Episode 72: How to Make Hard Tasks Instantly Easy
Confusion and Executive Functioning
In this episode of the Executive Function Braintrainer Trainer Podcast, hosts Dr. Erica Warren and Darius Namdaran explore strategies to make challenging tasks easy using executive functions. The conversation covers techniques like time chunking, unitasking, changing perspectives, body doubling, processing styles, and delegation. The episode emphasizes leveraging the right tools and approaches to shift tasks from difficult to manageable, ultimately increasing productivity and overcoming procrastination.
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Erica: Welcome to the Personal Brain Trainer podcast. I'm Dr Erica Warren.
Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your hosts. Join us on an adventure to translate scientific jargon and brain research into simple metaphors and explanations for everyday life. We explore executive function and learning strategies that help turbocharge the mind.
Erica: Come learn to steer around the invisible barriers so that you can achieve your goals. This podcast is ideal for parents, educators, and learners of all ages.
Darius: This podcast is sponsored by dyslexiaproductivitycoaching.com. we give you a simple productivity system for your Apple devices that harnesses the creativity that comes with your dyslexia.
Erica: This podcast is brought to you by goodsensorylearning.com, where you can find educational and occupational therapy lessons and remedial materials that bring delight to learning. Finally, you can find Dr Warren's many courses at, learningspecialistcourses.com dot. Come check out our newest course on developing executive functions and study strategies.
Darius: Hey, Erika, I'm, looking forward to chatting to you today. My wife and I have been working on something. It's called the productivity matrix. But I want to take one particular little aspect of it and discuss it with you because we've been kind of touching base on it over the episodes, just alluding to it. But it'd be nice to just have one episode, and it seems like it's a bit of clickbait. Title how to make hard tasks instantly easy to do, but actually it's not. There's a lot in this, and it's surprising what we can do, how to make hard tasks instantly easy to do. Are you up for the journey?
Erica: Absolutely.
Darius: I'm looking forward to this one because, you know, we've been talking about this quite a lot, just personally in the background for a couple of months since this kind of insight hit me. Yeah, you know what it's like. You do something unconsciously and in coaching sessions and so on, and then it comes to the moment where you have to teach it to someone, because we, my wife and I and you, we've been thinking, how do we take some of the techniques we've been using for workplace strategy coaching and teach it to others? And the moment you have to do that, you have to kind of create frameworks. You have to create processes that are really easy for other people to pick up. And this is one of them that sort of emerged.
Erica: You said something earlier that really resonated with me is you make it conscious. So. Right. We have some things that we do automatically, they come naturally to us, but in order to teach it to somebody else, we have to consciously break it down.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: And it's always a very, very interesting process because you don't always have the awareness of what you're doing. And sometimes it takes a while to tease it out.
Darius: Yeah, you've got like, unconscious competence that you're turning into conscious competence. So here's the thing I'd like to share with the listeners and with you and to really sort of think through this. So, listener, here's how it goes. Often in life we've got important things that we need to do, and unfortunately, often they don't get done. And sometimes we can get really frustrated with ourselves and say it's because we're lazy or other reasons we're procrastinating and we're just being lazy. But I would put it to you and to myself and, to you, Erika, that often it's because the task is too hard to do. And the job of everything that we're talking about with executive functions is to make a task easy to do, to make important things easy to do. Because the moment you make an important thing easy to do, if you want to get it done, you get it done because you think, oh, that's really important. That's, straightforward. I can do that, and you get it done, and it's easy to do. So the key here is when I say making important, make hard tasks instantly easy to do, I'm really focusing in on important things that are hard to do and flipping them over, so they become easy to do. And I'll give you an example. If I asked you to look at the number plate of a cardinal and you wore glasses, and I say, I want you to read that number plate on the car without your glasses, that would be hard to do. But the moment you put your glasses on, it becomes easy to do. Okay? And
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Darius: there are things we can do, techniques we can do that can turn hard to do, important things into instantly easy to do. And a lot of it comes down to some techniques that we're going to talk about in this podcast that can flip something from hard to do, to easy to do. And another example, for example, if a client has got dyslexia, they might be saying, I've got this 160-page research report I've got to read, and I've been putting it, off for the last three weeks, and it's really important. You could say, well, why don't you listen to it and read it with your ears, would that be easy to do? Well, that would be really easy to do. If I could just listen to it while I worked or listened to it while I had the book in front of me and highlighted it and I could just hear it, it would just carry me along. And that's an example of a hard to do task being instantly flipped into an easy to do task because you change the way you process the information. So you might say, I'm, processing with my eyes, or I'm processing with my ears. Once you discover that about yourself, you then start thinking, oh, I'm going to move this over into the easy to do pile.
