Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 2: Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: All right, so using your mind, yes, perhaps to play
Speaker 1: some games on folks, which is not always so nice.
Speaker 1: Are using it to be the best you get the
Speaker 1: most about of what you do. Not always easy and
Speaker 1: a highly distracting and increasingly short attention span world, which
Speaker 1: is why we are super eager to hear from our
Speaker 1: next guest with us as neuroscientists and physician and author
Speaker 1: of a new book that came out just this week
Speaker 1: with us is doctor Methu Sterni. Her new book hyper
Speaker 1: Efficient Optimize your Brain to transform the way you work.
Speaker 1: She joins us from London. Doctor Sterni, it's great to
Speaker 1: have you here with Matt and myself. Tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about the work that you do, because sometimes
Speaker 1: I feel like when it comes to the brain, I
Speaker 1: often hear like we've only just scratched the surface and
Speaker 1: understanding how it works and what it can do for us.
Speaker 1: But kind of set the record straight here or what
Speaker 1: you have been aware of?
Speaker 3: Well, I've been very interested in how we have been
Speaker 3: really ignoring the brain's dynamics when it comes to looking
Speaker 3: at mental performance and working in general. We know quite
Speaker 3: a little bit about the brain now, but we've ignored
Speaker 3: much of that in the way we impose and we
Speaker 3: impose work routines on ourselves and we just follow the
Speaker 3: structure of work as it is. So the biggest, my
Speaker 3: biggest learning curve has been figuring out the disparity between
Speaker 3: the way we work and the way the brain actually works.
Speaker 2: So when I look at your book hyper Efficient, optimize
Speaker 2: your brain to transform the way you work? First of all,
Speaker 2: I google this kind of thing like all the time.
Speaker 2: How can I stop procrastinating? You know? How can I
Speaker 2: become more efficient? How can I get more organized? Because
Speaker 2: I am such a disorganized add procrastinator. Is it about
Speaker 2: changing my habits? Do I need to develop new habits?
Speaker 2: Or is it actually about changing my brain chemistry? Or like,
Speaker 2: what is wrong with me? And where do I start
Speaker 2: to try and fix it?
Speaker 3: It's about changing the way you look at work. So
Speaker 3: we have been working and expecting our own brains to
Speaker 3: work really like a machine on an assembly line, because
Speaker 3: we started adopting the pattern of assembly line work back
Speaker 3: actually during forty en times and when knowledge work came
Speaker 3: into the territory, we didn't really change the way we worked,
Speaker 3: although we changed what we worked on. And we continue
Speaker 3: to impose this pattern of assembly line efficiency on the brain,
Speaker 3: which was all fine while the brain did a lot
Speaker 3: of simple level cognitive work. But now that AI and
Speaker 3: automation has come onto this scene, we need to think
Speaker 3: about working in a way that really takes the brain
Speaker 3: to its peaks of qualitative output so that it really
Speaker 3: works well, creates those ideas, makes those excellent decisions, comes
Speaker 3: up with innovative ideas, original ideas, and for that to happen.
Speaker 3: You know, the brain doesn't put pieces together on an
Speaker 3: assembly line. The brain has its own rhythm of working.
Speaker 3: So instead of just following the nine to five, continuous,
Speaker 3: monotonous and constant paced work that we usually do, it's
Speaker 3: time to reframe work and work according to the brain's rhythms.
Speaker 1: Well, help me understand that, like I understand. I remember
Speaker 1: being out a Pixar and doing a deep dive into
Speaker 1: the company and they basically were like, we don't care
Speaker 1: when you work, as long as you get it done.
Speaker 1: We know, creative types might wake up in the middle
Speaker 1: of the morning or middle of the night, and so
Speaker 1: people were some high out during the you know, at lunchtime,
Speaker 1: playing volleyball or having a barbecue. This was years ago,
Speaker 1: and then you know, they just didn't care as long
Speaker 1: as the work got done. So I am curious how
Speaker 1: to apply what you are saying. And first of all,
Speaker 1: I want to understand what do you really mean by
Speaker 1: an assembly line kind of way of using our brain?
