4 Steps to a Successful Marketing Plan: Identify, brand, price, relate.
Happier Clients Make Fewer Choices. Although it would be more accurate to call this Making Fewer Choices Makes Clients Happier (happiness does not lead to fewer choices, but fewer choices leads to happiness), think about how you present options to your clients. (Or for that matter, to your kids, friends, or family.)
NPR has a few stories about the brain this week:
- Multitasking Brain Divides and Conquers, To A Point. I used to think that the ability to multitask was a good skill, but more and more we’re hearing about studies that prove the more we multitask, the less productive we really are. Here’s one more reason to avoid checking your email or phone constantly:
[T]he brain has only two frontal lobes, suggesting there might be a limit to the number of goals and rewards it can handle. So the team decided to do another experiment.
They offered people rewards to do three things at once.
And when people started a third task, one of the original goals disappeared from their brains, Koechlin says. Also people slowed down and made many more mistakes. That suggests that our frontal lobes “can’t maintain more than two tasks,” Koechlin says.
The evidence that the brain assigns one task to each side of the brain is “very surprising,” says Rene Marois, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University.
. . . Marois says, someone who is writing a report might be able to take on a second task, like checking e-mail, without losing their train of thought. But if that e-mail asked for a decision about something, that would amount to a third task, and the brain would be overwhelmed, he says.
This makes me think about the benefits of having focus and practicing mindfulness (reducing stress and anxiety), because even if you only have one task at hand, but your brain is constantly running about other things, that’s like another task, right? No wonder we get less productive or worn out under chronic stress or anxiety.
Scientists tell us that as we careen through middle age, our brains do slow down. We have trouble retrieving names, or we get easily distracted. But the news is nowhere as bad as we think. In fact, science writer Barbara Strauch set out to explain why our brains falter in middle age, and wound up writing a book about how they can flourish.
