Dr. Linda Martin: Dr. Roger Hall is a business psychologist. He’s worked with top level executives and he understands our college. His dad was a soil scientist here, and I know you will enjoy hearing him speak.
Dr. Roger Hall: I am the son of a soil scientist with a joint appointment in ATI. I train leaders to monitor and manage their thinking. Great performance in any endeavor is a consequence of disciplined thinking. We all have a stream of consciousness. The first step is monitoring your thinking, slowing down your pattern of thought and managing it.
My work is in the performance enhancement world. You find psychologists in areas of sports, the military and in business.
Rather than resolve the problems that face our life we determine instead to just get busy on some other topic. Humans now have a great deal more technology that distracts us much more effectively. Distraction is America’s favorite past time. We appear productive by being busy. We’ve confused busyness with productivity and effectiveness.
Multi-tasking: Doing a number of cognitively complex tasks at the same time. Most people are NOT multi-tasking, but single tasking with rapid shifts in attention. Every interruption is a 20 minute interruption to your concentration.
The concept of flow: When you’re in the zone. You lose a sense of time and immerse yourself into work. It takes transition time to get to flow. This is when your best work results.
Data smog: Symptoms are forgetfulness, sleep problems, hypertension and more. These are physical ailments of trying to consume too much information. People who are information overloaded become irritated. People who experience flow every day or nearly every day are the happiest people. This is when you are solving challenging problems in your expertise. By consuming too much information, you’re interrupting your ability to be productive and happy. Turn off the email preview pane, turn off your phone. Our attachment to this information is keeping us from being happy and causing us to be irritable.
Great thinking doesn’t come from more information, it comes from spending time with the information you have.
You need to slow down to speed up. Successful performers spend time in quiet reflection every day or nearly every day. Be it mindfulness, meditation, pondering, etc.
Every day we have a certain number of decisions we can make, after which the brain fatigues.
Email is decision intensive and harmful for your concentration.
So how do we recover? Success looks the same in almost every endeavor. Successful people have a constellation of common habits that allow them to be successful. These are my “Big Ten”:
- Rest and sleep life — to do well you need eight hours of REM sleep and rest is doing nothing.
- Recreation life
- Nutrition life — our neurotransmitters come from our food. They come from amino acids. We need good, even nutrition. Increase the quality of the food you’re eating.
- Exercise life
- Love life – family, children, immediate family and romantic relationships
- Social life – friends and coworkers, the ideal number is about six close friends
- Money life
- Work life — people are happiest when they have productive work to do
- Spiritual life
- Thought life — battling cognitive distortions
Schedule the things you need to do as calendar items rather than having a to-do list. Schedule a “think” time to read or work on a project in your interest. If you don’t carve this time out you will not be productive. Get blocks of time to look at just emails instead of shifting focus.
Figure out your best think time and don’t use that on email.
Anything where you are CC’d should go directly to a separate folder.
Because we can communicate, we think we should communicate.
What you believe you have to complete and what you must complete might be different things.
Please join our panel members Kay Wolf, OSU Office of Academic Affairs, Ron Hendrick, Senior Associate Dean of CFAES, and Anne Dorrance of Plant Pathology for our session on Promotion & Tenure.