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: So what I mean by that is, normally we have
Speaker 3: this structure of work where we go to work at
Speaker 3: a fixed time in the morning, we leave work, whether
Speaker 3: at home or officially in the office, at a sort
Speaker 3: of fixed time in the evening, and we expect our brains,
Speaker 3: we expect ourselves to work continuously during that entire time
Speaker 3: at a constant pace. But if you actually look at
Speaker 3: how the brain works, you will know intuitively that you
Speaker 3: cannot churn out really good ideas continuously assemble them at
Speaker 3: the same pace throughout the day. You will have peaks
Speaker 3: of moments where you are really good at coming up
Speaker 3: with ideas, and there'll be other times in the day
Speaker 3: when you just feel this slump, and that's your brain
Speaker 3: naturally slumping. So, for instance, we know that after lunch,
Speaker 3: everyone has something known as a post lunch dip. We
Speaker 3: also know that creativity seems to peak first thing in
Speaker 3: the morning and last thing at night, and so really
Speaker 3: kind of harnessing these peaks and these natural peaks and
Speaker 3: troughs in the brain's natural rhythmic performance actually allows your
Speaker 3: output to be much better. So you know, you can
Speaker 3: write lots of emails, you can make you know, do
Speaker 3: reports without really working at your peak. And that's what
Speaker 3: most people, most of us do. Now that machines have
Speaker 3: come into the landscape, they will do that kind of
Speaker 3: work for you, for us better and at larger volumes
Speaker 3: and faster. So we are now left with these incredible
Speaker 3: array of tools, and it's up to us to actually
Speaker 3: now use the brain for what it's for. How it's
Speaker 3: different from machines. So in terms of working with equality
Speaker 3: of output in mind rather than focusing on quantity.
Speaker 2: Have there I mean, obviously you're talking to two people
Speaker 2: who cover finance in New York. So the idea here
Speaker 2: is you pay someone to work as hard as that
Speaker 2: person can all day and all night and expect everything.
Speaker 2: Are there societies or cultures that have adapted work to
Speaker 2: the way the brain functions. Do you see like anthropological
Speaker 2: cases of you know, a good use of the brain
Speaker 2: or a good work schedule.
Speaker 3: So anthropologically, historically hunt to gather communities in the past
Speaker 3: and present hand together communities. For instance, if you look
Speaker 3: at the way they work. If you look at the
Speaker 3: way we used to work before the pre industrial era,
Speaker 3: we never really worked continuously as in an assembly line.
Speaker 3: We used to work in sort of bursts, almost in
Speaker 3: kind of power law patterns, worked really intensely for short
Speaker 3: periods of time and less intensely for longer. And I
Speaker 3: think really the thing we need to do is we
Speaker 3: need an attitude. We need a kind of an attitude
Speaker 3: and emphasis change, because eventually each organization, each individual will
Speaker 3: have their edge based on the quality of mental output.
Speaker 3: Given machines, automation AI, they'll be doing quantity of output
Speaker 3: better than we are. So we need to start looking
Speaker 3: at work and looking at productivity in terms of how
Speaker 3: many meetings did it get to come up with a
Speaker 3: really good quality, sellable, unique idea, how many hours did
Speaker 3: it take to come up with this quality of output.
Speaker 3: So if we start visualizing and looking at measuring output
Speaker 3: in that way, that can lead to a step change.
Speaker 1: Doctor Stornie. One thing I want to ask you is
Speaker 1: my parents were this way. My dad was, you know,
Speaker 1: an early bird, early riser and just cracking jokes and
Speaker 1: wide awake. My mom was a night owl kind of
Speaker 1: same for my husband night owl. And I'm like, really
Speaker 1: prime in the morning.
Speaker 4: So is it?
