Make Work Fun Again With Neuroscience Tips

Ever feel like you’re still in the office, but with your brain having left work for the day? Regardless of where you work, I bet you’d be familiar with the sensation of being completely unmotivated, especially when slogging through an endless backlog of tedious tasks. It can be extremely difficult to finish anything when your brain is being dull and uncooperative; in times like these, it can feel like your mental battery is completely drained, leaving you with no way to cut through the monotony.

There is a way out for victims of office lethargy – the key lies in understanding how your brain works and accommodating for it. Instead of forcing yourself to tackle the work head-on with a sluggish brain, you can take measures to steer your brain towards peak performing capacity. If you know how your brain works, you will also be in a better position to achieve good time management.

Mental training exercises are not going to get you anywhere, because your brain is smarter than you think, and it’s not going to be easily bluffed. If you’re procrastinating at a task that doesn’t have a deadline, simply pretending that you have a deadline is not going to make you a more effective worker. The brain is an organ – it responds to stimuli and operates through neurochemical interactions. By approaching the issue of work efficiency from a neuroscience perspective, you will attain real changes and improvements in the way you work.

The 3F Model

The first step you can take is to evaluate your workload and work scenario against the 3F Model: Fun, Fear and Focus. As you go down your to-do list, you should be asking if each item on it is fun to you. Are these tasks things you love to do, or are you procrastinating because you have trouble with these tasks, which you deeply dislike? Everyone has tasks that they’re not good at, where they simply lack the talent or capability to get them done. It’s important to know whether you’re going to have the right level of fun with your tasks, because your brain releases a neurochemical called dopamine when you’re having fun.

Dopamine helps you think faster and learn better by making your brain more malleable and receptive to change. To get the right levels of this brain-booster and overcome your workload, you definitely want to look at what unsavoury tasks you can delegate or get rid of. Struggling at tasks that are not in line with your strengths means that you’re not having fun. When you’re not having fun, your brain is not producing enough dopamine, which can subtly but negatively affect your performance at work.

When it comes to getting work done, fear isn’t always a bad thing. As you analyse your workload to determine if they’re fun for you, you should also check if any tasks inspire fear. In this context, fear would come about if someone is checking on your progress, if you have an urgent deadline to meet or if other project stakeholders are depending on your output. Depending on the kind of scenario you’re in, if you have a lot of comparatively irrelevant tasks on hand, you should get rid of those and really focus on the things that matter most. Alternatively, you could complete the simple tasks first, so that you have enough mental clarity to handle more difficult tasks.

A certain level of fear is necessary to get the brain to release noradrenaline; this neurochemical makes us more alert and improves memory formation and recall. During situations of stress or danger, or what is commonly known as the fight-or-flight response, noradrenaline is released in higher quantities.

If the deadline for a given task is months away, it can be difficult to motivate oneself to tackle it enthusiastically – because there is no immediate stress or danger, there is no noradrenaline being released to mobilise you to work on the task. To keep yourself mentally healthy, the key is not to let fear overwhelm you as a chronic source of stress, but to get the noradrenaline flowing by putting yourself in situations where you feel slightly over-challenged, or when the task is just a little bit too difficult.

Is your workplace creating obstacles to your focus? Do you have noisy colleagues distracting you by chattering away on the phone or to each other? Do you currently have any internal distractions (for instance, a date after work) throwing off your focus from the task at hand? In order to work at your very best, it’s necessary to have sustained focus, whereupon the brain produces acetylcholine. This neurochemical works like a spotlight to keep you focused, highlighting the most important tasks and leaving everything else in the dark.

If you’re missing out on either fun (dopamine), fear (noradrenaline) or focus (acetylcholine), it’s impossible to enter peak performance. That’s why you should check if your to-do list is in line with the 3F Model – whether you’re obtaining the right levels of fun, fear and focus to get the job done. If your work doesn’t meet the 3F Model, then you want to operate in ways that can get you to fulfil these criteria, whether it’s changing the variables you can control, or avoiding the ones you can’t.

“If the mountain won't come to you, you must go to the mountain.” – Turkish proverb

Dopamine People, Serotonin People and Workflow

Worried about your tendency to procrastinate and cram everything to the very last minute, even when you’re aware of what you’re doing? This is likely because you have a more active dopamine system, compared to others who may have a more active serotonin system. People with a more active serotonin system tend to be very organised, thoughtful planners – because they plan ahead and work more steadily towards reaching their goals, they also experience less ups and downs along the way.

