What Most Productive People Do Everyday

By Bayo Ogunmupe It is January 2022. I have the ambition to achieve five goals this New Year. But it’s like we’re always getting closer to accomplishing everything but never ever managing to arrive at the doorstep of the goals. You want to kill two birds with one stone. But you’ll be lucky to kill one bird with three stones. It is like your brain can’t manage it all. However, if you lock yourself up in one room all day with nothing but the goal of your dreams. In eight hours you could get your stuff done but that turns life to a stultifying shade of monochrome real fast. In any case, there are good news, there are solutions. We just have to look at the problem differently. Instead of reducing your life to nothing but the task at hand, you only need to expand your mind. Look at it this way, how will you feel losing your phone or laptop? Certainly you will feel it as a panic attack, feeling you’d lost part of your brain. In modern life, those things are pretty much are expansions of your mind. They amplify your abilities. Since the invention of phones, the iPad and laptops, people have had a lot done marshaling these gadgets to improve their focus, attention and creativity. The good part of applying phones and computers to enhance your productivity is realizing your brain isn’t a computer. Your brain has moods and feelings which machines don’t have. But when you work with those gadgets you accomplish so much more. As a literary critic and lover of books, I found a book that can really help us. Annie Murphy Paul’s research packed new tome, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain is the exact book you need. Sitting still is now an aberration. The Israeli winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, Daniel Kahneman does his best thinking while walking. In fact he’s so aware of this that he even knows his best walking speed for coming up with great ideas: 17 minutes per mile. He’s not the first genius to realize the power of walking. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Only thoughts which come from walking have any value” and the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson concluded that walking is gymnastics for the mind.” And science agrees. A study by the US university, Stanford showed that students came up with more creative ideas when walking around campus as against sitting in a classroom. The researchers wrote: “Walking opens up the free flow of ideas and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing your powers of creative problem solving and increasing physical activity.” Isn’t that right? But it goes beyond that. Movement sharpens our minds. If you’re ever facing a cancer diagnosis, hide your radiologist’s chair. According to The Extended Mind:… radiologists who remain seated spotted an average of 85 percent of the irregularities present in the images, while those who worked identified, on average, fully 99 percent of them. But why the heck walking is such a powerful creativity enhancer? Scientists believe it goes back to our hunter- gatherer origins. We’re wired to be scanning the environment while engaged in physical challenges. When we’re moving around, our mental faculties are dialed up. So how can we leverage this brain booster? It’s well known that being fit makes us smarter in general but new research shows quick bouts of exercise make us smarter in the short term as well. Try working out before you need to do your best thinking. Or go for a brisk walk during your breaks. After a moderately intense exercise, your mind gets a 2 hour power boost. Moderately intense exercise, practiced for a moderate length of time, improves your ability to think both during and immediately after the activity. The positive changes documented by scientists include an increase in the capacity to focus attention and resist distraction; greater verbal frequency and cognitive flexibility; enhanced problem solving and decision-making abilities; and increased working memory as well as more durable long- term memory for what is learned. The beneficial mental effects of moderately intense activity have been shown to last as long as two hours after exercise ends.