Speaker 1: You know, you kind of gave us some general trends,
Speaker 1: and your book says the state of mind is most
Speaker 1: suited to creative thinking and happens from waking until around
Speaker 1: nine to ten am, from around eight to ten pm
Speaker 1: until bedtime. But I'm assuming there are variations. I mean, Matt,
Speaker 1: you and I both have done early morning schedules. I
Speaker 1: came in at three thirty in the morning for the morning.
Speaker 1: For a long time, I did too. I was like
Speaker 1: on fire. But I do wonder, like, what do you
Speaker 1: think of those people like us in the media business
Speaker 1: who come in at kind of odd hours, or people
Speaker 1: who you know, I don't know, are opening up stores
Speaker 1: in the morning or like different things where they're on
Speaker 1: kind of crazy clocks. Are we not at our prime
Speaker 1: or optimum?
Speaker 3: So there are two ways of looking at this. So
Speaker 3: first of all, we all have a slightly different rhythm
Speaker 3: and shift towards the morning or the evening. This is
Speaker 3: known as being a night owl or a lark. And
Speaker 3: whatever your tendency, your whole this whole cycle is shifted
Speaker 3: that way. So if you are naturally happier waking up
Speaker 3: early in the morning, you perform better in the morning,
Speaker 3: then your likely your whole kind of cycle is likely
Speaker 3: to start sooner. So your creative window will be sooner
Speaker 3: during the day and slightly slightly earlier in the evening.
Speaker 3: And if you're a night out, it happens the other
Speaker 3: way around. Yes, of course we have this problem with
Speaker 3: globalization and shift work and working at different times, and
Speaker 3: yes they will be affecting how optimally productive you are.
Speaker 3: I mean, our ancestors did not go for a hunt
Speaker 3: at three in the morning usually, and so we are
Speaker 3: not mentally geared to do that. But if that is
Speaker 3: your if that is what you have to do, then
Speaker 3: there are ways still of manipulating your creative time windows,
Speaker 3: the way the period within which you can focus.
Speaker 1: How do you.
Speaker 2: How do you help somebody who is locked into a shift?
Speaker 2: I mean, Carol and I were assigned shows at certain
Speaker 2: times that they can't be changed. I can't call my
Speaker 2: boss and say, listen, I'm more of an evening person,
Speaker 2: so I'm going to have to skip this morning show.
Speaker 2: What kind of tricks can we use?
Speaker 3: So the one way to think about it is if
Speaker 3: you imagine your brain as a sort of engine that
Speaker 3: works on different gears. And this is a metaphorical way
Speaker 3: of looking at it, and you can imagine that when
Speaker 3: your brain is in gear two, it's performing really well.
Speaker 3: So you want to get into gear too. Now, if
Speaker 3: you wake up very early in the morning, your brain
Speaker 3: is naturally still sort of in a sleepy state until
Speaker 3: you train it to be able to do that on
Speaker 3: a regular basis. And really they're the hacks that we
Speaker 3: all know about, things like coffee, things like exercise. Your
Speaker 3: mission there is to kind of get your brain into
Speaker 3: gear sooner in the day artificially, so using I'm sure
Speaker 3: you drink I'm not going to say I'm sure, but
Speaker 3: I would. I would guess you probably do drink caffeine,
Speaker 3: things like lots of bright light, things like ways, which
Speaker 3: as these are, these are ways of kind of gearing
Speaker 3: up earlier in the day. So you're trying to just
Speaker 3: push your cycle forward and then towards the end of
Speaker 3: the day I would assume that you go to sleep
Speaker 3: quite soon. I would hope you do in terms of,
Speaker 3: you know, at the end of the day. And if
Speaker 3: that's the case, then you would wind down sooner using
Speaker 3: all the hacks that I've described using.
Speaker 1: You use a lot of hacks to wind down, hacks
Speaker 1: with quotation marks, Doctor STRONI, we're gonna come back with
Speaker 1: you in just a moment. We're gonna continue with doctor
Speaker 1: methu Uh Steroni her book hyper Efficient, Optimize Your Brain
Speaker 1: to Transform the Way You Work. This is Bloomberg Business Week.
