Hyperefficient: Dr. Mithu Storoni Shares Productivity Brain Hacks

Getting your brain ready for the workday might be more complex than loading a couple of K-Cups into the coffee machine.

In Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, physician and ophthalmic surgeon Dr. Mithu Storoni — who has a background in neuroscience — uses the latest research to offer productivity boosters. She told b. how to increase focus without (just) relying on caffeine.

b.: Can you explain the basics of what you refer to as ‘power law’?

Storoni: I imagine a way of working that’s halfway between sprinting — going at 100% and then stopping at zero, repeatedly — and running a marathon, so running at 30% or 40% all of the time. 

The reason it’s such a powerful, effective way to work is because it lets you reach your peaks. It lets you perform 100% in terms of your capacity but, more importantly, in terms of the quality of your mental work. At the same time, it doesn’t need you to stop working. You can carry on working just at a slightly moderate pace for the rest of the session. It achieves efficiency by not needing you to stop working. 

b.: What is the ‘gear network’ you describe for optimal efficiency? 

Storoni: If you’re driving a car, you would be matching your gear. … Imagine your mind running at three speeds: slow, medium and fast. 

Mental processing happens best in what I term “gear one,” a state of the mind that is relatively sober, where your thoughts can wander. If you need to focus, as when you’re reading a heavy report, the best kind of mental state is … “gear two” [where] it doesn’t get distracted. A faster pace … is “gear three,” where your mind is working, where it is reactive — it’s easily distracted. It’s following leads without actually having any focus.

For what you’re doing, one state is going to be ideal. You achieve peak efficiency or hyperefficiency, when you can maneuver yourself into the right state for that. 

b.: How might efficiency change for varying personalities or environments?

Storoni: Your gear personality is the natural tendency of your mind to work in a certain way. For instance, we all need a baseline of stimulation to get into the “Goldilocks Zone,” into the middle speed of mental processing, of mental work. In this kind of middle, Goldilocks state, you focus, and you can do different types of mental work. You can brainstorm, and you can create all the time, having peak focus. Now, different people need different levels of stimulation to get to that level.

You could be someone who needs to be in the office, surrounded by your team — surrounded by people, surrounded by noise and deadlines of urgency — and that keeps you in the right mental state to be focused and alert for what you’re doing. You could be someone else who’s focused and alert in a quiet environment, and you need very little to get to that mental peak level.

You can use cues from your immediate environment — and you can use cues from your own physiology — to get into the right gear. … There are different times of day when certain types of work take place better. A team that’s putting the ideas down to a plan would be scheduled differently. … No one works for more than four hours at an extremely high intensity. 

Managers, employers and team leaders should create [a] rolling pattern for everyone in any workplace, especially today with AI and complete, drastic, constant change.

b.: If you could design the ideal workplace for the age of AI, what would it look like?

Storoni: There’s McKinsey data that shows 30% of all work hours in the United States will be automated by 2030. We’re going through a lot of drastic changes and people don’t know what their roles are going to be. Job security and long-term financial incentives are going, so now employers need a different way of motivating their team to carry on.  

Instead, what you have to do as a leader, as a manager, is inspire people for the pleasure of the learning itself. Give team members something that they have either a talent or natural inclination for — or existing skills they’re drawn towards — the opportunity to learn and to develop and to incrementally improve themselves along any domain. That has been shown to be a very robust way of people carrying on in the job, enjoying the process.

b.: How does hyperefficiency relate to longevity? 

Storoni: We have changed the way we live and work drastically from the way our ancestors lived and worked. Of course, “working” definitions have changed, the way we work has changed and so on. But there are patterns you can see in … the way life happens in places that have not been hit by industrialization or technological progress.

We all have a tendency to work in these bursts of high intensity and then moderate intensity now. I cite a couple of studies in the book that suggest when the brain works, it’s healthier for the brain. It’s more neuroprotective because it protects the brain from insults and stress.

We see evidence of this from the way we naturally move. If you look at the way current workplaces function, it’s much more of an assembly line, a continuous way of working. Your brain gets very tired if it does the same thing beyond a certain length of time or if it was a heavy load for a longer period than it should be.

As soon as the brain grows tired, it pushes on the accelerator and it uses all its resources to keep going. If you are working … in a way where your brain is feeling good enough to be hyperefficient — where it’s [in] a gear matching the terrain it’s working with — then you’re no longer putting your brain through this excess strain.

We would need a few years to confirm this, but it’s very much in line with studies and with ways in which people who live long and healthy lives have with the pattern of their lives.

b.: How long should it take for the average person to achieve hyperefficiency? 

Storoni: The change of habits revolves around your circadian rhythms, how you’re working, your work environment, the type of work you’re doing, giving yourself enough rest and so on. It’s engineering the right environment.

If your mind, your brain, is constantly working with a heavy load — if it is always tired, creaking under the strain — then as soon as you remove that strain, you create optimal conditions for it to perform. So, there isn’t really a time limit. It’s changing the way you’re doing things to create optimal environments for your brain.

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