Learn to focus to become more productive

Cate Murden, founder of corporate wellbeing and performance company PUSH, explains how to master the art of thinking effectively

If you want to be more productive, it’s not about working more hours, it’s about thinking at your best. To do so, you need to use your prefrontal cortex, at the very front of your brain. It is where our personality comes from, our decision-making, and it moderates our social behaviour – it’s where we do our best thinking.

The problem is, we have a tendency to come out of it really quickly – our brains are wired for danger. As soon as we start to feel psychologically unsafe, as many of us do right now, we go into our emotional system, rather than our thinking system.

To stay within your prefrontal cortex, you need to work with its limitations. It doesn’t have a huge amount of energy, so think about how difficult a task is and schedule the most challenging for when you have the most energy. It doesn’t have much capacity either, so break down your to-do list into manageable chunks. The prefrontal cortex isn’t very proficient at processing, so don’t try to multitask. And it’s really fussy – it only likes doing things it enjoys – so think about how you could add a reward to the completion of your task, or be a bit more curious about it.

Finally, the prefrontal cortex is really easily distracted, so make sure you turn off notifications on your phone so you can have an hour without interruption.