the time you spend doing that thing.
Productivity ✕ time = work
For instance, take a t-shirt sewing machine. This machine can sew 30 t-shirts in 1 hour. Let’s say the manufacturer needs 90 t-shirts. If the machine sews 30 t-shirts in 1 hour, then it will sew 90 in 3 hours.
30 t-shirts per hour ✕ 1 hour = 30 t-shirts
30 t-shirts per hour ✕ 3 hours = 90 t-shirts
Let’s say now the manufacturer only has one machine but needs to make 180 t-shirts. To make more t-shirts, he can either increase the amount of time to make t-shirts:
30 t-shirts per hour ✕ 6 hours = 180 t-shirts
Or he can increase the productivity of the machine, so that it can make more t-shirts per hour. If he decides to increase machine productivity, he can produce more t-shirts in the same amount of time.
60 t-shirts per hour ✕ 3 hours = 180 t-shirts
How does this relate to the “I don’t have any time to do anything” issue? Well, if you increase productivity, you can do more work in less time. Remember how increasing the t-shirts productivity by 30 t-shirts saved 3 hours of time?
What is productivity?
This may seem obvious, but it’s really not. How many times do you decide to read a book, organize the room, fix the ceiling fan, or write an English paper, and then take 5 minutes to decide what color pen you should use? You stare at a blank computer screen for 10 minutes. You avoid writing a single word. You daydream, eat snacks, distract yourself with your phone. You procrastinate. You’re so tired that the words become muddy, the thoughts unclear. That is horrible productivity. You just wasted 10 minutes logging on to the computer or rereading one sentence five times instead of writing five more. You need to improve productivity. But what exactly is productivity?
Productivity = speed ✕ accuracy
To be productive, you must decide, process information, and think fast. You must also be accurate: as Étienne Decroux, a French mime, had said “one pearl is better than a whole necklace of potatoes.” However, if you are extremely accurate, you’re still not as productive as you could be. Because you can work faster. Imagine being able to do work as accurately as you can but also as fast as you can. This means you must improve your cognitive speed. Though this sounds intimidating, unpractical, and unlikely, in many cases, you can think really quickly, but constrain yourself with doubt, overthinking, and procrastination.
Cognitive Speed
If you can increase your cognitive speed, you increase productivity. Look at how much more work you can do:
As can be noted, more work can be done in less time. The concern is how can you increase cognitive speed while maintaining accuracy? Does increased speed lead to more mistakes? Well, the goal of increasing cognitive speed is not to take an inconsistent task and do it as fast as possible so that you don’t have to do it anymore. The goal is to take a skill that you’re good at and increase how quickly you do that skill by small increments.
Cursed math problems
For instance, if you are assigned 20 math problems, and it takes you 5 minutes to do each problem, the math homework will take 1 hour and 40 minutes. But if you can do 20 math problems with the productivity of 2 minutes per problem it will only take you 40 minutes. Now imagine each day you tried solving the problem only 10 seconds faster than you did before. After 6 days, you can remove one whole minute per problem. Then you can solve even more problems in less time.
Increased speed doesn’t mean that the work is going to be sloppy and full of mistakes. It certainly can be. But working fast doesn’t mean doing all the computation in the head or dragging the pen on the paper to the point that you cannot decipher what you wrote. To increase efficiency you must keep the accuracy; however, speed allows you to process more ideas and thoughts.
FEEDBACK! FEEDBACK!
By increasing cognitive speed, there is an inevitable increase in the amount of feedback and repetitions. Let’s go back to the math problems. Suppose every time you solve a math problem, you get instant feedback on whether or not you got the problem right. So if you solve one problem in 5 minutes, you will get feedback one time: either the answer was correct or incorrect. However, if you solve 5 problems in 5 minutes, you will get 5 times the feedback. Feedback is invaluable to learning, because how do you know if your idea has merit, if your thoughts make sense, or if a fact is true unless you try it and get feedback? Feedback and learning are inseparable. You have to test and experiment and receive feedback. Here are a few scenarios.
SCENARIO = You interrupt the teacher
FEEDBACK = The teacher gives you a scorn and tells you to be quiet
LEARNING = Don’t interrupt your teacher
SCENARIO = You don’t wear a jacket when it is snowing
FEEDBACK = You get sick
LEARNING = Always wear a jacket when it snows
SCENARIO = You add 2 cups of salt to the cake
FEEDBACK = Everybody hates the cake
LEARNING = Don’t dump salt on the cake
But this doesn’t just apply to basic correct or incorrect answers. Many of the tasks that you do have multiple ways of thinking. Let’s take writing as an example and examine how increased cognitive speed improves tasks that don’t have a direct answer.
