How to Get More Done in a Day: A Neuroscientists Guide | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I really find the energy in the projects themselves. I find that if I work on projects that I'm actually curious about, they give me energy.

Your whole idea is you can use science, you can use neuroscience, and you can use video tools to work smarter and learn faster and just think better overall.

So mindful productivity is really about paying attention to the signals and adapting your thinking and your behaviors based on the signal. And then the cooler term is IDSx, and it can They are really cool. It's like co-thinking partners, really. I brainstorm with them, I clarify my ideas with them, and it just helps me think better and faster.

Welcome, Anne-Laure Le Cunffff, to the Down to a Science podcast as part of Smore Science. I am so excited to have you here with us to share all your knowledge and expertise I came across your newsletter, MakerMind. Is that what it's still called?

I call it NestLabs these days, just to avoid—

Okay. Okay. So yeah, I joined, I was part of that when it was MakerMind and I was completely blown away by all your insights and your writing. So I'm so glad to have this conversation and let's share some knowledge that you have given out to people. Sarah, there are like thousands of people who are part of NestLabs and your whole idea is you can use science, you can use neuroscience, and you can use BIDI tools to work smarter and learn faster and just think better overall. So we get into all that. But before that, have to— I looked at your website and you talk a little bit about your background. So it looks like you have a really multifaceted background. You went from selling French wines in New York to working at a tech giant, Google. And now what you're doing is a PhD, you are writing a book, and you are running a business. So my very first question to you is, where do you find the energy?

That's a really good question. I actually find the energy in the projects themselves. I find that if I work on projects that I'm actually curious about, they give me energy. I actually feel pulled towards these projects. So, I've experienced many times before feeling a little bit burned out, a very little bit overwhelmed, and really the cause was rarely too much work. It was more the fact that I didn't really feel in control of what I was working on. And I didn't feel in control of my schedule. I didn't feel in control in the way I was managing my energy levels. Now, very fortunately, I've managed to design my work and my life in a way where I feel in control. I work on stuff I'm actually excited about, and it doesn't mean I always have high levels of energy, but I get to match the kind of work I'm focusing on based on the level of energy that I have at that very moment. So I have days where I'll be super focused, deep work mode, um, working on a research paper or working on the book. And then there are other days that are going to be a little bit lighter where I'll answer emails and maybe have podcasts like we're doing right now. And it's, it's really, again, this, this ability to be able to adapt based on how I feel and choose the work that I focus on.

So do you still have a routine that you follow week to week, like, you know that Mondays are your chill days and your Wednesday and Thursdays are your deep work days. Do you let your calendar guide you or you're like, I'll just go with the flow?

I like how you say guide you because that's what it is. I have, I use my calendar as a rough guide, but it's not extremely rigid either. So usually very roughly I'll focus Mondays and Tuesdays are going to be for my research at the lab. Then Thursdays and Wednesdays are going to be on NestLabs and the book. And I keep Wednesday in the middle as a buffer, depending on what are the priorities, anything urgent coming up that week. But that being said, it's very flexible. So I just came back from the US, for example, I'm completely jet lagged. So I'm also giving myself that grace of not forcing myself to stick to that routine. So my routine this past few days has been all over the place. And that's completely okay. Again, I'm really listening to my body, to my brain, listening to the signals and seeing what works for me right now. The one element to my routine that I have that is pretty fixed, but I've missed it sometimes, it happens, but I'm really trying to stick to is my weekly review. So every Sunday evening I sit for 5 minutes and I have this very simple template. I call it plus minus next. And it's plus everything that went well, minus everything that didn't go so well, and next everything I want to focus on next week. And I have found that if I do that, it gives me enough clarity as to what are the big priorities, the big things I want to achieve that week. And then during the week, I can be quite flexible depending on my energy levels.

I love that you brought that back to me because when I was part of, when I was reading MakerMind, I read that and I implemented that for all of, I wanna say a month, and then I couldn't keep it. So is that something very common? Like what makes us stick to a something that works in terms of productivity?

