Why and how to time focused work: Alertness, top-down control and “precrastination”

In my newsletter series, I share short, practical and science-based productivity tips to help you thrive as a knowledge worker. After spending the first months on mental energy, let’s move on to the second of three elements of my underlying framework: mental focus.

In an earlier post, I’ve stated that our chronotype matters when planning focused work because focused work requires higher levels of alertness than collaborative work. Today, I dive deeper into that statement to provide some groundwork for upcoming posts on mental focus.

As we move through our day, two parts of our brain determine our decisions: the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The prefrontal cortex is the logical part of our brain. It allows us to reason and pursue our longer-term goals. The limbic system is the instinctual part of our brain. It lets us give in to temptations and seek short-term gratification.

We have evolved to spend our energy on collaborative tasks. Thus, our minds have a tendency of not “wanting” to perform challenging focused work such as creating reports, performing analyses, or programming. To do those things, we need our prefrontal cortex to suppress our limbic system’s instinctive urges to distract ourselves or quit. That process is called top-down control, and consumes a lot of mental energy.

Conversely, collaborative work – notably engaging in e-mail or group chat – is like candy for our limbic system: very alluring and hard to resist. There’s even a term for reaching for the low-hanging fruit of collaborative work to avoid challenging (focused) work: precrastination.

As it turns out, we’re much better at performing focused work and resisting distractions (i.e., top-down control) when our alertness is high. So again, take your chronotype into account when planning your focused bouts: If you’re a morning lark or intermediate third bird, schedule at least one bout of focused work early in the day. If you’re an evening owl, block some hours for focused work later in the workday.