Cursed essays
Suppose you’re writing an essay. Option A is you spend two hours writing one draft, where each sentence takes 10 minutes to write. You’re overthinking what content to add, what to remove, what tone and transitions the text should include. After those two hours, you still must go back and revise even those sentences that you spent 10 minutes writing. The sentences change and so will the structure. Then you get tired and start procrastinating. You no longer wish to write, and fair, you spent three hours on it already. But you also spent 10 minutes just sitting there and “thinking.”
Process more ideas
What if you spent those 10 minutes writing? Instead of sitting there, activate your cognitive speed and write down as many variations of the sentence that reach the mind:
Jazz music makes me angry.
Bebop jazz tones make my blood boil.
If I hear jazz music one more time, I will rip my hair out.
Despite the great learning experience of reading jazz music, I wish to shred my music sheets, snap the music stand, and burn the stage.
You don’t realize how many ideas you have. You waste a lot of time “thinking” when in fact you should be doing and experimenting. Come up with something– anything. Then you can get instant feedback. If you write a sentence that is gross and icky, then write a different one. Change the structure, add or remove words. Test. Experiment. Eventually, the sentence will be good enough so that you can move on. But that only works if you can efficiently think up and sort through sentences– cognitive speed. Just write the damn sentence; you can always change it later.
Now imagine essay writing option B. Instead of spending two hours slowly overthinking through each sentence to come up with one draft, you dump all the ideas out, writing the first draft in 30 minutes. This draft sucks. It’s overflowing with ill-connected content. Some of the sentences aren’t punctuated correctly. It’s wordy. Poor transitions. Abstract nonsense nouns. Over-complicated jargon.
More feedback = More corrections
But little do you know that this draft you wrote in 30 minutes is almost as good as the one in option A, which took two hours. Why? Because the ideas are still the same. However, instead of wasting time judging each idea and 10 minutes staring at the wall, you were writing. In fact, you have more content and ideas in the essay to work with. This draft took 30 minutes. You got feedback– your essay sucks. Then you spend another 30 minutes on draft 2. Then 30 minutes on draft 3. Then 30 minutes on draft 4. Each time you revised the draft, you got feedback: “This part doesn’t make sense,” “I don’t like the structure here,” “I need to give more detail here.” With each draft, you were able to make the writing a little better.
So which is better? Writing one draft in two hours or four drafts in two hours.
Maybe option 1 seems more complete because “you spent two hours doing it,” but you also spent a lot ot time staring at the wall. Even after you have finished, the writing isn’t perfect and needs improvement. However, if you quickly and accurately write as many ideas and coherent thoughts down as you can, you receive four times as much feedback, therefore, revising your text and spending more time actually writing. This means you can get higher quality writing – isn’t it better to write and revise a sentence four times than to only write it once? Of course, each essay, task, job, and assignment will differ in time. But if you can think more productively with increased speed, you open the opportunity to try and test more ideas per hour. The more ideas, the more feedback. The more feedback, the more learning.
Maximize repetitions for learning and productivity
This repetition craze reflects the fundamental neurochemistry in the brain for learning. First, the more repetitions you do, the more the neurons can realign and change. Each time you do an action, a sequence of neurons fires. If you’re really concentrated, these neurons will get mixed with a soup of neurotransmitters – epinephrine for attention and alertness, and acetylcholine for focus and highlighting which neurons need to change. During sleep and deep rest, the neurons reconfigure.
Neuroscience of repetitions
When neurons reconfigure, you learn. The more repetitions of an action you do, the more your neurons can reconfigure. Therefore, learning is inextricably tied to repetitions. This principle in neuroscience is the Hebbian Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Wire literally means that the axons, dendrites, and other parts of the cell connect with another cell. This means that if cognitive speed allows for more repetitions, you will have increased learning.
Failure for success
The second way repetition increases learning relates to feedback– in this case neural feedback. When you do an action and you fail, the brain freaks out. Epinephrine and acetylcholine surge through the blood vessels in the brain. Pioneering studies by the Knudsen Lab at Stanford School of Medicine distinguished the rate of errors and miscalculations stimulated neural change. In other words, to learn you must fail. Failure is the prerequisite of learning. Because why would the brain ever change if it was already good at everything? The nervous system changes so that you can overcome challenges. You need feedback to tell you that you failed so that you can change, you can learn.