Erica: Right. Right. And I think the other thing that's very interesting is, you know, we're pulling ourselves out of our subconscious to be conscious. But what takes this to an even more beautiful space is if we can build that skill while we're being conscious to automaticity so that it's now subconscious and then we don't have think about it.
Darius: So we're automatically turn something that was hard to do before into something easy to do.
Erica: Right. And then we become familiar with it enough that it becomes automatic. So that's ultimately where we want to be, right?
Darius: Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of leads on to the first topic, really, is that time. Time chunking is one of the best ways to turn something that is hard to do into easy to do. Like, often what I find is creative, dynamic individuals who are maybe new or diverse think, I've got this big plan, I've got this project, and then it's such a big chunk of work that they don't get around to doing it because it's hard to do one really big chunk of work. But it's easy to do a small chunk of work.
Erica: Yep. Yeah. There's that sense of overwhelm that if you look at the big picture that it feels like you're not able to possibly take off, it's just too much. It's like looking at this monster hamburger that you can't possibly eat all of it, but while you don't have to, you can live on it for a month and just take little bites, so to speak.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: Time chunking is just lovely in that way that it takes the big picture, and it takes the overwhelm out of it because you're breaking it into manageable chunks.
Darius: Yeah. So we're going to just go through a few different perspectives in this podcast where we take this. How do I instantly change something that's hard to do into easy to do? So first framework is time. So I've got an important thing that is hard to do at the moment. The fastest way to instantly make it easy to do is to decide what can you do in less than 30 minutes that will progress this? Or even what can you do in less than three minutes that can progress this? So we've got this range. My feeling, working with folk and myself, is that that 30-minute line is the dividing line between easy to do and hard to do. Once it becomes a 1-hour, two-hour job in that sort of hard to do pile, once, it's a one-day job or a half day job that's in the hard to do range. you can still do hard to do stuff. Don't get me wrong. You can still do hard to do stuff. Yeah. Where our life is filled with unimportant things that are easy to do. TikTok is really easy to do. It's a 62nd burst. It's really easy. But it's unimportant and easy to do. And what we want to do is take important things and make them easy to do. So time chunking is one of them, and it ties in with what you were saying with automaticity. Like, is there a three-minute habit, a 1-minute habit, a, two-minute activity, something that is really short that would contribute to moving the dial on that tiny little thing that then you can repeat, and you go, oh, I'll spend a minute doing just that. I can do that. And that's a habit, isn't it?
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Erica: This makes me think of college students. You know, at the beginning of a semester, you get a syllabus, and it shows you everything that you have to do for the whole semester. Well, if you didn't time chunk it, everybody would shut down. They'd be like, I can't do all this. This is too much. This is. Oh, my gosh, look at everything I have to do this semester. But when you time chunk it and you just say, okay, what can I get done this week? And this is what I do with a lot of students. And I know that you have, too, Darius. Just being able to take that huge amount of work that needs to be done and maybe allocating it to certain times throughout the semester, so then all of a sudden, it doesn't feel so overwhelming. And I do that, too. When finals are coming, the students, I want to meet with them a month before the finals. And then what we do is we figure out about how many hours do you need to study for each subject. And sometimes it's like 15 hours per subject. That's a lot. But when you're actually putting it over a four-week period, it's never overwhelming. It's really just an hour or two here and there and then it all adds up and it takes that pain, it takes the overwhelm out of it because it just breaks something that's just too big into those manageable chunks.
Darius: Absolutely. And I think for me, the 25 minutes mark, the Pomodoro technique of chunking it down further into a 25-minute task with a five-minute break before you go on to the next one, is really helpful. And sometimes, you know, when you've got like an essay to do or some report to write or whatever, you're like, oh, it's going to take me 3 hours, you say 3 hours? It's probably going to take you five to six. And you know that in the back of your mind and you're like, I'm just not going to start it. It just feels overwhelming. And then in the back of your mind your kind of like, yeah, because I don't know where that document is. I don't know where that question paper is. I don't know where this, this is. And all these kinds of things are mental, unconscious under the surface blockers. So actually, sometimes you just need to say, look, I'm going to do this. What's the next achievable thing I can do in less than 25 minutes? And it might be, can I find the document or the book that I need to refer to my textbook, the question paper. Can I find that? You're like, well, if I did find that, that would be really helpful. Do you think I could find it in less than 25 minutes? Yeah, I could pretty much find it in about 15 to 20 minutes. But is that all I'm meant to do? Yes, that's all you meant to do. Find a book, find the question, put it on a pile, job done. At least you've got everything for when you're ready for the next step. Oh, well, that's easy to do. I'll do that. And you go in and it shifts from the hard to do pile over to the easy to do pile. And I think that's the goal in all of the workplace strategy coaching that I do. Everything boils down to someone stuck with a hard to do task that needs to be moved over into the easy to do tap zone. And the moment you move something into the easy to do zone, you move into the achievement zone. The moment you leave things in the hard to do zone, you're in the overwhelm zone. And if you stay in the overwhelm zone, what happens is you end up trying to escape from that and just go into some sort of distraction. And so the best way to deal with distraction, I think, is not to force yourself to do hard to do things, but to make those hard to do things easy to do, right?
