Becoming a Cognitive Athlete

This is Sergio (call sign Star). What does he have to do with cognitive performance? That will become clear as the story unfolds.

I heard a phrase recently from Dr Tommy Wood, the neuroscientist, athletic performance consultant and author, that I rather enjoyed. It came from a conversation on the Feel Better Live More podcast which a lot of the ideas below are drawn from, along with a few of my own thoughts and observations.

He used the term “cognitive athlete”, and the idea of actually becoming one resonated more than I expected. Imagine the strange looks you would get if you put that on a business card (then again, business cards don’t really exist anymore, so that alone would get you a strange look) Anyway, I digress.

He uses the term not because we are operating like cognitive athletes… but because, for most of us, that’s probably the biggest opportunity we have. If your work largely involves thinking, deciding, solving problems and making judgement calls, then your brain is effectively your primary asset. And while we’ve become a lot more sophisticated with how we train and look after ourselves physically, it feels like we still have a fair way to go on the cognitive side.

Part of the challenge is how we actually spend our days.

Professor Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, has shown that our attention on a screen now lasts, on average, less than a minute. What’s more interesting is that a large portion of those interruptions are self-inflicted. We’ve now trained ourselves to seek out distraction to the point where it’s become a habit. A habit we’re very good at. In fact, some people are getting close to mastery… which would be great if it was something worth mastering.

A quick check of email turns into a reply, which turns into another tab, which turns into something else entirely. Before you know it, the thing you originally sat down to do has quietly slipped off the list.
You can get to the end of the day having been flat out… and still feel frustrated that you didn’t actually make progress on the work that matters most. The kind of work that gives you a sense of meaning and satisfaction. The kind of work that’s really important that you do. Instead, you’ve done a whole lot of small things.

I was also listening to Connor Teskey, CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, who runs a business managing well over a trillion dollars in assets. He was talking about starting a family and initially thinking there was no way he would have time for it given the demands of the role. What he found instead was that the important things stayed, and a whole lot of other things simply fell away.

Around the same time, we’ve seen similar patterns in the four-day workweek trials run by 4 Day Week Global, where organisations have maintained output while reducing time.

Which suggests that most people aren’t short on time, they’re just not always clear on what actually deserves it.

This is where Dr. James Hewitt, performance scientist, provides a useful lens. He talks about the brain having three cognitive gears. There is a high gear where you are fully focused on meaningful, demanding work, a low gear where you are properly recovering, and then there is the middle gear, which is where emails, meetings and general administration tend to sit.

Physical athletes understand this concept immediately, you are either in high gear (performing) or low gear (recovery). In fact if you think about it from a physical perspective, the middle gear is a bit like running all day. Not fast enough to be high performance, not slow enough to be recovery, just a constant level of output that gradually wears you down.

 Most people spend a large portion of their day here. Running aimlessly from one small distraction to the next. To be clear, we have to spend some time here (meetings, admin etc) but not most of our day. This is not where we can add the most value.

Plus the challenge is that middle gear work has a way of slowly draining the meaning out of what we do. It gradually sucks the life from us. A day full of reactive, small work with no meaningful progress (cited as something we seek most in our roles) can leave us feeling like an empty, shallow husk by day’s end (sorry, being dramatic for impact).

So to become a “Cognitive athlete” we need to deliberately spend more time in high gear and low gear. Perhaps in our workday we need to operate more like a surgeon. Clarity of what needs to be done, the execution of it (poor phrasing) along with the focus to deal with any complications.

I mean surgeons don’t begin an operation and then decide to quickly check their phone or jump into something else halfway through. Can you imagine them stopping surgery to take a selfie, check a text or do a bit of scrolling. The environment is set up, distractions are removed, and for that period of time the focus is singular.

We, on the other hand, tend to attempt our most important work somewhere between emails, distractions we are now programmed to look for, and endless meetings.

So rather than overcomplicating it, there’s one simple thing you can do. One habit you can start. Pick one piece of work each day that actually matters (something that would genuinely benefit from your attention). Do it at the time when you feel most alert, remove as many distractions as you can (including your phone), and give it a minimum twenty minutes of proper, uninterrupted attention.

Not an hour, not a full morning. Just start with a minimum twenty minutes where that’s the only thing you’re doing. Do this one action and then notice how you feel at the end of the day.

Because we probably owe it to ourselves to spend more time in that high gear… and just as importantly, to properly switch off afterwards into the low gear where a lot of our creativity and thinking actually happens.

And just to close the loop on the alpaca.

Yes, it was a distraction, one I shamelessly used to prove a point.

But hopefully this distraction was a useful one on your journey towards becoming a cognitive athlete.