If you have a more active dopamine system, you get excited very easily, change your mind quite often and are very interested in new happenings. Scientists also call these people “sensation seekers”. On a practical level as a sensation seeker, you need to set up your life in such a way that you don’t have to work in the organised manner that defines those with active serotonin systems. If possible, you should play to your niche and focus on engaging in things that get you excited so you can deliver on results, while delegating away things you find boring. What you find boring may be fun and interesting to somebody else, and vice versa – consider splitting tasks with others in such a way that everyone is doing work they find fun.

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and start a lot of companies, but they don’t heavily engage in the logistical, detail-heavy work needed to establish the business, instead leaving it to a team of people dedicated to carrying out such work. Perhaps you’re great at starting projects or generating new ideas, or spontaneous work comes naturally to you. However, if you end up stumbling when you have to plan from a long-term perspective, you may want to steer yourself into a position where you can delegate the implementation to someone else. Realistically speaking, you won’t get your way every time, but with clear communication and supportive colleagues you can take steps to minimise the type of work that you don’t cope well with.

With that said, what kind of person are you? It’s important to understand yourself – whether you’re a sensation seeker or more of a serotonin person, you have unique stress points. Ask yourself what you prefer: planning several weeks ahead and finishing up your tasks one after the other, like a checklist, or improvisation without a fixed plan, always subject to change? Are you more excited by novelty, thrill-seeking and opportunities to learn new things? Or are you more interested in stability, routines and structure, working at your own pace and rhythm without external distractions? Regardless of the answer you arrive at, the path forward is the same – create the situations where you can do your best work.

Visualise a graph with the letter U inverted, marked by stress levels at the x-axis and performance at the y-axis. You can then perceive an inverted-U correlation between stress levels and performance, where some people perform best at either high or low stress levels. Draw this on a piece of paper, then add the five top tasks that you do on a daily basis. Where do they end up on the curve? If you have a very clerical or logistical task that bores you, you can throw that to the lower left corner of the curve.

Within your top five, which tasks give you high stress levels and which do you thrive well in? Do less of the tasks that bore or stress you out and do more of what you tend to do well at. With the help of the graph, you can get a feeling for your stress points corresponding to the kind of situations you will hit peak performance in.

People often think they need to change themselves, which begins with the idea that they need to work on themselves. I’d question the necessity of this idea. Why do you need to change? You should think about what your strengths are, what you’re really good at, then do more of those and try to get rid of the other things.

After a recent keynote speech, two top bosses of an organisation approached me and shared about their past experiences. They had been experiencing conflicts due to different work styles regarding questions they faced – she needed to look at the questions ahead of time and draft the perfect plan; he preferred to answer them spontaneously. Tensions occurred when she took issue with his lack of preparation, while he felt stressed by her need to prepare everything beforehand. Once they understood that they needed to work in line with their strengths, they could work more smoothly, with each party accepting and respecting the other’s preferences.

Many self-help resources suggest that you need to change yourself to become a better person, but you just have to know yourself and understand your neurochemical signature. That will provide insights into the circumstances where you can deliver your best work, whereupon you can set up your work environment in such a way that you can reach peak performance more easily and without much effort. Everyone has different stress points and working styles – understand your own and figure out how you can deliver your best work.

Having fun at work has to do with more than a workplace with an endless party atmosphere. Many organisations, particularly start-ups, try to spruce things up with free food, beautiful colours and nice workplaces. When you strip all these pleasures away, do you still love your job for what it is? People at your job may be great to work with, but people come and go. On an intrinsic level, do you love what you do?

One quick way to have more fun at work is to choose tasks that are in line with your strengths. Many organisations have yearly performance evaluations; some may hold them more frequently. Through these evaluations, organisations are aspiring to mould human beings towards perfection, polished through appraisals to be well-rounded, well-balanced and knowledgeable in every field. However, research has shown that the best results are driven not by “perfect” textbook-knowledge individuals, but by people who can fully leverage their strengths, having undergone training and development efforts to maximise them.