Erica: Absolutely.
Darius: And it seems so ridiculously simple when I say it like that. But when you're feeling stressed, just ask yourself, is there a way I can instantly move this from hard to do over to easy to do? And the moment you start asking that question of yourself, is there a way for me to do this? Easily, you get answers.
Erica: It's funny, you talked about how the Pomodoro technique really works for you, and for me, I would say it doesn't work for me because 20 minutes is just, what's my appetite? And that doesn't work. I need 45 minutes. So Andrew Huberman often suggests these 45 minutes workabouts, and he's one of those people too. And then there's the flow time technique, which basically says, well, you set it for 20 minutes, and then you decide whether you want to continue, or you can come up with your own amount of time. But I think, you know, one of the things that's most important is to try out different time periods and see what works for
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Erica: you. Even sometimes 45 minutes. I'll go a lot longer than that because I'll be in a flow. That's what I like about the flow time technique. If you just ask yourself, m am I in a flow? Is my body, okay? Do I have everything that I need? Okay, then I can continue on. And so I want to encourage everybody to be mindful of what works for your body, because it's very easy to hear a technique and say, okay. And you get it kind of stuck in your head that if that's what other people do, then maybe I should do that. And, yeah, try not should yourself. Try to be really in your body and say, is this working for me?
Darius: What is useful is to set a timer for 25 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever time you set 15 minutes. You might be very ADHD or really young, and you need a ten-minute slot, and that's fine. You set the timer; it sorts of alerts you. And at that point you decide, should I keep going or not? One of the advantages of that is sometimes it can alert you, and you go, oh, gosh, yes, I'm meant to be working on this, and I got totally distracted on something else. And so what it's done is it saved you a whole hour of being distracted because you might have got around to, after an hour and a half, put your head up and go, oh, gosh, I was meant to be finding that textbook and the questions. I completely got sidetracked by something someone asked me to do or whatever. But when, when that alarm goes off, you're like, oh, what was that for? Oh, gosh, the textbook. You saved yourself an hour of getting lost.
Erica: That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about utilizing it that way, but I guess that would be different than the Pomodoro technique, where you're working for a certain period of time, but you could send give yourself little timers that let you, that basically are asking you that very question, are you focusing? And you could be like, I am.
Darius: The proper technique for the Pomodoro technique is that at the beginning of a Pomodoro, you should be able to say to yourself, at the end of the 25 minutes, I know I've finished this job because I have done X, Y and Z or X and Y. Okay. And then the alarm goes off after 25 minutes, you go, oh, gosh, yes, I was meant to do X and Y. I start with
X, but then I got distracted with AB. Yeah, it's really helpful that from that sort of inhibitory control perspective, it brings back inhibitory control. Erica, we put something on our list here. Change your perspective. And when we were doing this, we were so excited about this, and I'm forgetting what we meant by that.
Erica: that was mine. I threw that in because it's about moving over to cognitive flexibility, which we were talking about last week. But sometimes we get stuck. For example, I might say, oh, my gosh, it's so hard for me to start my taxes. And then I can say, wow, all right, well, what if I flip it and say, it's easy to start my taxes? So part of it is just changing your perspective, changing your narrative, or even just saying, okay, this is hard to do. How can I make this easy so that you are not stuck in that rigid perspective of, this is hard, this is impossible, I can't do this. What if all of a sudden you say, okay, I can do this? It kind of changes things, right?
Darius: Yeah, it does. It so does. And in many ways, that's what we're trying to emphasize in this, instantly change something from hard to do to easy to do. It is very hard to get your head around it. The first time you hear it, you think, oh, no, no. If it's hard to do, it's going to take a long time to make it easy to do. And you go, no, there are ways. We are looking for those ways that are easy to do for you. And I think that's a key part of this perspective change, too, once you realize there are things that you already find easy to do. Let's go back to the dyslexia person. They maybe find it hard to read. They can read fine, no problem. There are loads of people with dyslexia. most people with dyslexia in adulthood read absolutely fine, but they find it so much easier to comprehend and read faster by listening to something at the same time or just on its own. And so they've instantly changed something from hard to do to easy to do because they're operating in a mode that is easy for them to do. And this is part of the perspective, being self-aware of what you find easier to do.
Erica: Right. And understand that everybody's going to be different that listens to this. For example, if
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Erica: one of your personal issues was that you are very inflexible, you're cognitively inflexible, then this could be a really powerful strategy for you. But if you're already pretty cognitively flexible, this may not work for you, and you might want to pick one of the other strategies.
