How often have you heard someone say, “I’m so busy”? Would you agree that sometimes it seems that the word busy can be used as a success badge? For people who are too busy to see anyone, this busyness could not only be burying themselves but their real values.
It’s important to consider that, rather than using the term busy, we talk about how effective we are and whether we are working smarter. Using busyness as a label creates a perception of doing the right thing in other people’s eyes, whereas effectiveness creates real outcomes essential for personal and business success.
How would you like to be more effective with the work you do? I’m sure you’ve decided on some key goals and aspirations for your future. What if you could achieve these by optimizing your workday: adopting tools that help you become more effective, helping you break free from being too busy?
At work, it’s important to create space in the busyness and decide how you can work smarter. When you find ways to do this, you create time for effective leadership, you support your team and demonstrate that you value the people who are helping you build a successful business. You would then feel that the business cares about you and your well-being.
And remember, as a manager, success is about keeping your team with you on your journey by being supportive: being there with everyone at the start, middle and end, not just letting employees go when they are stressed! Having everyone with you on YOUR bus at the end of the journey is true success: not just being too busy to notice who is around you and who got off at the last bus stop!
“May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion” – Thomas Jefferson
The way to optimization
Life is a journey, and it’s important to be aware of what you are doing on this journey and how it impacts your well-being. The pace of life can make this difficult. However, there are messages on the way, if we take time to notice! This is especially true regarding mental well-being, where we should aim to work effectively and avoid burnout.
Your life messages offer insights into what might be holding you back, providing opportunities to change your behaviour. To start the process of increasing effectiveness and working smarter, let’s check what’s happening for you at the moment:
- It seems there is never enough time in the day.
- You feel like you’re on an endless treadmill going nowhere.
- You often feel you don’t have any time for yourself.
- You feel unprepared and pressured by too many priorities.
- You are tired of working hard and still don’t create enough income.
- You have trouble staying focused and motivated.
- You have missed many important family events because of work-related time pressures and responsibilities.
- It sometimes feels like you never even have a chance to catch your breath.
- You wonder why others achieve so much more with little effort while you work so hard.
- You can’t remember the last time you read and finished a book.
If anyone, or a number of these, ring true to you, I think you would agree you have good reasons to start making some changes.
Knowledge is Power
Knowing where you are at in broad terms is a great start, but let’s go a step further:
- Examine past trends. How focused were you? What worked for you, and what didn’t work for you?
- How effective are you now? Try rating your effectiveness out of 10, with 1 being not very effective and 10 working very effectively. How does this compare to your past performance? Can you see opportunities for change?
- Are you constantly in ‘urgent mode’, always busy or feeling that you are fire-fighting everything? What are the outcomes? How is it affecting your mental well-being?
What if you could add in an additional layer of understanding by knowing your cognitive stress and attention levels throughout your workday. This would put you in a powerful position for success. You could identify when you’re unfocused, in the zone, or burning out, before you’ve even recognized it yourself. These insights can lead to behavioural changes and smarter outcomes that help you optimize your day.
EMOTIV provides technology that enables personalized insights into stress and attention levels helping you optimize your day, just like being in the driver’s seat of a high-performance car.
EMOTIV and SAP Collaboration
In 2018, EMOTIV and SAP collaborated to develop a focused user experience to improve workplace productivity and well-being. With EMOTIV’s Electroencephalograph (EEG) technology, the companies created a system that leveraged real-time brain activity data and provided personalized feedback on users’ cognitive performance at work (including cognitive load, stress, and attention levels).
In 2019, the companies collaborated again to personalize workplace learning and development and created a seamlessly integrated work environment for employees.
To develop this initiative further, EMOTIV developed MN8—a 2-channel EEG earbud system that allows you to listen to the audio while collecting brain activity data. Paired with EMOTIV’s workplace wellness app, MN8 is a powerful, user-friendly tool and is a key differentiator in the workplace wellness or productivity apps space.
