Description

Hi everyone,

Welcome to another episode of the Elevation Grid.
Today, we're diving into a crucial topic for the modern workplace: cognitive budgeting.

Throughout my journey, I've come to realize that managing our mental energy is just as essential as managing our time or our finances. We know from neuroscience that our cognitive resources are limited on a daily basis, much like a financial budget.

In today's remote and hybrid work environments, the need to manage our mental energy is becoming even more important. Without the spontaneous social interactions at the office, we can find ourselves stuck in cycles of rumination that drain our mental energy.

So, what can leaders do to help their teams channel their cognitive energy more effectively?

Cognitive budgeting is a very powerful tool. It involves identifying the unique strengths and weaknesses of each team member and assigning them tasks that match those strengths. Imagine a team where one member excels in creativity, another in strategy and the third in more hands-on tasks like managing deadlines and budgets. By allowing everyone to focus on what they do best, the time spent on rumination can be reduced and overall productivity increased.

This approach not only boosts individual performance, but also strengthen team spirit and cohesiveness. The result is an environment where everyone can thrive in their comfort zones, thereby reducing stress and increasing job satisfaction. Experimentation, learning from failure and constant adaptation are key.

In this episode, we'll explore practical strategies for implementing cognitive budgeting that will help you create a workplace that is both fulfilling and highly productive.

Talk to you in two weeks,
Malou

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Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hi everyone, Malu speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Grid. I speak about career, science, and well-being. Okay, enough. Let's stop. Today we're talking about cognitive budgeting. So what is cognitive budgeting? It's about creating a personal plan to proactively direct our energy. What does this mean? Because neuroscience is clear. We have only a limited amount of energy. We have not infinite. It's like budgets, like financial budgets. You don't have infinite money. You don't have infinite energy. It's just exactly the same thing. And why am I talking about this? This is quite clear, well known. It's because we are currently in an environment of remote and hybrid working where it's particularly important to manage your personal energy. Why? Because there is lack of peer pressure. In this environment there is insufficient cross-fertilization and also isolation. You are sitting in your office by yourself and you have the tendency when you're sitting by yourself about ruminating because previously you would go to the water cooler, take a coffee, talk to someone, knew what the rumors were in the corridor and this would... kind of alleviate your rumination. But now that is not the case anymore and as I mentioned no peer pressure, no cross fertilization, all of this is subject to leading to ruminate. So what could for example in this kind of work environment a boss do or a leader do with his team to actually direct their energy to the best version of themselves ultimately and to increase team performance accordingly. So the way he could do is to set a cognitive budget for each team member. So it's kind of like taking a table. Taking two columns, what task am I good at, what task am I not good at? Because the task where you're good at, you have not so much tendency to ruminate. It's when you have to enter these dumb results in this company budget, which is so boring that you start ruminating. So why not use the best... the best attributes of each employee so that they have no time to ruminate, they are so happy to work. So let's take the example of the team leader who is creating a cognitive budget for each of his team members to help their employees to direct their mental energy towards the activities they perform best. So he has, for example, three team members and two are very good at strategy. Even so, one is better at conceiving the strategy and the other one is putting it in practice, implementing the strategy. And the third person is better at timelines and... practical things like budget entries, etc. So in order for them to perform best as a team and to be motivated by their work rather than by ruminating, it's good that everyone has his personal budget according to what they are best at. So... The creative people will take care of the creative stuff and the practical people of the practical stuff. This way... This way, the workflow is redistributed in a way that everyone works at his best, based on the task preferences. And so work becomes more flexible and the group dynamic is changed. Now they are really in a... It's fostering team spirit, actually. So... Everyone is motivated to work, and even the discussion, which is now three days, four-day weeks, I'm sure that five-day weeks, they don't care so much about the number of days they come to work because they're really energized by the work they do. They are excited, and everyone does what he wants to do. And this doesn't mean that this can't change in the future, because for different projects eventually team members will become new activities to take care of. And eventually the strategist has learned from the operational people things which he can apply later on, and so they learn from each other. And eventually he will like it better to do it better later because he can do it now. He has learned to do it. So it's not written in stone. Things can change. But it's a way of really optimizing the team spirit and optimizing the teamwork so that everyone can work in their respective comfort zone. And they are not plagued anymore by these ruminating thoughts and why did I miss out on the promotion, or what is going on, I have no idea what's going on. And believe me, this can have a considerable impact on team performance. And so it would be a good idea to... to think about cognitive budgeting to really use the strength of each individual in the best possible way.