Darius: So what do you mean?
Erica: Well, the whole purpose today is to give people a number of strategies to make hard tasks instantly easy. And, you know, you might already be time chunking, and that's not enough. And there might be another one that, we talk about today where you're like, wow, what if I mix time chunking with unitasking? Maybe that's the secret sauce. So for everybody, it's going to be a little bit different.
Darius: Yes. Yes.
Erica: And so I just want people to know that we are going to be offering. I think. I think we have six different strategies here to make easy and feel free to pull from the ones that really resonate with you. Pay attention to what really works for you.
Darius: Okay, so number one was time viewing your tasks through the lens of time - time chunking. Number two is viewing your tasks through changing your perspective. How? Asking that question, how do I make this go from hard to do to easy to do? And then number three, you brought up, which was unitasking. Tell us a bit more about unitasking.
Erica: Yeah, I love this whole concept because we are definitely in a society where most people are multitasking most of the time, even in our cars we're driving, and we might be listening to a podcast that is multitasking. We're able to do that when we have developed our driving skills to a place of automaticity. But I can tell you right now that if you were a brand-new driver, you would not be able to listen to a podcast because you quite likely might even get into an accident. It would be too much of a distraction. So unitasking is where you're really putting all your focus on one task. Uni, meaning one tasking, meaning a task. And I had a graduate professor who was just amazing. She could accomplish so much in such a short period of time, and she had so many publications. And I asked her one day, what's your secret? She said, I do one thing at a time. She said, if the mail comes, I don't touch it until I know that I can do it once and only once. She said, many people will open up things and start things and then abandon them, and so they really don't get much done. But she says, I never abandon a task. I don't take it on unless I've allocated the time to complete the task once and only once. And I really have tried to use that, and it makes a huge difference. And of course, when you're doing schoolwork, a lot of kids will be able to do a little bit of math and a little bit of English and a little bit of history. But every time you do that, it takes a while for your brain to shift over, and so you're losing time there. But also, how many of us work on a computer where we have distractions with pings, and whether it's our phone or our computer or email just came through. That is all getting in the way of unitasking, and it pulls us away. And what happens is we don't do the task well enough, we're not giving our full attention to that task, and we lose our flow. We may never get into a flow. And so unitasking is really important. And I can remember when I was in high school, I did my homework in front of the television. Not a good idea. You'll end up spending twice as much time doing your work, and you won't be doing it well. Then you have to study longer later. But unitasking is really beautiful.
Darius: So I've got a fourth filter to look through this spectrum on, and that is people. So it ties in a little bit with unitasking, and it's called this phrase, body doubling is something that's used in quite a lot of ADHD coaches are using this term body doubling. Basically, body doubling means you do it with someone. So sometimes you've got an important task you need to do that you probably put off or find it hard to do. If you do it with someone, all of a sudden it becomes straightforward to do. So this idea of buddy doubling is like, I find it hard to do on my own, but really easy to do when I'm with other people. So this could apply to all sorts of things. I find it really hard to study on my own, but I find it really easy to do when we're all just in the library together and I'm not even talking
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Darius: You know, when you're at university, you think, I'm in my room studying on my own, but I'm going to go to the library. And you go the library, and it's easier to do it because you're not talking to people, you're doing exactly the same thing. You're just going in there, you don't talk to anyone maybe, and you come back out, but it's easier to do it in the library. And that's this kind of, you know, how are you doing this with people? Because sometimes if you're in a workplace, like sometimes I like to go to a co working space where other people are really working, and it makes it easy for me to do that work. Whereas if I'm in the home and there's, you know, everyone's relaxing and it's got that vibe and the kids are out and so on, it's harder to do. Do you know what I mean?
Erica: Absolutely, yeah. It's interesting. A lot of cities are creating these workspaces, and it's interesting because, and I know some people that use them, and they've given up their own office space to use these group office spaces. They all have different jobs, but they go there to work, and they enjoy the company of others. And when you see other people working, it's kind of motivating to get your work done. And, then they have all sorts of things to kind of help you. Where they might have rooms that are super quiet, you can utilize or. But for just those people that just have trouble getting work done when they're isolated, which has something to do with the next one. Should we go on to the next one?
Darius: Yeah, yeah. Number five.
Erica: Right. So discovering and honoring your best ways of processing. And what I was thinking about was interactive people that are interactive processors, they just don't do well in isolation. That they do much better when they're able to process with the company of others. Now, there's a distinction between just the company and being able to talk through your ideas with others. Talking through is verbal interactive, is just having the company of others. I mean, there's some kids that I know, they just don't want to do their homework in their bedroom by themselves. They'd rather be sitting in the kitchen with their mom just to have their company, even though they're not even interacting with them. Just having the company gets them more motivated.
