When you have a full keg of brain juice (energy/ attention or bandwidth), you can do good work.
And when you don’t, you’re trying to do good work using a depleted, scraped-out, aggressively unimpressive amount of cognitive horsepower.
And the thing with brain juice is that you get a fixed amount of it per day, and you are almost certainly spending it on the wrong things.
Cal Newport, who I will assume you’ve heard of at this point, puts the ceiling for genuine cognitive work at roughly four hours per day, after which the quality drops off a cliff whether you notice or not. You can keep going, most people do, but the version of you still coaching at hour six is a way worse version than the one who started at hour one, and your clients, if they could compare, would probably demand tiered pricing.
Mullainathan and Shafir put more specific language around what’s actually depleting. Bandwidth, as they define it, has two components:
Cognitive capacity: raw processing power, reasoning, problem-solving, and the ability to take in new information and do something useful with it.
AND, Executive control: the ability to direct your own attention, regulate your impulses, and plan three moves ahead rather than just responding to whatever’s in front of you.
A coaching session requires both, simultaneously, for the entire duration of the session, multiplied by however many sessions you have in a day. That is a buttload of brain juice! Which would be fine, except that sessions are far from the only thing making withdrawals.
Remember, you have four hours of good brain. By the time most coaches have finished their morning, three and a half of those hours are already gone—and there’s still a whole second half of the workday to tackle.
PLUS, all the stuff outside of work needs brain juice too. Your partner wants you to be genuinely present and engaged and actually listening. Your kids want full-eye-contact parenting. The dog wants a walk, and to be fed, and to be snuggled, and for all the other parts of his 17-step routine fulfilled ON TIME. Oh shit, you meant to pull in the patio furniture before the rain moved in but totally forgot. Oh shit, when is Mother’s Day?
You are not a bad partner, parent, or dog/patio furniture owner. You are a person who has spent a finite cognitive resource on a day that demanded more than you had, and you arrived home with droplets of energy left to give anyone, including yourself.
And just like with time scarcity, when the tank is low and there is still stuff to do, the brain starts doing shitty bargaining.
- You skip your own training because the day ran long and your body is the one thing that will definitely still be there later.
- You put off the awkward client conversation for the fourth consecutive week because you genuinely do not have the bandwidth to manage where it might go and it isn’t quite an emergency yet.
- You pull a late night to finish the thing rather than building the sustainable habit that would make late nights unnecessary, because the sustainable habit requires planning and the planning requires brain juice and you’re out of brain juice which is why you’re pulling the late night.
- You let that full sink of dishes be a surprise for Future-You.
Every one of those is a loan with interest. Tomorrow’s tank starts lower, and your decisions get made by a brain that’s already behind. Next week we’re going to talk about what the compounded version of all this looks like. (Spoiler alert: it sucks!)
For now, let’s talk brain juice conservation:
If you control your own schedule: Stop building your calendar around logistical convenience and start building it around your brain juice supply. Your best brain goes to your most complex clients, your hardest diagnostic problems, your own development and the creative stuff that’ll support your business. The administrative stuff, the emails, the scheduling, anything that runs on procedure rather than thought—those go later, when your brain juice is kicked.
If you have some schedule agency: You can’t restructure everything, but you can probably move one thing. Your most demanding client should not be your last appointment of the day. If you can’t move it earlier, see if you can shift around your morning, knowing you’ll need the brain juice later.
If you have little to no schedule control: Stop making decisions you don’t have to make and minimize interruptions as best you can. Batch your messages, eat the same lunch for a week, take the same route home. Eliminate one recurring micro-decision that is currently costing brain juice for no return.
And pay attention to where your brain juice goes. What are your biggest spends? Does that align with the needs of your work, your relationships, and ohhhhh I don’t know, your soul? Clock the mismatches where you find them, and adjust, just like physical training.
Feature Photo by Rodrigo Santos at Pexels.com.