As I entered my forties, besides suddenly developing a taste for whiskey, I could no longer rely on having the boundless energy I once enjoyed. Gone are the days when I opted for budget accommodation while traveling and when I configured my PC just the way I wanted it. I’ll take the comfort of a four-star hotel and the ease of use of an iPad any day. We all know that time is a precious resource that needs careful management. But the more I age, the more I realize that my energy, particularly my mental energy, is limited and requires the same level of attention.
But we’re living in the information age, and information, both the useful kind and the not-so-useful kind, is growing without restraint. We have a limited mental capacity, and there’s a plethora of data out there competing for the available space in our brains. It’s no longer feasible to remember every username and password combination required to live a normal life. It’s easy to become overwhelmed and mentally fatigued.
How can we simplify our lives and reduce the amount of mental overhead? How can we defend our memory and mental energy from rampant abuse?
Actively manage your mental energy
The ability to discern what’s important from all the noise and to have the faculty to then throw away the noise is a skill that’s becoming increasingly critical. By purging what we identify as unimportant, we free up space in our minds. The less we need to keep track of, the more mental energy we have left for essential tasks.
Here are six habits I follow to minimize noise and manage my mental energy.
Restricting intake
Before we start swatting flies, we need to shut the windows first. The less trash we allow into our minds, the less we need to deal with its ill effects. For instance, I limit my time spent on social media. I’m particular about the type of news I read. I avoid broadcast television. I don’t read tabloids, pay any attention to gossip, follow sports, or keep up with trends.
Since having kids, I’ve come to appreciate tranquility and quietness more than ever. Occasionally, you could try exercising or commuting without listening to music, a podcast, or an audiobook. You may discover peace or moments of brilliance, running through quiet meadows or even while driving through a concrete jungle.
The key is to be more aware of what we subject our brains to each day. Camping or relaxing on a beach are enjoyable activities because they produce fewer stimuli and require less decision-making than our usual routines.
Returning items to their home
Everything I own has a home. When I finish using something, I put it back in its designated spot so that I don’t need to spend time and energy searching for it later. We’re affected by our surroundings, and living among clutter will add stress and anxiety to our lives. Organizing our environment will organize our minds, facilitating mental peace.
It may seem counterintuitive that remembering the home of every item we own would reduce the strain on our brains. But I believe that the moment we unwrap something and place it in the house, we’ve already allocated space in our long-term memory for several attributes associated with that item. For instance, we know who it belongs to, where and when we bought it, and where we’ve decided to put it. The only extra effort is putting it back where it belongs after each use. And I believe that this effort is less taxing on the mind than even one instance of having to scour the house frantically for a misplaced item.
Putting things back where they belong will free up our short-term memory by not having to remember where we put them. Our long-term memory remembers where everything belongs. And if something doesn’t deserve space in our long-term memory to store its attributes, then we likely don’t need it. This brings us to the next habit.
Reducing what I own
We progress through life amassing hundreds of tangible and intangible items that leech away precious energy, and we hardly give any thought to it. We buy cars and houses and fill them with all kinds of things. And the more we acquire, the more mental energy we need to spend to keep track of everything. Try reducing what you own and restrict your consumption.
When my wife and I moved from Toronto to Tokyo, we took our two kids and four suitcases. We had sold our house in Toronto and almost everything in it. It was a mental detox, and it was liberating. It was a privilege to feel at that stage in my life, the freedom of a clean slate and the exuberance of having so much potential for the future. With distractions eliminated, I was charged with great focus and was thrilled to take on an uncertain future that I knew held several challenges. My wife and I vowed that when reestablishing our lives in Tokyo, we would be ruthlessly discriminating about what we choose to allow into our lives. We would defend our minimalistic lifestyle, prioritizing experience over material ownership.
Removing things from my mind
Is there a nagging task that you’ve been needing to do but haven’t gotten around to doing? Try scheduling an event in your calendar so that it can be offloaded from your mind. By writing things down, either manually or electronically, we relieve our brains from the burden of having to maintain them in our short-term memory. When I used to work at an office, the last thing I would do before leaving for the day was to update my calendar to upload my short-term memory. This quick activity ensured a productive morning the next day and helped to leave work at work.
If you have unsettled feelings that are causing anxiety, you could dump them onto your journal. Or, consider the source of your stress and whether or not there’s anything you can do about it. If it’s not within your control, then you’re likely better off removing it from your head.
Repeating habits
Decision-making uses a lot of mental energy. Where possible, I set up and document processes or establish routines. Again, the calendar is an excellent tool for this. I time-block recurring activities and let the calendar tell me what to do when. Routines help to simplify our lives by bringing a sense of order. There’s a time for fun and spontaneity, but a little splash of color here and there is more palatable than a roomful of screaming reds and yellows.
Through automation, I reduce the number of decisions I need to make daily. I decide once and then repeat.
Reassessing tools
With the constant introduction of new technology, more of what we do and how we need to go about it have become less intuitive and more abstract. We now need to work deliberately to keep things simple. We’re no longer chopping wood and carrying water. Instead, we move digitized data around using numerous suboptimal interfaces, each adding its layer of mental administrative overhead.
There are many productivity apps out there that promise to make life easier. Take a close look at all the tools you currently use and reevaluate their effectiveness. Is there a better way to do what you’re trying to do? Can you consolidate some of these tools?
I only use the following productivity tools:
Calendar
I make it a habit of setting my calendar appointments for the next day or week every evening. I have different calendars within the app for work, personal, and family-related items. The family calendar is a shared calendar that I use with my wife to include tasks for home and activities for the kids. I also use the calendar as my to-do list.
Reminders
My wife and I have a shared reminders list for groceries. Either of us can update the list. A quick tap on my Apple Watch brings up my groceries list while browsing the isles, and I mark an item as completed as soon as I put it into the shopping cart.
Notes
This is where I keep free-form information of just about anything, including recipes, random thoughts, and my journal. It’s also where I do all of my writing.
When I worked at an office using Windows, Outlook had a wonderful feature for creating conditional formatting rules for emails and calendar events. For example, you can have all emails that are sent directly to you in one color. Make emails where you are only on the CC list appear in another color. Colors can be assigned by sender, such as your boss; by recipient, such as a distribution list; or by several other parameters. I didn’t create rules to move emails to various folders as the control freak in me wanted to make sure I saw every email before deciding what to do with it. Once in a while, I would sort my inbox by sender and go through a cleanup exercise.
I have tried several list-keeping and productivity apps and have found that they all net me more time and energy used than saved. I felt that I spent too much time managing the items within the apps when I could have been using that time to work on completing them. Over time, I have landed on using just the four basic iOS-native apps of Calendar, Reminders, Notes, and Mail to manage my personal and work lives. They are simple, yet not simplistic, and Apple is more likely to stick around than most other companies offering productivity software.
Closing Comments
To simplify the world and manage my mental energy, I keep these six habits:
- Restricting intake
- Returning items to their home
- Reducing what I own
- Removing things from my head
- Repeating habits
- Reassessing tools
I believe that the energy we have is finite, and we should spend it with the same care we give to our time and money. By using our mental energy more mindfully, we can help avoid mental fatigue and ultimately lead happier and more fulfilling lives.
Leave a Reply