Darius: I used to have a girlfriend at university, law school. She was so clever, really, a grade student, etcetera, top of her class. And when I saw her studying, she would play, I think it was like some sort of death metal rock or something like that, very loud, you know, play it loud. And she'd be working away frenetically, you know, and I'm like, how? Stop. Stop, please. I can't think. She's like, I'm sorry, but I got to study. And I'm like, and I'm in the room doing something else while she's studying away. And I'm like, how can you study with that noise? She's like, well, I've got to have this noise to study. And so again, it's coming to your processing ways of processing. So she had found a way that shifted it from hard to do to easy to do when it's studying. She would find it incredibly hard to do her studying in silence. And she finds it incredibly easy to do with noise. And not noise, but that music. And that m music actually lifted her from the hard to do zone into the easy to do zone. And that's the instant-ness. I mean, you play that music, she's instantly in that zone, right from hard to do to easy to do.
Erica: And let me explain that to you a little bit, because a lot of people are confused by that. And of course, if music is distracting, it's really hard to imagine how that could possibly be helpful. But for many people, what music does is serves as white noise to distract unexpected noise. It's expected noise, or there might be something in the rhythm or the beat that they get a little bit of a high out of. It gets them into a faster pace, more of a groove. And I've had those, too. I had a heavy metal student that did calculus, the heavy metal, and it blew my mind. And he absolutely showed me that he could do that. And that's something just to be aware of, all of you, because that is an absolute possibility. For some people they even have binaural beats. There are all sorts of different types of music. Some people love classical, some people like rock. I can't have any words. As soon as they're words, I find them distracting. You know, I personally, music just distracts me anyway because it just makes me travel to the first time, I heard the song or what I associated with it. But for some people, yeah, it's absolutely magical. Yeah. So that's just three of the twelve different ways of processing that I've
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Erica: defined. I have a whole series of processing inventories for people that want to figure out their best ways of processing.
Darius: I think it would be good to give some more real-life examples because we're talking kind of hypothetically here. Like let's think through some real-life workplace examples. We talked quite a lot about students. Let's see if we can work this through for workplace examples.
Erica: Right. So let's look at each of the different ways of processing. If you're very visual, then you want to see a lot of imagery. Not only do you want to see a lot of imagery, but you want to self-generate visualizations to help you to process information.
Darius: Oh, can I stop you there then? So I'm very visual. So I'll give you an example. Okay. So you might be in a meeting. And I do this with my wife a lot. My wife starts throwing lots of things that we've got to consider for a trip or a project or whatever. And she's like, yeah, we need to do this, we need to think about this, we need to think about that. We need to think about A, B, C, D, E, F, you know, and I'm like after it gets after C, I'm kind of alert, alert, alert. I know I'm going to drop a, b and c and delete them. because I need to hold on to def because she doesn't. She remembers ABCDE and F. If you gave her an, ah, eight-digit number, she'd remember all of the digits in order. I would only remember the last three because my working memory is smaller. So I immediately go to a whiteboard and start drawing out what she's saying. And the moment that happens, it turns it from a hard to do task into an easy to do task. Because I tell you, if we're just talking, I'm going inside myself. oh my goodness, this is just so overwhelming. I'm lost already. I know she's going to think that I'm not interested or whatever, and quite honestly, I'm not interested right now. Because I'm completely lost. I've lost the a, b and c, which is the foundation of d, e, f and g. So I'm kind of like, but I'm 50 odd now, and I now know better. If I can see it, no problem at all. And it moves from hard to do over to easy to do.
Erica: you actually used multiple processing methods to do that. You made it visual. You also made it tactile because you were writing it. But I know you well enough because you are the mind mapping genius that I know. And you like to see the big picture and how everything is connected. So you combine really beautifully a combination of visual, tactile and simultaneous processing. And sometimes even within there, I'll see you sequence things. So you really use, multiple ways.
Darius: Of processing to, and also interactive. You know, like she's talking about this. And then I'll point to, are we talking about that up there? Oh, yeah, yeah, we are. Oh, does this work with this? And, you know, and so you're interacting, you're discussing.
Erica: That's right. So actually now you're up to five different ways of processing. And of course, anytime you use multiple ways of processing, it becomes an exponentially better for you. Yeah, because you're just basically adding the numbers.
Darius: It's like having two eyes instead of one. You're triangulating with the two eyes, and you've got some depth perception, which is why we've got two eyes to triangulate. And often when you're using different modes, like these processing styles, you're triangulating with different modes of information as well, aren't you? No.
