Simply relying on willpower alone isn’t enough to stay ahead of the game. High-earning and achieving entrepreneurs and professionals understand that their minds and bodies need to run at peak efficiency. They can optimize their output by priming and aligning their mind-body connection to never miss a step. By reducing their body’s probability of fatigue and burnout, they achieve maximum results in a fraction of the time.
Cognitive priming can help reduce decision fatigue
When you’re mentally fatigued, your overall energy levels suffer, leaving little to no bandwidth for making high-impact decisions that will move the business forward. Every successful entrepreneur and high-achieving professional understands how priming your mind and minimizing the amount of menial decisions only aids your overall stamina.
The mental load of making decisions every day can tax the brain over time, leaving you drained and debilitated. This is why it’s important to always side with progress over perfection. Something doesn’t need to be perfect for it to be done. Focusing on consistent improvements can reduce the mental burden of trying to achieve perfection.
Another tool that can be used to prime the brain is weekly reflections that allow you to identify bottlenecks and refine strategies—things that aid business growth. When you refine your decision-making, you’re able to adapt more effectively. Decision automation is also an additional tool that many high-achieving entrepreneurs and professionals employ. This is why so many sign up for meal plans, streamline wardrobes, and set work schedules.
Nutrient timing boosts and sustains the body’s energy and focus
No one needs a doctor to tell them how important eating is. Regarding your business, skipping a meal can impact your cognitive function and lower your productivity levels and stamina. You can’t think clearly when you’ve skipped breakfast and lunch.
A strategic approach to food consumption can impact your business’s day-to-day operations. Eating protein-rich foods before a deep-thinking creative session or business evaluation can help your body sustain focus for long periods.
Love to snack? Adding nutrient-dense snacks like a Greek yogurt parfait or no-bake energy bites can help you avoid those pesky midday energy crashes and stop you from grabbing that extra cup of coffee. Also, don’t forget to hydrate. Your body runs on water, not Dunkin.
Energy mapping uses the body’s natural rhythm to maximize output
The idea of energy mapping can seem foreign to some, but at its core, it’s aligning tasks with your natural energetic rhythm. If you feel your energy levels are highest in the morning, it might be advantageous to schedule your heavier tasks so that you can wind down as the day goes on.
Author Daniel Pink wrote an entire book on how energy mapping can change how you approach your workday. In “When: The Scientific Secrets Behind Perfect Timing,” Pink discusses how the day is divided into three phases: Peak, Trough, and Recovery.
The Peak is considered the best time of day to do cognitively heavy work. The Trough is when your energy begins to dip and is at its lowest. During the Recovery phase, we gain some of our energy post-trough, so it’s a great time to brainstorm or plan.
Identifying your peak productivity windows will help you pinpoint the best times to set high-focus work sessions. Scheduling the more cognitive demanding tasks during these windows of time can help boost your productivity, circumvent burnout, and lead to better time management. To avoid mental fatigue and burnout due to long-term focus, always incorporate 10-minute breaks that allow your body and brain to rest.
Using delegation and automation frees up mental bandwidth
An adage states that we all have the same amount of time as high-earning entrepreneurs and professionals. This is only partially true.
Something that sets them apart from everyone else is that they have learned the power of delegating and automation. These crucial differences allow them to free up time so that they aren’t exerting themselves non-strategically.
They recognize that delegating tasks frees up their mental bandwidth (and avoids burnout) so that they can make impactful decisions to grow their business and careers. Another useful system is batching similar tasks together. When you do this, you reduce the need for context-switching and, in turn, save cognitive energy.
