If you’re ending each day feeling drained, the problem may not be your workload, but how your brain is being used. Most leaders over-rely on the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s planning and decision-making center. But this part fatigues quickly under pressure. To sustain high performance, you need to engage other neural systems—and create conditions for your employees to do the same. Here’s how.
Audit your cognitive patterns. Don’t just track time, but the type of thinking you’re doing. Are you deep in focus, switching tasks, solving emotional problems, or skimming? Identify what drains or sharpens your mind, and redesign your week to match peak energy with deep work.
Make recovery visible. Embed short buffers after intense meetings, block decompression time on your calendar, and rotate meeting-free half-days across your team. Recovery isn’t optional; it’s necessary for creativity, insight, and sustained focus.
Switch your decision-making mode. Step away, change environments, and reframe the problem. This activates your “salience network,” helping you spot what truly matters.
Design team routines for whole-brain work. Label meetings by cognitive mode: focus, reflect, or connect. Schedule one team-wide “no new input” block each week. This should be a time to synthesize existing information, not consume new information.
Simplify systems. Run an input audit. How many platforms, requests, or messages are employees managing in parallel? Cut the clutter, align internal initiatives with available attention, and protect people’s time for core work. |