Erica: You could think of it as legs. I like to think of it as legs. So you could have a table with twelve legs. If a table with twelve legs, because I go into twelve different ways of processing, it's not going to fall, it's going to be so stable. Every time you take away a leg, it's a little bit weaker, which means that you may not hold on to that information. And of course, everybody's different. Some people really prefer to use just one or two ways of processing. Other people like to use five or six ways of processing. But again, it's very, very much of an individual thing. But when you honor your best ways of processing, it takes tasks that are hard, and it makes them easy. For me, I'm very much of a verbal processor, so I really like to think out loud. How else do I process? I am a simultaneous processor. I like to see the big picture. I can be tactile; I can be tactile. Sticky notes can be really fun on a wall if I really, if I'm struggling with the details. So,
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Erica: yeah, when you do that, it then makes it more palatable. It also, again, as we've talked about in the past, it makes it conscious.
Darius: So there's a more depth. We could go into it with processing, but I want to move on to another frame of reference. Okay. And that is what tools help you make important things that go from being hard to do into easy to do. And we've talked a lot about different tools that make things easier to do. And I'm thinking about things like note taking tools, mind mapping tools, Siri AI, those sorts of things. Sorry for activating your personal assistant by saying that. I just activated mine. I'll just refer to the Siri as your, what's it called? Your assistant, your phone assistant. Let's call it that. So what I've noticed is that you can start actively using tools to make important things that felt hard to do before or were hard to do, and they make them instantly easy to do. And that's where the sort of glasses approach comes in. You know, you might be, it might be blurry and hard to read, and someone gives you some glasses and it's instantly easy to read. Another analogy for this would be walking up mountainous. You might be walking up a mountain with size eight walking boots, but you've got size 10ft. Can you imagine what that would be like? Once you're halfway up the mountain, you've got some really sore feet, you've got some blisters, you've got some problems. It is going to be really hard to accomplish that mountain, but then someone comes along and goes, you've got really. You're finding this really hard to do, aren't you? And you go, I know, I don't know what's wrong with me. You know, I think I'm quite fit and I really want to get up there. I don't want to hold you guys back. Someone goes, maybe let's check your shoe size and shoe size. Ten. You're a ten. These shoes are too small for you. I've got some size ten shoes here. Yeah. They probably wouldn't have a spare pair of boots, but let's just stretch it for the analogy. They put the boots on, and they can. It becomes easy to do because they've got the right size tool for their mind. And I think that's another perspective to take with this hard to do. often important things are hard to do for people, because they've not got the right tool to actually do the job, because we all know how frustrating that is. You know, you've got an important thing and you're trying to do it with a hammer, but it's actually, you know, you've got a screw that you've got a screw in, and all you've got is a hammer, you know, and you're tapping in that screw. That's horrible. They call it a Glaswegian screwdriver in Scotland. The hammer. A Glaswegian screwdriver. Very, critical of Glaswegians in Scotland. And so you just hammer the nail, the screw in like it's a nail, instead of screwing it in with a screwdriver. Sorry, Glaswegians. I am a Glaswegian, so I can say that, but that's important. Tools can make all the difference.
Erica: I have an example from this past weekend. So my boyfriend John really, struggles with being able to record things in a calendar, and he finds the calendar overwhelming. He struggles with putting it into his phone. I've never found, frankly, I've never really found the calendar easy to do on a phone either. And he said, it's just too overwhelming. And I said, well, you've got to come up with some kind of strategy, because, yes, he has a really hard time managing all of his appointments, and sometimes they get forgotten. So what can we do? And we eventually came up with a way to make it easy where he doesn't want to have to type, but now what he does is he can just put his thumb on his iPhone, and it listens. And he simply says, email John Thor. It creates an email. What would you says? What would you like to say? Whatever it is, whether it's an appointment or something he doesn't want to forget, or an outing with his children or something that we're going to do. Then he just says it and it emails it to him. Then once a day, he can just look at his emails and put them into his calendar when he has the bandwidth, but he, doesn't want to be typing, he doesn't want to be distracted. And that's a simple way to just create a voice list that he can address later. But it's interesting. Now, that's not a strategy I would use for many people. It's a strategy that I use when I'm in my car, because for some reason, when I'm in my car, I think I have all these great ideas of things that I need to do. And this and that. But I'm in my car,
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Erica: so I just simply have to just say, hey, Siri. And then I can do it without losing my train of thought, without having to pull over and use my thumbs. I can just take it off, take it out of my working memory immediately so that I can get back to what I was doing quickly. That's a really good real-life example of, and in fact, for both me and John, what works for us is verbal. We just want to verbalize it. We don't want to make a tactile, we don't want to pull our attention away even more. We don't feel like it's that easy to navigate all these different apps and calendars to be able to do that. So there's an easy way for us to be able to capture something so that we can let it go. Making a hard task easy.