Speaker 1: I want to get back to our guests. We're talking
Speaker 1: with neuroscientists and physician doctor Mithu Staroni on her new
Speaker 1: book just out this week, hyper Efficient, Optimize your Brain
Speaker 1: to Transform the Way You Work. I have to say
Speaker 1: thank you because you call out seasoned live TV anchors,
Speaker 1: although I don't. Yeah, we're seasoned.
Speaker 2: We're pretty darn Carol.
Speaker 1: But you note that they are especially adapt at processing
Speaker 1: too synchronous streams of information. At the same time, it
Speaker 1: happens when they listen to their producer or we don't
Speaker 1: as our producer Paul Brandon sometimes knows, but this happens
Speaker 1: when they do listen to their producer through an ear
Speaker 1: piece when speaking to the camera, they you know, and
Speaker 1: if we all have them in right now, they don't
Speaker 1: attend to one stream first and then the other, but
Speaker 1: somehow seem to fuse both streams into one source of reality.
Speaker 1: But then you go on to say that.
Speaker 2: Finally we get the props that we deserve.
Speaker 4: You know, we are very grateful because it is a skill.
Speaker 4: It's I kind of love having I like having your
Speaker 4: voice in my head. But having said that, the thing
Speaker 4: I wanted to get to is multitasking. And Matt, I like,
Speaker 4: we think about it all the time when we're doing something.
Speaker 4: We're working on a show, people come over to us,
Speaker 4: we're working on other stuff. We're getting emails, we're getting
Speaker 4: phone calls. Everybody deals with multitasking. I'm not as good
Speaker 4: as I used to be a multitasking.
Speaker 1: Multitasking does it? What's your thoughts on that and how
Speaker 1: we deal with it? And how do we I don't know,
Speaker 1: how do we.
Speaker 3: Deal so the multitasking in terms of what you as
Speaker 3: anchors do or what normal mortals do.
Speaker 1: We're pretty normal, okay.
Speaker 3: So when we're talking about getting simultaneous pieces of information,
Speaker 3: that is really a special skill, and for that you
Speaker 3: have to think about it as an information bandwidth issue.
Speaker 3: So you're getting a huge, wide variety of bandwidth and
Speaker 3: you're somehow fusing that together. Another way in which we
Speaker 3: actually refer to the words multitasking is when we are
Speaker 3: attending to different tasks at fast in quick succession, and
Speaker 3: they're all very different, so answering an email, then switching
Speaker 3: to a phone call, then switching to something else, and
Speaker 3: all of these are usually urgent, they're usually high in
Speaker 3: terms of information content. And again for all of that,
Speaker 3: you need your brain really needs to sort of log
Speaker 3: on clock in attached to that information source, process that
Speaker 3: information source, detach again, reattach and detach, and that really
Speaker 3: results or it really requires the brain to be quite agile,
Speaker 3: but also it requires your brain to have quite a large,
Speaker 3: quite a wide information bandwidth. And again, if you imagine
Speaker 3: your brain as an engine that's constantly processing information and
Speaker 3: it works at these different speeds, different powers, you're having
Speaker 3: to really step again metaphorically, you're having to step on
Speaker 3: that pedal to really process that information as fast as possible,
Speaker 3: and that results in your brain working at pretty high power,
Speaker 3: which really leaves you prone to exhaustion, prone to developing
Speaker 3: mental fatigue, And if you push on through mental fatigue,
Speaker 3: then the information you're processing and the higher cognitive function
Speaker 3: that you're carrying out is no longer optimal. So multitasking
Speaker 3: when you are quick switching from one thing to another
Speaker 3: in rapid succession, does not leave your brain to produce
Speaker 3: its best kind of work?
Speaker 2: Does it get more difficult as we get older? Carol
Speaker 2: and I were wondering what happens, what happens when you.
Speaker 1: Get old for those other people who are getting old
Speaker 1: or the old people out there.