MN8 and EMOTIV’s workplace wellness app gives you valuable personalized brain insights to help you optimize your day. You can see when you’re most focused or when you need a break, even before you recognize it yourself. The app makes suggestions for how you can refocus and get back in the zone, such as taking time to do a breathing exercise or meditation, so you come back to your work feeling refreshed and more productive.
EMOTIV’s Workplace Wellness Solution
EMOTIV’s workplace wellness solution optimizes your work day, leading to healthier mental well-being, inside and outside of work. Imagine being able to tap into a sophisticated tool that gets you back in the zone even after being derailed! A tool that acts like a virtual coach inside your mind, that measures and interprets your brain activity. A tool that gently guides you to regain that focus and slip back into that powerful flow state. That’s one mighty tool and EMOTIV provides that capability for you.
Now, considering you have all of these tools and increased understanding at your disposal, imagine being totally focused, and balanced, achieving your goals, and feeling fantastic. Here are some tips to take you to the next level of effectiveness:
- Decide what efficiency means for you with key tasks that progress your goals. For example, giving you more space in your day to care for yourself, go for a walk, and meditate.
- Consider the time of day that suits your productivity. Each person has a different internal clock according to Daniel Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
- Be clear on important activities and the things that are most critical to your job performance and the company’s success.
- Set boundaries that you have learned through the pandemic if working from home. This could mean saying no to more work or setting realistic expectations on when you can start another project.
- Engage with the EMOTIV Future of Work initiative.
How does this feel to find a new approach to working smarter? Knowledge does create power and the increased awareness that EMOTIV’s workplace solutions provide helps you change and work smarter. The way we work is changing, especially in light of the pandemic. Millions of workers have not returned to the office and now work from home, where many distractions can steal your focus.
Many in-person conferences and meetings have moved to online alternatives, like Zoom. For these calls, sometimes energy and enthusiasm can be harder to muster. Many might find they are distracted, by either answering emails or doing work in the background while others are talking in the meeting. These activities probably don’t happen when you are in a meeting room with your colleagues. You would be more focused/engaged in the meeting and the conversation.
Business models have been upended. Entrepreneurs, managers, and workers at all levels have had to rethink how they do business: ensuring that staff is recognized and mental well-being is supported while businesses are changing.
Creative, out-of-the-box thinking has never played such a vital role in the past. Approaches to work are becoming more holistic, not only achieving work requirements but balancing the things we care about.
It’s more important than ever before to have access to tools that help you find your flow and stay in the zone when you need to. EMOTIV’s workplace wellness solutions will help you optimize your day so you feel less stressed and more productive. This has a cyclical effect, helping you at work and outside of work, leading to better well-being all around.
And we all need to find that edge to help us stay relevant, be more agile, and get to the top of our game. Having responsive technology that works with you, not against you, gives you a sense of personal empowerment to make effective changes. Why not make work a more fluid activity that innately syncs with where you are mentally and cognitively on a moment-by-moment basis? Who wouldn’t want a virtual coach, sensing your stress levels, focus, and flow, and make personalized suggestions to help you do more with less effort? That’s the future we all want—working smarter, not harder.
The launch of EMOTIV MN8 is a very important milestone and is the centerpiece of a cloud-based ecosystem leveraging the power of contextualized neuroinformatics at scale to improve workplace wellness, safety, training and productivity strategies. Brain data can also be integrated dynamically into truly adaptive software solutions aimed at making people feel better, be safer, learn better, and be more productive. This increased effectiveness will create real outcomes that are essential for personal and business success.
EMOTIV’s technology can now do what we humans are notoriously bad at—assessing our own stress levels and cognitive limits. At EMOTIV, The Future of Work is Here NOW. EMOTIV’s technology can be applied to any industry. By investing in a wellness solution, you’re empowering employees to learn more about their brains and optimize their workday IN tern, this will make a positive impact on ROI.
EMOTIV is a recognized pioneer and market leader in the field of BCI enterprise solutions and EEG technology. Its award-winning EMOTIV EPOC+ headset and the 10-year anniversary
