When you’re trying to get a better handle on how to use your brain, we suggest “paying attention to your attention.” We describe this as noticing “patterns in the quality of your thinking across the day.”
For example, maybe you “notice how amazingly focused you are in the morning and how incredibly slow you are in the afternoon.”
Like many people, you might feel more clear-headed in the morning because you’re still unencumbered by the many fires you’ll have to put out and tasks you’ll have to take on throughout the day. By the end of the day, however, your head may be filled with the various to-dos that have popped up, and it can be harder to focus.
Once you’ve taken stock of the quality of your thinking throughout the day, you can start scheduling it out accordingly.
If your mind is clearest in the morning, use that time to do deeper and more complex thinking, “because you can just focus better.”
Save less creative work for the moments when you tend to be more distracted.
For many people, we recommend doing “creative work first, urgent and important work second, email and everything else third.” All of this can ensure you’re applying your brain’s most powerful moments to the tasks that truly require them .