Speaker 3: I mean, age is just a number, right, so we
Speaker 3: know that there's lots of plasticity as you grow older,
Speaker 3: So there are lots of Every individual is going to
Speaker 3: be different. But really the bottom line is being able
Speaker 3: to control your attention and being able to make sure
Speaker 3: you are not doing it to the intensity that you're
Speaker 3: getting mental fatigue. So having lots of breaks, making sure
Speaker 3: you detach from something before you reattach your attention on something,
Speaker 3: all of these things can help. What does that make fatigue?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: What does that actually to detach from something be?
Speaker 3: Why you? Yeah, go ahead, So if you imagine when
Speaker 3: you are doing any kind of work. You are really
Speaker 3: and you're really zoned in. It's a little bit like
Speaker 3: diving deep into that work. Okay, So diving deep into
Speaker 3: an ocean, and then if you suddenly have to climb
Speaker 3: jump out of that ocean and jump into another ocean,
Speaker 3: you'll get the bends, okay, because you're going to have to.
Speaker 3: It's difficult. It's difficult for your mind, so you have
Speaker 3: to kind of come out slowly and then go in again.
Speaker 3: So one way of doing that, one way of making
Speaker 3: that process easier is every time you are switching from
Speaker 3: one task to another, you have a little bit of
Speaker 3: time in between tasks, so you actually stop focusing on that,
Speaker 3: rid your mind of that content by taking a short break,
Speaker 3: by emptying your mind, clearing your mind, doing something else
Speaker 3: for a very short space of time that doesn't completely
Speaker 3: occupy you. So you've kind of let go of that
Speaker 3: glue with which that mental glue with which you're sticking
Speaker 3: to what you're doing. Because the tougher than the more
Speaker 3: you know, the deeper you were into that that, the
Speaker 3: more difficult it is for your brain to kind of
Speaker 3: reconfigure and fit the new task.
Speaker 2: I have a curveball, what's that I'm gonna go off
Speaker 2: script here. Okay, it's dangerous because I don't know how
Speaker 2: it's gonna work out. Did you watch the Donald Trump
Speaker 2: Joe Biden presidential debate? Did you happen to see any
Speaker 2: of that?
Speaker 3: I'm so sorry I didn't.
Speaker 2: No, okay, just because what are you thinking? I'm just thinking.
Speaker 2: Biden said that he had a bad night and it
Speaker 2: was it was really uh, it kind of disturbing. But
Speaker 2: there are times when he's on point, you know, there
Speaker 2: are times when he can listen and react, when he
Speaker 2: can fact check in real time, but he couldn't do
Speaker 2: any of that on this evening. And he blamed it
Speaker 2: on a lengthy travel schedule and not getting enough sleep
Speaker 2: and you know, overworked. And I just wonder how much
Speaker 2: that really does affect could affect your performance, all of us.
Speaker 1: And just got about a minute left here.
Speaker 3: Well, in general, the sharper you are, the fresher you are,
Speaker 3: the more capacity you have, and the more capacity you have,
Speaker 3: the better you can delegate your resources and use them.
Speaker 3: So if your resources are really struggling, then your mind
Speaker 3: is having to put in more effort to get what
Speaker 3: it would normally be able to do done and so yes.
Speaker 3: So if you are struggling with resources, then of course
Speaker 3: things will feel more difficult for you and your output
Speaker 3: won't be great. So part of the idea of hyper efficient.
Speaker 3: Being hyper efficient is to really create optimal circumstances for
Speaker 3: your mind to always be able to have the best
Speaker 3: resources at all times.
Speaker 1: Nothing like a good night's sleep for me, I don't
Speaker 1: know about you, Matt, yeah, or a few weeks of
Speaker 1: a good night's sleep our vacation, Doctor Sterni, thank you
Speaker 1: so much, Mithu Sterni neuroscientists physician. Her new book hyper Efficient,
Speaker 1: optimize your brain to transform the way you work