Darius: Brilliant. Yeah. I think my motive for this podcast was really just to firmly embed it in our minds that to get important stuff done, we've got to make it easy to do it. doesn't mean it's easy. It's an easy task, but we need to make it easy to do. And easy to do could be looking at how you're chunking the time, your perspective on it, unitasking, body doubling, doing it with people, how you use people, your processing style, your tools that you're using. I think I keep asking myself, is there a way that I can make this important thing easy to do? And when you start asking yourself that, your unconscious mind starts coming up with answers like, oh, well, remember what Erica said, or remember when you did this, that. And the next thing you found that easy to do, and you're like, gosh, that is, yeah, I'll do that. And things really do start instantly becoming easy to do. When you really ask that question and really look for it, rather than just accepting that's the way it is. That's the size eight shoes I was given that I or walking around the world with no glasses on. When you're short sighted or whatever, it's like sometimes you just need to stop and say, I need the right tool for this. And you put that right tool on, and it immediately happens. Or you, become more self-aware of the way you process information or the way you like doing things with people or without people. You like going away into complete seclusion, having no interruptions, no noise whatsoever. So that looking at it through these frames of reference, it might be useful to just ask yourself some of these questions right hm.
Erica: And again, be conscious, because as soon as we are conscious, we can change. If we are not conscious, things don't change. And so if you want things to change from being hard to easy, there is a little bit, there is that one sweet spot where you have to be conscious because as soon as you're observing something, you're not in it.
Darius: Absolutely.
Erica: And that's where you're able to grow. So even just coming right on out and saying, okay, all right, I'm struggling with scheduling my time. As soon as you've done that, you're on your way to fixing it.
Darius: Yes. M and using our language, it's like I'm finding that, hard to do. I wonder if I can make it easy to do, you know?
Erica: Yeah. And if you struggle with that, you can work with us, you can work with a coach. That's what coaching is all about.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: Coaching is all about helping people to come up with new ways to make hard tasks easy. And of course the opposite, which we weren't going to really talk about, but to make the unimportant tasks harder, the distractions, the things that get in our way. Right. we don't want them to be easy. We don't want them to be easy. We want the things that really are important, that we really want to get done, that really matter to us, that really help us to be our best boy. If those are easy, that's a beautiful thing.
Darius: Yes. And if you make unimportant things that tend to distract, you go from easy to do to hard to do, then what happens is you increase the capacity you've got in your life. So if I could show you the matrix, the productivity matrix, four boxes. With this, we'll put it into the show notes so you can see the image and just open it up and you'll understand how much more there is to this as well. But it's kind of like chocolate. Like I love chocolate. And sometimes
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Darius: you need to make something that's too easy, make it slightly harder to do. Like instead of having chocolates on the tabletop, they're away in a cupboard. Or maybe you make it harder than putting it away in the cupboard. Maybe it's in a different room and the utility slightly higher up. So it's not like impossible to do, but it's just harder to do. So it makes you puts a bit of friction in the way. And so we're trying to do the reverse of that with important things, remove the friction and make it easy to do. And we're trying to make unimportant things, higher friction, harder to do. And we're reversing these default behaviors because the default is important things tend to be hard to do, and unimportant things tend to be easy to do. Now, oh, there's one big bonus thing that is an instant from hard to do to easy to do. and that is to give the job to someone else to do. Delegation often transforms a hard to do task into an easy to do task, and that is the basis of business. You know, a business comes along and says, oh, you find it really hard to do your tax returns. We can make it really easy for you to do your tax returns. You just send us this, we'll get it all done. It will cost you $1,200 for that. But do you want it easy to do? Yes, I do want it easy to do because that's important and I want to make it easy to do. That is the fundamental basis of business as a whole. You know why people get other people, pay other people because it shifts it from hard to do to easy to do. So it's even a way to think about business and about delegation and about running. Who does this for me instead of me? It was this author, Dan Sullivan. he runs a company called Strategic Coach, and he wrote this book called who not how. And what often happens is people get stuck in procrastination because they're like, oh, this is really hard to do because they're trying to figure out how to do it. And he comes along and says, maybe you should be asking instead of, how do I do this? You should be asking, who should I do this with? Or who should be doing this for me? And what happens is it moves it immediately over to the easy to do pile because you then start building up relationships with people where you say, look, you find this really easy to do, don't you? And they're like, yeah, sure, that's really easy to do. Would you do this for me? And I'll do this for you because I find that really easy to. They go, oh, you find that easy to do? Yeah, love you to do that. And that's really the fundamental building block of our whole economy, specialized economy.
Erica: Well, you know, it's funny because I originally created the student processing inventory to empower students, and now I, am in the midst of creating, and it'll be done shortly, the Your Professional Processing Inventory. Because when people can figure out how they process best, and it's funny how we were not always fully aware of it, sometimes these things are very subconscious. But by taking the inventory, it really helps you to figure out, like, wow, okay, that is the way I process best. That's right, I do. I haven't thought about that. I haven't used that in a long time. Maybe I should give that a try. So if you're interested in learning more about my processing, inventories will put a few links in the show notes.
