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.