我头好疼啊

Act I: Problem & Decisions – Information overwhelm – A project that hurts to think about – Juggling 5 things at once – Saying no to distractions – Searching for the zone of peak performance – Getting past a roadblock

Intermission: meet the director

Act II: Stay Cool Under Pressure – Derailed by drama – Drowning amid uncertainty – When expectations get out of control

Act III: Collaborate with Others – Turning enemies into friends – When everything seems unfair – The battle for status

Act IV: Facilitate Change – When other people lose the plot – The culture that needs to transform

Information Overwhelm

Central economic problem of scarcity: spend it always with opportunity costs in mind Maximise efficiency: make good use of visuals Reduce wastes: 不必要的后台程序关一关

Mental energy is a limited resource that cannot be wasted. Spend it on something truly important. Therefore, prioritise (which by itself is one of the most energy consuming activity for the brain).

What makes prioritising so hard? It involves picturing something you've not seen; involves imagining and moving around concepts of which you have no direct experience. Partly explains why people think about problems and not solution. Why setting goals is so hard: effective forecasting is difficult because people make decisions based on how they feel today instead of how they would be feeling then.

Creating visuals for complex ideas is also one way to maximise limited energy resources. It helps because they can condense huge amount of information in one single visual. Visual processes evolved over millions of years so it's highly efficient.

A Project That Hurts to Think About

Simplifying + chunking

Juggling 5 Things at a Time

3 solutions: Embed or automate more of what you do: keep practising until it no longer takes conscious effort so it doesn't use the prefrontal cortex but the basal ganglia (Say, “thank you, Basal Ganglia!”)

Get information onstage in the best possible order: sequencing matters. Pick a path of least resistance. If you are decorating a house and can't decide what colour to paint the walls, you're probably missing a higher-up decision about the overall colour scheme you want.

Mix up your attention

Saying No to Distractions

External distractions: best if smartphones can be out of sight, but otherwise I'll just try to use iPhone's focus mode :|

Internal distractions: brain wandering...Need to 大脑清空术

Improve mental braking system by practicing any type of braking, including physical acts.

Inhibit distractions early before they take on momentum. Inhibition requires, first and foremost, recognition, which is made easier if you can explicitly spell it out in verbal terms than if you only have some vague, implicit sense of your desire. Call it by its name LOL. So build up relevant vocab and get used to internal dialogue.

Searching for the Zone of Peak Performance

Bad news: it takes a kind of delicate & precisely right balance of chemistry in the brain to kick the lazy butt of your prefrontal cortex and get it to work.

Good news: you can actually cheat your brain into releasing the chemicals to optimise your performance by visualisation. Visualise something good or something bad (fear heightens alertness and right amount of stress), whatever that works to get yourself going.