Darius: Yeah, absolutely. And if you think about it from a financial point of view, okay. If you waste an extra hour on one small, repetitive task that you're doing once a day or once a week or whatever, and your hourly rate is $30 an hour or $50 an hour or a $100 an hour, let's just say $30 an hour. Okay. We've got certain habits of, we make things hard to do because we just accepted, oh, that's just the way it is. That's really hard to do. It takes a long time, takes me extra time. AI is going to be great for that. That's another conversation immediately flips things from hard to do to easy to do for some people, especially if you've got dyslexia and grammar, construction, and order of text and all that. So, if you find these tools and techniques, the payoff, the return on investment is immense in terms of hours, time, and freedom, because it's tied so fundamentally into our executive functions. If our executive functions are not operating correctly, the consequences are massive, because it's just a little nibble away at your time here or your confidence there or your competence, or, how you show up to other people.
Erica: Sometimes we have to rewire our brain because other people have told us how we
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Erica: should be doing things. I can think of an individual that I worked with that had attentional problems, and I've mentioned this story before about how traditional schooling taught her how to focus, but it closed her aperture, and she just doesn't feel herself. And so it is very important to really evaluate and see what is your personal best way of processing. And even if you're a business owner, that the yippee that I told you about is a fantastic way to hire the right person, because, say, you're looking for a secretary that will always be by your side and will always listen and will always record what you want. Well, you're looking for a very specific ways of processing, right? Maybe you don't want her to talk or him. You don't want him to talk. You just want them to listen. Well, then you don't want to get a verbal processor. You want someone that's auditory processor.
Darius: I got someone. I got a personal assistant, a VA in the Philippines. And her job was to mind map my meetings by hand the way I wanted. So I trained her how to mind map. I put her through my training course and so on, and she would just rock up to meetings and mind map them in real time during my meetings with clients and business colleagues and so on. And they would see the real time mind map, mind notes, etcetera. And I chose her particularly for that particular skill.
Erica: Yeah. So it's nice to know because that's not something that people typically talk about in a job interview. How do you process?
Darius: Yes. Yeah.
Erica: You know, if you want a team player, say you have this incredible team and everybody on your team gets along really well, and they all love to collaborate. If you hire somebody that's not an interactive learner, it could be a wrench. You're, throwing a wrench into the system. But you can think very specifically, okay, this job, what kind of processing skills does it need?
Darius: Or what kind of processing.
Erica: Skills do I want?
Darius: Let me push back on that little bit. So that particular person might actually want to be a team player, but their way of processing isn't hugely interactive. But they want to be part of the team. And I've seen this in my life so often. What happens is the leader of that needs to be aware of their particular style and go, look, we're just going to go away and think on this and dwell on this, have some ideas, and we're going to return back before we make a decision. And this can be super helpful for people who are not the interactive type in terms of processing. They might be more introverted in their nature. They might like to just dwell on things, digest things, and then they dwell on it. They come back and they're like, I'm ready to contribute now. And they're being a team player, but they're being team player according to their.
Erica: That would still make them interactive. It would still make them interactive that they want to come back and contribute to the team. But what's interesting about it is that if you were to give an inventory to the people that you're interviewing, you then have something to talk to them about and say, hey, see that you didn't respond, that you enjoy working with others, that you really enjoy working by yourself. We have a very interactive group here and I'm curious, how could you contribute to our community?
Darius: Yeah.
Erica: Or would you be comfortable in our community? Because we're always doing stuff together.
Darius: Yeah. Yeah.
Erica: Like, how could. How could you? Does that interest you? Does that not interest you? And, yeah, how would you fit in?
Darius: Interesting. Yes. And they might respond saying, well, I'm actually a computer programmer. I like to just be given my task, go away, come back and give you a one-week update or a ten-minute update each morning on a sprint. And the rest of the time I just go away, do my stuff, come back and deliver. Yeah, right.
Erica: Or by having that conversation, the person that's hiring might say, oh, it's funny that now that I see your profile, I don't think you're a good candidate for this position. But I have another one that you'd be ideal for. So, I mean, that's what's so beautiful. Then you're placing your employees into their ideal positions, and then you're going to get the most productivity and they're going to be happy.
Darius: Yeah.
Erica: Because you're honoring how they naturally process. Anyway, this is a fun conversation.
Darius: Yes. If it's important and you're finding it hard to do, ask the question, how do I make this easy to do?
Erica: All
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Erica: right, so I guess we will take it on next week.
Darius: Till next time. See you next week, Erica.
Erica: See you next week.
Darius: Bye bye.
Erica: Thank you for joining our conversation here at the Personal Brain trainer podcast. This is Dr Erica Warren and, Darius Namdaran.
Darius: Check out the show notes for links to resources mentioned in the podcast, and please leave us a review and share us on social media until next time. Bye.
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