Low Battery - Why You're Always Mentally Drained (And How to Fix It)

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• Low Battery: Why You're Always Mentally Drained (And How to Fix It)
• A talk by Callum Silcock

This presentation was written using obsidian slides which is why the markdown looks a little weird, see attached PDF output and notes of every slide.

Everything underneath "note" below are speaker notes to remind me what to talk about

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• Introduction - Principal Engineer at ANZ
• 15+ years building and scaling dev teams
• Today: why you feel brain dead at 3pm and what to do about it

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Story time - Baby is coming

• October 3rd 2023
• I'm working from home and dialed into my standup at 10am with a new manager that's just started at ANZ a few weeks prior
• Why am I working from home? Because my wife is 41 weeks pregnant and due at any moment

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• She comes into the room and exclaims "I'm pretty sure i'm in labor"
• Ok, great! We have a plan for this, I do a quick brb on the call and get her to sit down on the couch and set her up
• I run back to the call and tell everyone "my baby is coming" and put the slack status on, quickly book the next 2 weeks as OOO and cancel all my meetings

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But in the time it takes me to do this suddenly I have 6 new slack notifications

• I start looking at them
• OMG congrats!!
• Could you quickly send me the document so I can work on it while you're away
• etc.

Hold on... this isn't important... back to the task at hand

I close the laptop go through to the other room to sit with my wife

Ok, gotta call my Dad as I need him to pick up the dog.

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• Open my phone and see a wall of notifications
  • Do a quick scan
  • ummm more slack notifications
• Gotta Focus
  • Call dad

Great he's going to pick up the dog

Ok back to my wife, what do I need to do now, right

Start timing the Contractions

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I open the contraction timer app, click "start contraction" and immediately get a "Could you rate this app out of 5 stars"

The most important thing in my life was happening that day and I was consistently bombarded with things trying to steal my attention

Things getting me to switch focus

Things that ultimately didn't matter

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Sound familiar?

• We're constantly being pulled away from what currently matters
  • Notifications from other applications
  • I bet in the time i've been talking you've had a bunch of notifications already pop up
• Every buzz, ping, popup stealing our focus
• And there's a hidden cost we're not seeing

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Your brain has a battery

• Think of cognitive capacity like your phone battery
• Start the day at 100%, take it off charge to wake up
• Every task drains it a little
• Sleep recharges it
• Simple, right? But here's where it gets interesting'
• It's not just WHAT you do that drains battery, it's HOW you do it

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Some brains drain faster than others

• If you're neurodivergent, especially ADHD, cognitive battery starts smaller and drains faster
• This isn't a limitation, just how your brain may work

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We're all running at 60% capacity

• Research shows most professionals spend 20-40% time on meaningful work
• The rest: switching between tasks, managing interruptions, cognitive overhead
• But, It's not just about time
• There's a deeper problem happening in our brains

source

VoucherCloud Study: The average office worker is only productive for 2 hours and 23 minutes each day Apollo Technical

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The Switching Cost Trap

• Every time you switch between tasks, brain pays cognitive tax
• Your Brain has to stop, context switch, reload new task
• Like closing one app and opening another
  • creates a processing overhead
  • creates errors

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It's not just online

• Environmental factors also play a large part
• In the office we have
  • Physical interruptions - "shoulder tapping" - people coming to your desk
    • Cognitive drain
  • Overhear conversation? Brain needs to filter that out
    • More cognitive drain
  • And the worse, peripheral vision constantly triggered by movement
    • Like someone walks behind my monitor?
    • Even more Cognitive drain

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And it's not just in the office

• Working from home we also have forced cognitive switches
  • Seeing the laundry that you still need to put on or the dishes in the sink
  • Doorbell rings from Amazon delivering a package
  • My dog that wants to bark at everyone that walks past my house

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The compound effect

• All of these compound together
• One or two switches? No big deal
• But we're switching tens to hundreds of times per day
• Email, Slack, meetings, phone calls, different projects
• Each switch compounds
• By afternoon, cognitive battery running on fumes
• Don't know why because each individual switch felt harmless

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Fast vs slow battery drain

• Focus on a single meaningful item drains our battery slower
• Deep work - when you're in flow state - barely drains battery at all
  • You can do this all day
• But responding to 12 different slack threads, or something like, I dunno, suddenly needing to do a ton of estimations and elaboration sessions?
  • Kills your battery quick

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What can I do?

• As a manager you have a major impact on your teams energy
• You can implement strategies to help them preserve their batteries

But first...

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First: put on your own oxygen mask

• Start with you
  • Look at your own situation first
• By implementing strategies to help your own battery, you will learn how to help your staff
• Can't preserve other people's cognitive batteries if yours is constantly dead

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holding slide for strategies

4 quick fixes 3 strategies

Ok... so, I'm an engineer and love giving people actionable takeaways from my talks, so, here's some immediate things to roll out

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Quick fix #1: Notification triage

• As we discussed notification is context switch
• Phone buzzes, brain automatically processes "is this important?"
• Even if don't check immediately, you've paid cognitive tax
• Be ruthless and cut those out
• Email / slack don't need real-time responses
• You can batch these into dedicated times

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Quick fix #2: Physical workspace

• Your environment shapes your cognitive load
• In office, position yourself to minimize peripheral movement
• headphones mean "don't interrupt"
  • try messaging on slack first
• At home, dedicate space for work
  • Brain learns to associate that space with focus mode

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Quick fix #3: Calendar blocking

• Most people are calendar reactive
• Let meetings fill their day, try to do real work in gaps
• Flip this
• Block time for most important work first, let meetings fill around it
• Two hours is sweet spot - long enough to get into flow, short enough to maintain energy

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Quick fix #4: Deep vs Shallow scheduling

• Cal Newport's concept - not all work is created equal
• Deep work requires your full cognitive battery
• Shallow work can be done when running low
• Schedule accordingly
• Do most important thinking when battery is full
• Save email for when running on fumes

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Holding slide for all 4 quick fixes

Ok lets move on to strategies

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Strategy #1: Communication protocols

• Set a culture with your and stakeholders on communication norms
• Not everything needs immediate response
• Most "urgent" things aren't actually urgent
• Create clear protocols about what warrants interrupting someone's deep work vs what can wait

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Strategy #2: Meeting hygiene

• Meetings are major battery drains, especially back-to-back
• Build in transition time so brain can context switch properly
• Protect blocks of time that are meeting-free for your team
• Please have an agenda - aimless meetings are cognitive torture

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Strategy #3: Energy management

• About becoming more conscious of your cognitive state
• When are you sharpest? When do you crash?
• Plan accordingly
• Know you have demanding afternoon? Take it easier in morning
• Big presentation? Schedule recovery time after

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But how am I going to remember these?

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Your toolkit

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• Created companion website with tools to help implement these concepts
• At link csi.lk/battery
• Includes all of the strategies i've talked about, the slides and the AI generated images

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Start tomorrow

• Don't try to implement everything at once - recipe for failure
• Pick one thing from today's talk and commit to trying it tomorrow
• Once that becomes habit, add another
• Remember, small changes compound

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Your cognitive battery is precious

• Final thought - cognitive capacity is your most valuable resource
• You don't expect your phone to last for days on end without charging
• Don't do the same with your brain
• Protect your cognitive battery, it will serve you better in everything you do

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Questions?

csi.lk/battery

• Thank you

• Love to hear your questions

• Don't forget to check out companion resources online

• Lastly I'm going to finish early to give you some time back to do the context switch