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One counterintuitive trick that has worked for me is to fire up my "manager brain" in daily life. When you do most white collar work, especially as a manager, y
by ellius 7y ago
One counterintuitive trick that has worked for me is to fire up my "manager brain" in daily life. When you do most white collar work, especially as a manager, your job consists largely of filtering a huge number of potential inputs/jobs and focusing intently on the highest value/leverage ones. Instead of fighting my increasing tendency to scan for a new dopamine hit, I allow my brain to wander for a moment and then to consider the highest value option, which frequently turns out to be continuing doing what I'm doing so that I gain the advantages and compound interest of depth in an activity and do not incur the cost of context switching. I will say that this takes a little enjoyment away from going truly deep and achieving flow, for example, where you lose your sense of time and become engrossed in the narrative/activity/whatever, but it's a bit of a jiu jitsu move and allows you to fight the world around you less and use it to your advantage a little more. I still think tuning out and removing distractions is valuable, but it's a good complementary practice.