Brain Capital

How many notifications do you get every day? How many emails? How many messages? We have instant communication with the whole world available at our fingertips. It helps us achieve things we couldn’t even dream of even a few decades ago. But it can also be overwhelming. Our brains aren’t really designed to process so much information all the time. 

When we get burned out, our decision-making suffers. Often we just want to fire off an answer and move on to the next thing without really stopping to think about the ramifications. If you’re on the phone, reading an email, and having a message ping in all at the same time, how much of any of those conversations are you even retaining? You might miss critical details or make promises you don’t remember. You just wanted to get off the phone so you could respond to those messages.  

Doing all that leaves little time and little brain bandwidth for creativity. It’s those big ideas that executives are in their positions for. So, how to claim your brain back?  

Busy Is Not Productive 

We may have been passive participants in our cognitive overload, watching it happen little by little until our peace of mind eroded. To reclaim our time and our brains, we need to be proactive. It can be in setting aside the first 30 to 45 minutes of the day to reflect, meditate, or set an intention, as Puja Bhola Rios advises.  

“Everyone’s busy, right? But it’s your life. It’s your career. It’s your job. If you don’t make the time, you’re actually never going to be able to process everything that’s going on around you, and you’re actually never going to be able to do things like assess, ‘What is the market saying? What is my competition saying? What new features are coming up?’” the author of Get It Together: A Winning Formula for Success from the Boss You Need told Reboot. 

Managing your own attention needs to be a priority so you can be a thoughtful, attentive, and effective leader. The first step to that is accepting that you can be more productive if you aren’t busy all the time. That goes for employees too. Firms like EY and Accenture provide mental health coaching programs. Others, such as Nike and Netflix build in mental health days for long-term employee well-being. A day off to rest the brain might yield far more production than a steady slog of presenteeism. 

“Redesign your week to align deep work with cognitive peaks. Group similar tasks. Avoid decision-heavy mornings after disrupted sleep. And if you’re asking others to do focused work, give them the same scaffolding — not a Slack ping every 12 minutes,” Synaptic Potential director Amy Brann advised in Harvard Business Review. 

As a leader, model that behavior for your team and evaluate how they’re spending their brain energy as well. Simplify the environment for them as well as yourself. 

The Learning Cycle 

The recent proliferation of AI tools in the workplace can be a double-edged sword. AI’s ability to perform menial and repetitive tasks does free us up to do higher-level work. That could include saving more brain bandwidth for deep thinking, the kind that produces big ideas for products and campaigns. But overreliance on AI can compress learning cycles, causing us to retain less. The less we learn, the less we can innovate. 

Information is instant, and it’s constant. We have faster access but shallower integration. Instead of working our way through problems, many times we just ask AI. That gives us the answer we need quickly, but we don’t learn how to arrive at the answer. We don’t have our old math teachers there taking points off if we got the answer right but didn’t show our work. We know what but not why.  

In order for the human brain to grasp concepts and remember them, it needs a story. A narrative structure that can help us wrap our heads around the idea makes it stick in our minds. That’s how we learn. 

For people in the middle or later stages of their careers, it’s not that learning isn’t important, but they know pretty well how to do their jobs. They know what tasks aren’t worth their time, and they can use AI agents to cut down on busy work. But people just starting out need to learn the job. That makes mentorship more important than ever, and a two-way street. Digital natives can teach their older counterparts new tech skills, while those old dogs can pass on their old tricks to the next generation. 

A Sun Microsystems study found that employees in mentoring programs earned promotions at five times the rates that those not in such programs did. Most executives say mentorship is among their primary methods of strategy building.   

“Mentorship isn’t just a nice-to-have,” Anthony Marshall of the IBM Institute for Business Value wrote on LinkedIn. “It’s career-critical. Structured, guided relationships help individuals grow in both confidence and capability. It helps people navigate complex learning curves, develop expertise faster, and sustain motivation over time.” 

This Could’ve Been an Email 

So, how do we get our time – and our brains – back? It takes a mix of tech tools and good old-fashioned R&R.  

From the software side, cloud-based tools like Ninety keep comprehensive and easily accessible logs of operations information anyone in an organization might need. This reduces a lot of back-and-forth messaging around simple questions and reduces the number of meetings necessary. AI assistants and transcription services such as Read AI and Sally can give effective enough summaries that not everyone has to attend every meeting. Task prioritization apps like Todoist and TickTick help ensure the important things get done. 

Data optimization tools from Splunk help measure outcomes rather than simply outputs. “The two measurements go hand-in-hand, but many people focus on only the outputs, missing the bigger picture from the outcomes,” Splunk advises.  

On the human side, an important task is separating which meetings to take and which to decline. Structuring the necessary meetings into blocks, for example all in one day or only during certain hours, leaves longer chunks of time for absorption and deep work. 

“Practice being intentional about meeting participation by clarifying your role. Define whether you’re a decision-maker, advisor, informed (receiving outcomes), or not involved. Only attend meetings where you have a defined, active role,” Read AI advises. 

We can also practice good neuroergonomics, giving our brains the best chance to focus and succeed. That includes tidy workspaces and clear instructions in our communications, empowering ourselves and others to act decisively without nagging distractions that shift our attention. It can also include neuroplasticity tools like Elevate and Lumosity to stimulate critical thinking.  

When it comes down to it, our brains are the most powerful tools we have. They’re what enabled humanity to become the dominant species on Earth. We need to take of them if we want to keep succeeding.