Imagine this: The alarm goes off, and the first question arises – should you hit snooze? Determination prevails, and you get up. Next, another decision – to meditate or exercise first? You decide to exercise, and while running, you ruminate about whether your neighbor thinks you're unfriendly because you didn't wave yesterday. After your workout, you decide to have breakfast, and as you eat, you worry about a coworker who commented on an old photo on social media. Should you reach out, or would that seem weird? Before heading to work, you wonder whether to bike or drive. You glance at your phone to check the weather and see a message from an old friend, prompting another decision – to reply now or later.
This is the cognitive landscape many of us navigate daily. Most of the time, our consciousness is occupied with minor, irrelevant, and trivial questions. We waste precious cognitive resources on micro concerns that don't align with our goals. Now, imagine replaying this scenario, but instead, your mind is solely focused on your primary professional pursuit. Your morning routine runs on autopilot, with every decision pre-determined. In this optimal state, rumination still occurs but with meaningful questions. While exercising, you contemplate strategies to grow your business over the next five years. During breakfast, you consider applying lessons you learned from the book you read a week before. Commuting, you consider what your son Alex needs most to excel in school this year.
This shift to pointed rumination transforms your cognitive landscape. By focusing on significant professional and personal questions, you enhance creativity and problem-solving, even during idle moments. The more targeted your rumination, the more productive and innovative you become, unlocking your brain's full potential.
In this article, we'll explore how to achieve this transformation through simple yet powerful routines, turning your brain into a supercomputer capable of extraordinary productivity and creativity.
Undermining Your Default Mode
On average, humans awake for about 16 hours a day, translating to 112 hours a week! In these 112 hours, we utilize about 40 hours for specific tasks - (focused mode) such as your writing job, working as a solopreneur, or studying if you're a student. For the other 72 hours, your attention is dislodged or wasted if not utilized properly. Your 72 hours are in default mode, which is usually ignored. In this default mode, your brain is contemplating (or a more correct word- ruminating) on something (trivial, irrelevant things)- for 72 freaking hours, that is 64% of your waking week!
Become Your Own Puppet Master
Instead of wasting your default mode on ruminating about irrelevant things and matters, transform your rumination into a supercomputer. It can only be achieved when you give this default mode specific pre-programmed goals, on which it will work tirelessly 24/7. Upgrading your rumination will be achieved through:
Focusing on one important thing: Every time we do a specific task, there is a consequence of doing that task in our default mode. There will be rumination (unavoidable inner noises) in your default mode regarding the tasks you did in the focused mode. So, if you focus on too many specific tasks at a time, your contemplation in the default mode will become cluttered, unable to yield any helpful rumination. For example, you've been learning graphic design for about six months since it is your passion. Your friend tells you that if you know social media marketing, you can sell a unique service to creators. You started learning SMM, too. After some time, you thought, why not become a creator and solopreneur in the true sense? You begin publishing on Substack and creating content on X/ Twitter! But you notice that you're unable to progress in any of them adequately compared to when you were only focusing on learning graphic design. When your focus is divided, you cannot tap into your flow state, where you achieve maximum productivity and progress! So, the lesson here is - avoid dispersion. We always want to explore the new and shiny. But the most significant rewards come from doing one thing. Focus on single professional pursuit and cut out everything else!
Externalizing The Clutter: Spend some hours and dump everything accumulating in your brain (that has been worrying you) on paper. It can be a wrong decision, the debt to be paid, the message you never sent to a girl or every regret. Dump it out! It will reduce the cognitive load, which is called 'cognitive offloading.'
Understanding Decisions Are Resource Intensive Tasks: The average adult makes about 35,000 ****remotely conscious decisions daily! Making too many decisions depletes our willpower! Decision-making also increases the cognitive load. We usually view decisions as nothing that just automatically appears in our minds. But decisions are resource-intensive tasks. We treat it as nothing because they're not necessarily physically intensive tasks. The key here is to reframe how we think about decisions. We should treat decisions more as a physical task requiring physical work to be done. Seeing decisions this way encourages us to minimize the number of decisions we've to make. So, now we can set things up once and let it run repeatedly. There are two tools for this:
Decision Recycling: For all the medium sized "should I or shouldn't I" decisions, we can decide once and recycle this decision endlessly. For example, setting up a wake up alarm- make one decision and recycle it everyday. Always wake up at 6 AM. Treat decision recycling as mental shortcut for making optimal decisions with minimal cognitive burden. Start with five scenarios you frequently encounter, where you find yourself making unique decisions each time when you hit that scenario. And instead make that decision right now- one time, and apply it endlessly thereafter.
Decision Autopilot: It eliminates what's next in this routine as compared to decision recycling which eliminates all the should I or shouldn't I medium sized macro decisions. What's next within a known routine, like getting ready in the morning. You map all the small decisions in advance and next time decisions are on autopilot- now you've a routine - the secret to reduce your cognitive load and transform your brain into a supercomputer. One such example is Leonardo da Vinci. This Renaissance polymath was known for his rigorous work ethic and disciplined routine. Da Vinci typically woke up before dawn and spent his mornings engaged in creative pursuits like painting, drawing, and studying anatomy. He would then dedicate the afternoon to his various scientific endeavors, often working late into the night. Decision autopilot eliminates micro uncertainty. Here's the thing you need to do: Take the routines you are already doing and make the micro decisions within them explicit. Determine the details and sequence of this routine and write these details down. And make every little detail explicit: For example, while getting ready in the morning, eat breakfast only after taking the bath.
You want all the decisions you made, right in front of you and made for you. And you're just mindlessly sailing through the process.
So, important points for action are:
Cut everything but the most important professional project to reduce dispersion and give your default mode a clear goal to target.
Eliminate as many "should or shouldn't I" decisions to keep the flow going.
Harness the power of routines.
My recommendations for this week:
Book - Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz: If there is any “one book to rule them all” type of book in the self-help section, then that would be this book. Absolute gem of a book explaining the importance of self-image in an individual’s success or failure.
Video - 30 Years of Business Knowledge in 2hrs 26mins by Simon Squibb: If you haven’t watched it already, then what are you even doing with your free time. Every little thing you need to build a successful business.