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Doing hard work is hard. Hard work can frustrate us and cause anxiety and stress. We can struggle to maintain focus on our hard tasks, including the ones we enjoy. We often postpone work on hard tasks. We often choose quick wins from easier tasks, like email, social media or watching videos. COVID-19 pandemic has made it even harder to get hard work done. Everyone experiences bouts of procrastination or work-avoidance, and the guilt that comes with not getting work done. There is no avoiding these experiences entirely.

David Badre, professor of cognitive sciences at Brown University published a book, On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done, about the neuroscience of cognitive control. Cognitive control is the mental function that allows us to connect our goals and plans with our actions. In the book he provides some suggestions to get hard work done.

Make space to get hard work done

To get hard work done, Professor Badre explains that the brain needs ready access to a task set. A task set is the information, plans, procedures, and knowledge you will use to get the hard work done. However, the task set is not instantly available. We can’t hold it all in our ‘working memory’, all the time.

For example, when planning a complicated project, we must collect lots of information related to schedules, budgets, resources, plans, stakeholders, and the results. However, if we have just been at a meeting on a Betty Jo’s retirement party, and then return to work on the project plan, the necessary information will not be in the forefront of your mind.

The project information must be mentally retrieved and organized in your working memory before you can start planning again. In practice, returning to a hard task in this way comes with the author calls a ‘restart’ cost. Restart costs are the time and mental effort spent getting back into your task set, rather than making progress. For this reason, it is important to create time and space to work on hard tasks.

Create time to get hard work done

Set aside large blocks of time – We all know how easy it is to fill our workdays with Zoom meetings, junk email and social media. These can leave only small gaps of time for getting hard work done. Long blocks of time are needed to get hard work done for several reasons. They require intense thought and work, but also because we need time to re-establish our task set. Switching frequently between tasks makes producing quality work harder.

Be consistent – The author suggests you should reserve a consistent time and place to get hard work done and be protective of it. Ideally, you should block this time and place every day. Even if you do not make progress one day, that time should be spent on your hard task rather than other tasks, even if it’s just reviewing your work.

Consistency aids memory. Memory retrieval is context dependent. It helps to have the same sights and sounds available when you learn something as when you try to remember it. Thus, working on a task in the same context repeatedly might aid retrieval and help us to re-establish our task set when we restart.

Never multitask

When you do two or more tasks at once, your performance efficiency and quality will suffer. This happens partly because each task occupies the working memory. As a result, they will compete for that shared resource and interfere with one another. When doing a hard task, it is important to minimize this interference from multitasking.

Remove cues to other tasks. It helps to put away e-mail, social media, and phones. Just seeing the phone on your desk, will distract you. They are distractions that pull you off task. The cues will create multitasking costs, whether you do the other tasks or not. Mr. Badre recommends, keep our space and time for hard work clear of other distracting tasks.

Beware of easy tasks. When you decide to perform a task, your brain does a cost–benefit analysis. Your brain will weigh the value of the outcome against the projected mental investment required to be successful. As a result, people often avoid hard tasks in favor of easier tasks. Sending some e-mails or straightening up the desk are worthwhile tasks and feel productive, but they add multitasking costs and prevent you from getting hard work done.

How to get hard work done

To get hard work done, you must structure the problem or task in a way that will allow you to succeed. For example, a hard task such as building a budget might involve a structured process of retrieving, selecting, and checking a set of facts from the general ledger, department budgets, corporate calendars policy and procedures. The better you know these facts, and the more effectively you can evaluate them and produce your project budget. As you do more budgets, they get easier to do. In general, you can get better at structuring hard problems with experience. This is one reason that practice makes us more efficient and successful getting hard work done, and that experts outperform novices.

Engage in good problem-solving habits

Stay with it. Finding the right structure can take time. You may not make progress on a hard task every day, but it is important to keep trying. Be kind to yourself when you don’t make progress.

Be open to a change in plans. Often, your first plan does not work and leads to dead ends. When you get stuck, be willing to change your plan and look for new ways to address it.

Take breaks. It’s not helpful to insist on trying to get everything done at once. It is important to take breaks from difficult work. This keeps the mental costs low, and you can consider new ideas. Mr. Barde says there is evidence that incubation of this kind helps problem-solving.

Interact with others. Just like taking a break, interacting with others can help see a problem in a new way. Talking to people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and viewpoints that differ from your own can be a powerful way to break out of a rut and make progress, as well as get some perspective. Moreover, working with others whose company you enjoy makes it more fun to get hard work done.

This social aspect of getting hard work done has been challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has prevented the spontaneous interactions that are often helpful. Professor Badre suggests it is useful to make time for informal discussion over work, to recapture these interactions with others and avoid isolation.

Completing hard work is an essential part of success. Professor Barde concludes that there are no simple tricks or get-smart-quick schemes that will instantly make getting hard work done effortless. But, if you make space for our work, avoid multitasking and pursue good problem-solving strategies, can be more successful at getting hard work done.

Stay safe out there !

Related article

• The Surprisingly High Cost of Multitasking (The Muse)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.