Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The day is done. We're just getting started. The last show. Some days, your brain feels like a laser. Other days, it can feel like chunky soup. Well, there's new research hot off the presses showing that if you somehow manage to be mentally sharp, that can give you a productivity boost that equals 40 minutes of extra work. Wanna work less? Be sharp.
Let's talk about how, here with Sendri Hutcherson, who's a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Sendri, welcome to the show. Hi, David. Thanks for having me. It's kind of a vague description, mental sharpness. What does that mean in like psychological terms? That's a great question. And to be perfectly fair, we're not 100 percent sharp on what mental sharpness actually is.
All we can do is we can measure something and we can call it mental sharpness. Let me tell you how we do that. There are in psychology a whole bunch of tests that we give people You know, think making little judgments about what a word says.
Some of those are things like trying to stop yourself from doing things, like you're going on pressing a button and then we say, stop, stop, stop, and you're supposed to withhold a response. There are all these kinds of tasks that are generally thought to assess something about cognitive function.
Many of them are thought to assess specifically your ability to deal with hard stuff, to control something about what you're doing or saying. So we gave people a bunch of these tasks that we asked them to fill out every day. And then we use some super fancy computational modeling to decompose those tasks into a number of different metrics, one of which we end up calling mental sharpness.
And we I end up thinking about this mental sharpness as simply how well the brain processes information quickly and accurately. And we're not saying they're sharp people. We're saying people have sharp days. There are days that we have that are sharper than others. Yeah. And in fact, one of the really interesting things we find is because we measure people for three months.
So we can say on average, who is, you know, the sharper bulb and who is not. And that doesn't correlate with goal achievement in any way. It's really this within person fluctuation, the days when you're better than your average or worse than your average. So I want to talk about when you're having a sharp day, how much more productive you are. But before that, how can I have a sharp day?
Do I just drink 10 pots of coffee? Do I just make sure I got my eight hours of sleep? Is it a luck situation? Am I rolling the dice? How can I guarantee a sharp day? Well, according to our work, which I will point out is entirely correlational, sleep, absolutely. We find that people are sharper after they got a good night's sleep.
We find that there are a lot of emotional factors, so different mood states.
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Chapter 2: What does mental sharpness mean in psychological terms?
So if you're super depressed, you're kind of fuzzy. Interestingly, if you're super anxious, we find that you're sharper. If you're excited, we originally thought that being excited would kind of pep you up and make you sharper, but it doesn't. It actually makes you, according to our metrics, a little bit fuzzier.
We also find, interestingly, there are lots of debates in psychology about whether working hard makes you less sharp in the long term. And we find some evidence for that. So a single day doesn't really have any effect. Like working hard for one day doesn't really have any effect.
But if you've been like grinding for a full week, we start to see those effects build up so that you're a little bit less sharp at the end of that week. Okay, I have a pretty good context. I have a pretty good idea of what sharpness is, what a sharp day looks like, how I can have one. Let's get to the headline number, about 30 or 40 minutes of extra work.
So if I'm having a sharp day and I put in a full day's work, I get like, I don't know, just shy of an hour, close to half an hour. But how does that work? Yeah. So what we did is, in addition to measuring these fluctuations in mental sharpness, we asked people every day, how many hours did you work? And then we just asked them about their goal achievement, right?
They had told us about different goals and we measured a whole bunch of these subjective measures of how much you got done. And so we can say, how much does an hour of work allow you to get more stuff done?
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Chapter 3: How is mental sharpness measured in research?
And then we can do the same thing for mental sharpness, not in terms of hours, but just, you know, sort of your highest days versus your lowest days. And so we can put that variation into terms of how many hours is it equivalent to.
And that's what we ended up finding is that when you do that, you find that sort of your best sharpness days compared to your longest hour days is roughly the effect is about 25 percent of number of hours worked. And that ends up translating into around 30, 40 minutes.
Can I do other things like to have a more productive day, like be super conscientious or work on my own personal level of grit, my ability to persevere? Yes, absolutely. And in our study, we definitely found that people who said they were super conscientious, super gritty, super self-controlled, on average reported getting their stuff done better.
We don't actually know, interestingly, how to really make people more conscientious. It's a big issue in the field. We can measure conscientiousness. We can show the people who say they're conscientious do better, but we don't know exactly how to make somebody, you know, how do I get more of that? And that's one of the exciting things about mental sharpness is I think we might be able to say
as we've discussed, how do you get more of mental sharpness? Interestingly, the other thing that we found was that mental sharpness, the effects of mental sharpness from day to day don't really vary as a function of whether you're conscientious or not, gritty or not. So conscientious people have good days and bad days as much as the slackers do. And some of that we can tie to sharpness.
On a low sharpness day, let's suppose I have one, am I doing less? Am I setting goals that are way more easily achieved? Am I just stalling? Am I doom scrolling? What am I doing on a low sharpness day to make me less productive? That is a really great question. We don't yet have a really great answer for you. I wish we did. No, it's OK.
What we can say is we do think that you are just working more hours. So it's like you're able to push through a little bit, maybe more than you would normally. But the effect of mental sharpness actually stands apart from its effect on how much you're working. And we tried to measure a number of other things around, like, what are people doing as a function of mental sharpness?
We do find that they set harder goals for themselves on days when they're mentally sharp. And particularly in this group of students, we find that they're much more likely to set their academic goals on days where they're feeling super sharp and to basically be engaging in like self-care or like goals around family or friends on days when they're not as mentally sharp.
So it does affect the goals that you're setting for yourself. So interestingly, we find that it seems to help you get your goals done, regardless of whether those goals are academic or non-academic, which I found a little bit surprising.
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