More attempts = better work
This is referred to as the Super Mario Effect, a term coined by Mark Rober, former NASA engineer and Youtuber who conducted a coding challenge on 50,000 followers. The study showed that the group that had the most attempts or “tries” to solve the puzzle was more successful (68%) than the group that had fewer attempts (52%). The successful group failed on average 11 times before succeeding, while the less successful group only took 5 attempts. More failure equated to more success. How to increase failure? Increase repetition. How to increase repetition per unit of time? Increase cognitive speed.
Cognitive speed for productivity: mathematically modeled
So you want to use time more efficiently to perform more work. To increase efficiency, you decide to increase cognitive speed– the rate at which you perform a given task. Let’s try to model that with the math problems example. The graphs below compare the amount of time it would take to do 18 math problems.
In the second graph, you were able to complete the same amount of math problems in a shorter amount of time! Yay! You saved time. However, you can’t do work with the same intensity of focus forever. You become tired (why?) This is because the brain has cyclical patterns of brain activity called ultradian cycles. You can really only focus for 90 minutes at a time. Then your concentration diminishes. In the diagram below, this reduced concentration period is called the ultradian healing response. Then, concentration rises again until it reaches a top performance, after which it slopes back down.
Suppose that you can only work if you’re concentrated and fully focused.
Now let’s combine the graphs. The first is the amount of work you can do with average productivity. The second models maximum productivity. The region where the productivity line (blue) and concentration (purple) regions overlap is the amount of work that gets done (yellow).
Note that even in the maximum productivity graph, there is still some white space. This signifies unstable focus and distractions which occur when entering and ending a 90 minute ultradian cycle focus rhythm.
You can’t control the ultradian cycle. It’s an ancient biological rhythm. You also can’t control how many hours are in a day, or how much time you have. But you can control how productively you use that time. If you can do more repetitions and process information faster, you can complete more work per unit of time. This means that you can spend a total of less time doing work (because you’re so productive at it) and have more time to do other things. Therefore, a solution to “I don’t have enough time” is to improve your cognitive speed – the rate at which you think and perform work.
How to improve cognitive speed
So you have decided to take initiative to improve cognitive speed to increase productivity to waste less time. The question is how? When you sit down at the desk you still feel sluggish, your thoughts have no clarity, you cannot concentrate, you have no ideas. Here’s some things you can try.
- Fix your sleep. The brain works better after it has rested. If you learn something but have poor sleep, you’re not going to retain that information. You will also feel horrible– there will be imbalance between neurochemicals in the body that haven’t been reset. You will feel less motivated, have worse cognition, feel more anxious and have less efficient processing speed and cognition.
- Hydrate and diet well. Eat nutritious food. Intake electrolytes.
- Improve focus.
All of the above directly influence brain and body function. If those are not solidified, the rest of the tips will have no foundation.
Premium Productivity
- If you start overthinking, start doing. For instance, instead of spending 10 minutes thinking about a sentence, start writing sentences. If you start thinking about something else, write it somewhere safe so that you can go back to it. (read this if you want to be more creative)
- Take initiative and really mean that you’re going to be productive. This means that anytime you do work you must do that task with maximal speed and accuracy. Think more repetitions, more feedback, more ideas, more testing, more learning.
- Start doing things that you’re good at faster. If you’re good at doing math problems, try solving them faster with each time. If you play a musical instrument, play the song at a higher tempo. If you’re good at cleaning, sort the items faster. The point of this exercise is to increase your cognitive ability because you will have to be more alert and focused. Think to yourself “what is something I do everyday, that I can do accurately, that I could save time doing?” Improve by small increments, it builds up over time.
- Be decisive. Be assertive. If you have a dilemma about what color t-shirt to wear or what to order at a restaurant, just pick something. Don’t waste time deciding small choices that don’t have consequences. The more assertive you are, the faster you make decisions, the more efficiently you can use time.
- Fail. The more you test, the more feedback you get. If you get the question wrong or decide wrong, you will know and can learn from the error. But you can’t improve if you haven’t tried. If you’re solving math problems or puzzles, try to do as many as possible as accurately as possible. Each time you fail, you are presented with new ideas and ways of thinking.
- Rest the mind. Remember, you can only focus for so long. It’s more efficient to recharge the brain and rest in between sessions. Sleep is vital at night but you also need to take breaks during the day.
