Hi, I'm Dr. Sahar Youssef.
Welcome to Radio Headspace.
I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and a lecturer at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
I'll be guest hosting Radio Headspace this week, and I am so happy to be here.
My work is all about using science to help you get your most important work done in less time, with less stress.
I also founded a training and consulting firm called Becoming Superhuman with fellow neuroscientist Lucas Miller, who's hosting the show next week.
This week we'll explore how neuroscience can improve your life and discuss some powerful strategies that you can use to quickly get better focus.
Today, I'll talk about what you may be getting wrong about productivity and what becoming superhuman actually means.
The concept and the ethos of becoming superhuman.
First it was grounded in the research that was being done.
We could see that there was just so much untapped potential and how the brain can actually change for the better.
We can raise the roof on basic cognitive functions like our attention span, our memory, our information processing speed.
All of these things are malleable.
If your cognitive function is not serving you to some extent, you are in control of that.
And that was a super aspirational and uplifting thing to experience working with people and seeing the amazing changes that they can undergo in just a matter of weeks.
Becoming superhuman is all about questioning the status quo.
It's change.
Change is possible.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that we see people make as it relates to day-to-day productivity is actually around choosing what to focus on.
And listen, I'll be the first to admit, I love a to-do list.
Big list maker over here.
However, the research on to-do lists is rather abysmal as it relates to actually being able to identify and prioritize what is actually going to move the needle forward for you, your life, your career, your family, etc.
So take a step back, have the list.
It's the backlog of every single possibility.
It's your pantry.
It's your refrigerator.
It's the cans that you bought when we were mid pandemic and thinking that we couldn't get access to food, that are just like collecting dust in your pantry.
What we do not recommend doing on a daily basis is to literally empty your refrigerator, literally empty your pantry, throw it out all on the counter and on the floor and say great, now that I can see everything.
Let me go ahead and figure out what I'm going to make for dinner.
No, of course not.
Figure out what energy you have available to you this evening.
What needs to get done, right?
What needs to get used up tonight?
How much time do you have available?
How many people are you feeding?
You need to do an assessment first, and then you tactically go in and pick out the items that actually make sense and you bring those out and then you make your meal.
This is where you actually start to identify what we call your MITs, your most important tasks.
The one two, maximum three things that, if you were to get done today, would make today a raging success.
Another question to ask yourself here is, what will my future self thank me for?
Work back from that future state.
For example, if you're sitting there thinking, Sahar, everything is in MIT.
Ask yourself some critical questions here.
What's your unique expected contribution?
What were you hired to do?
What are the things that only you can do?
These are the questions I ask myself, because I can tell you, if I wanted, I could stay in my inbox all day, and it feels good.
Why?
Because I am in dopamine heaven.
I'm knocking out little things here and there.
A little email here, text there.
Oh, pick up on a quick call.
I'm doing low lift tasks that give me a sense of progress and accomplishment for such little effort.
Think about yourself at 7 p.m.
What do you need to get done that will make sure that you actually feel comfortable working?
Turning off.
Urgent matters and firefighting are a natural part of most of our jobs, right?
Honest moment.
We all have them.
Let's paint a picture of this day.
You wake up, you're like, oh, I'm gonna have such a productive day.
You look at that to-do list, right?
You pick out the two MITs that you wanna get done, you write them down, and then you get started.
Oh, it feels so amazing.
And boom, you get hit with that colleague.
That's like hey, sorry to interrupt, but I'm going to need this in the next 30 minutes.
Or hey, something's come down the pipeline and it needs your attention ASAP.
Pause for that moment.
What can you do inside of your own mind that will help you feel like you're still in the driver's seat?
Because I can tell you from a mental health perspective, stressors that feel and seem outside of our control are far more toxic to the brain and to the body than the exact same stressor that we perceive as being in our control.
So the name of the game here is perspective.
What can you do in terms of your mindset and how you perceive this fire that your colleague has now brought to your table?
So I'm going to pause.
I thought I was going to go from X to Y and that was my plan.
In light of new circumstances.
I'm actually going to choose to to readjust my priorities to accommodate the circumstances.
Nothing in life is set in stone.
Really, the heart and the soul of becoming superhuman is being you and accepting and embracing what it means to be you.
And when we actually accept and embrace that, even leverage all of the amazing, unique ways in which we are human, that's when we become superhuman.
You can find out more about becoming superhuman at becomingsuperhuman.science.
We'll link that in our show description too.
That's it for me today.
I'll be sharing some tips on how to improve your relationship with your phone, so you can concentrate on the important things, distraction-free.
Until then, take care.
Thank you.