Employees with mediocre non-crucial skills highlighted during performance evaluations are often encouraged to attend training courses to improve them. However, I believe that it is a waste of time and effort to do so – you may be able to make these skills less awful, or even hone them to an acceptable level, but are you going to reach greatness? These resources could be spent to further train your strengths, and it has been observed that financial performance in organisations and individuals improve when people work in line with their strengths. Your job can be fun if it taps into your strengths rather than your weaknesses.

With that said, if your job is boring, nothing is going to change that. However, you can try to switch things up. Human beings only develop and progress when they are challenged and do new things. If you always do the same things, there’s no challenge and you’re not going to perform beyond your expectations.

When learning how to drive a car, a trainee has to focus and pay special attention on which pedals to push, when and how to steer the wheel, and much more. In contrast, an experienced driver can drive without having to pay nearly as much attention to the driving process. Once you learn and gain experience, the basal ganglia in the brain is responsible for helping you execute tasks without much effort, tantamount to operating on autopilot. Before this stage, however, your prefrontal cortex is actively trying to process new information – it is engaged when you perform higher-level cognitive tasks that engage creativity, problem-solving tasks and more complex thinking.

If your job is a persistently boring and unfun one, your only recourse might be to switch jobs. Your brain is intelligent enough to delegate often-used functions to the basal ganglia instead of the prefrontal cortex, without any conscious choice from you in this matter. A lot of self-help focuses on training your mind artificially, such as tricking your brain into thinking you’re having fun when you’re actually not; this doesn’t work, because our brains are not so easily tricked. Instead of attempting to pretend to have fun, you should try to have fun for real.

Certainly, it helps if you have colleagues that you enjoy being around – interacting with their cheerfulness and good humour can boost your dopamine levels. Working in a comfortable environment and access to delicious food can also elevate dopamine production, but in the end, it’s about whether you love your job or not. If you still find your job intrinsically boring, despite all the perks, you might want to consider switching jobs.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Maximising Cognitive Ability

Optimising your work life is as simple as sleeping, eating and exercising well. In other words, complementing the 3F Model is a 3S Model for Sports, Sleep and Snacks; something that people can remember and work on very easily. Your brain is part of your body, and when you change your body for the better, you do the same for your brain.

Getting off your chair and moving about, at intervals throughout the day, can benefit your cognitive performance. Regardless of your work environment, if you sleep more you’re going to perform better – a large body of research has emphasised the benefits of sleep and the dangers of insufficient ZZZ-time. By eating well, your body is supplied with the nutrients and amino acids needed in order to keep neurochemicals flowing and keep you at peak performance.

It can be very difficult to change the way you think, but it’s easy to make changes to your body and improve brain health. It can be as simple as taking a quick walk for 15 minutes to clear your head before getting back to work.

Work life is often dotted with meetings and scheduled time with other people. Why not set some time in your agenda for you? In a meeting of one, you can work by yourself and focus on the most strategic tasks without any interruptions. When people attempt to multitask or are interrupted, they make 50% more mistakes and take 50% longer to complete their tasks. Eliminating internal and external distractions can be a big performance booster – common occurrences like doors opening and closing, or catching stray conversations in the office, can be unexpectedly disruptive and pull you out of the productive state you’ve worked yourself into.

Having worked with a wide range of people from various industries, it’s always great hearing them bring up the positives of changing their work routines. From implementing the 3F Model throughout their workplaces and focusing on their strengths, to improving physical and mental wellness with the 3S Model, the results are consistent – people note how they feel better, think better and get more done at work while spending less time.

With the 3F Model, it’s possible to become much more productive, since you’re working with your brain, not against it. If you spend one day of the week optimising for fun, fear and focus, you can get more done with the rest of the work week than if you were working normally for those five days. When you configure your work life to unlock your brain’s peak performance, driven by foundations in neuroscience, working less for more results becomes a reality.

1. Evaluate for Fun, Fear and Focus

With fun, fear and focus in consideration, prioritise work that is fun and in line with your optimal stress levels, while removing internal and external distractions to the best of your ability.

2. Coordinate with Others

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. When you coordinate with your colleagues, you can delegate work you find difficult to them, if they respond well to such tasks, and vice versa.

3. Treat Yourself Well

Get sufficient nutrition, sleep and exercise to keep your body, and by extension your brain, in peak condition. Even simple activities like short walks out of the office can provide much-needed mental clarity.