As human being, we are often in stressful situations either in our private life or in our professional one. Part of the stress comes from external sources such as a company setup, the management attitude, goals setting, colleagues aggreablness, etc. Another part of the stress comes from internal source such as high personal goals, fear of being not appreciated, an overlaod schedule, a lack of energy recovering moments, etc.
Stress can be spotted quite easily whereas the microstress just goes below the radar. It affects us but its hidden nature makes it difficult to manage. And it can have an imporant toll on our health. The kind of mirostress that affects us can also come either from outside or inside. Outside, you can endure unconforable remarks about your work. Inside, you can just suffer of having too much on your plate but explain it to yourself as an unability to manage your environement. In this case, you might look for productivity tools but this will let the microstress linger.
Needless to say that stress' impacts on your health can be serious..
When we're unable to move on with our tasks because we feel overwhelmed, we don't think about all the tasks we have to do but we mistakenly believe that it's about a bad personal organisation. In fact it's related to the huge quantity of tasks, our workload, and a lack of energy. Wathever the orgnisation system we got, we have too much on our plate. And just looking at our todo list just makes it worse. As Jade Wu puts it:
Why would you let a to-do list hijack your brain? But it’s actually pretty simple—your brain doesn’t just see a to-do list, it sees the threat of scarcity: not enough time, not enough energy, not enough magical ability to fit everything into 24 hours. Or it sees the threat of failing, the threat of disappointing others, the threat of feeling like you’re not doing enough.
Research found out that having some issues in life hinders cognitive skills. A study showed that when people with limited ressources are asked about an hypothetical question such as what they would do in case of an issue with their car, knowing that repairs will cost them more than what they can afford, it put them in a state where their gognitive performance is reduced. Researchers compared their results with a group of people with limited ressources as well who where not asked about some financial issue and with a group of people with sufficient financial ressrouces. The three groups were asked to make a small cognitive tests. Only the first one showed lower cognitive assessment results. The phenomenon can be explained by the brain trying to inconsciously keep the topic hot because of its importance. The price to pay for the brain is to dedicate some amount of its cognitive energy into this task.
The same effect heppens with a lack of clarity. If some task you have to do is not clear enough, is just intimidating, or you don't have the tools to carry it on, you will be impactacted before you even try to perfom this task. The effect can be measured by a drop in performance on all work preceding the problematic task. The brain keeps inconsciously producing some anxiety about the difficult task to come impacting thus the one currently being performed.
The tasks that are not clear enough to be performed without more research, with some tools you don't have, or without proper explaination tends to be delayed in their start. When this task pops up a feeling of confusion happens in our head. To proceeed with the task the brain must find a path and switches to the startegy mode. Sometimes because we are tired this switches does not happen and we just revert to something else putting off the task to diffuse anxiety.
Another setup where confusion hinders performance is when working on a task where the associated mete-goal or vision is lacking. We have to come up ourselves with the missing pieces. Besides having an idea completely off course that would just make our output less interesting, lack of vision, context or high level goal induces resistance or friction in our work.
A clear purpose helps us perform task with ease and alignement.
When switching from one working sphere to another costs you 23 minutes on the average.
Working with different working sphere (unrleated topics) can be challenging as our brain needs to switch between those topics. This change impacts our cognitive load and research showed that it costs 23 minutes of lost maximal focus. Obvously this doesn't happen when you switch from your wordprocessor to the email to look up for some reference (unless you read the messages you just received). We usually think of this issue when switching from our work to a social app to check in with friends but this happens also when full focused on our work just because we are mixing different topics.
Task we do at different moment of the day or of the week have different impact on our psyche. Sometimes, it's easy to do, other times it strains us. All tasks are not equal: some needs focus, other thinking, and others neither. But depending on your state of mind, performance on a task will differ wathever the willpower we think we have.
Willpower doesn't work. We have a limited amount of willpower and predicting our own behavior based on our estimated willpower is usually wrong.
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