I wanna question the assumption that it worked for you if you didn't stick to it first. So maybe it didn't work for you and that's completely fine. I always tell people that it, you can't really copy and paste what other people are doing when it comes to their productivity, their creativity, and their mental health. So it's nicer and more effective to run little experiments like you did, where you're like, okay, let me try it for a month. Let's see if it works for me or not. If you can't stick with it, then maybe it's just not the right tool for you. Maybe you just haven't found a system that works for you. So that's one thing. Another one is that there sometimes is a sense of like timing as to when it's going to work for you. Maybe it wasn't the right tool for you at that time. An example for me is journaling. I journaled a lot as a little kid, and then around maybe the age of 13 or 14, I stopped. And then for most of my adulthood, I tried to get back into it, and I knew it was good for me. I knew I loved it. I knew that when I was a kid and I was doing it regularly, it was an amazing way for me to process my experiences and my emotions. Somehow couldn't stick to it. And then it's only 2 years ago when I started journaling as part of a process that I was going through for my mental health that I started building that consistency again. And I've been journaling almost every day for 2 years now. So it's the same tool, but I'm a different person in a different context, and now the tool is working for me. So I would really consider tools in a very neutral way. There are not really good or bad tools. Are these tools working for you right now? So in the case of Plus Minus Next, you could either try it again to see if maybe it works better for you today, or maybe you just could try something completely different because maybe that's not the tool for you.

One of the things that maybe didn't work for me at that time was I— the Plus Minus Next, I would list out every— it was more of a brain dump for me than actually thinking about what is the things I need to. So really small, small thing. And then the list kept growing and growing and growing. And I think it overwhelmed me to the point like, no, this is too— like, actually seeing the kind of things, I think that put me off a little bit. So what I do right now is I have this little sticky note on my computer. And like you said, the previous day, I will write down these are my most important tasks to be done for the next day. But I find that that is a little bit of a problem because I then tend to focus on the tasks that are urgent, not important enough to move the needle. They may not be urgent, but that needs to get done. But my to-do list tends to focus on the small tasks that are urgent. And once I strike it off, I'm like, "Whew, I got that done." But if I were to actually sit down and review how productive my week was, I was like, "I got a whole bunch of small tasks done." But I didn't really do the one thing a little bit every day to move the needle. How do you kind of resolve that issue and what should we focus on when we think of listing things that need to get done?

First, I wanna, uh, address for the plus minus next. This is actually a really good way of using it because that's what I tell people is that just use it as a brain dump, but then also you'll be able to see if you're listing way too many things, if it's getting too long. It gives you a visual representation of what you think are your priorities at the moment. And if it's too much, you can realize, whoa, I'm trying to do way too much at the moment. And then you can take that and build your actual to-do list based on this and decide, okay, what— from everything I put in my next column, what actually needs to be actioned. And you can also decide— there's a very simple tool called the Eisenhower Matrix where you can decide based on the priorities and the urgency, what you're going to do yourself or what you're going to delegate or what you're going to remove completely from your task list. So this is a tool that you can use, for example, and I don't necessarily recommend using it for a very long period of time. It's that kind of thing. It's a little bit like, um, people who start trying to manage their nutrition a little bit better at the beginning. It is actually helpful to read all of the labels and to understand how calories work and all of that. But once you've done it for a few weeks, you develop this instinctive of, oh, this is actually good. This is something, you know, I can, I can eat a pretty big quantity of and I'm okay. Or this is more of a treat and that's okay too, right? So with the Eisenhower Matrix, it's kind of the same process. At the beginning, you use it to have this structured approach, but then after a while you develop this deep sense, almost embodied sense, of what should be moved to your task list and what should stay in the brain dump of Plus/Minus/Next. So that's one use case, for example, here. And then in general, even if you were not using that tool, a way that I find very useful to avoid this being overwhelmed or lost in the weeds is to use your calendar as a task list. Because that's the problem with a task list. It's just a list, but it doesn't give you any indication of how long a task is going to take. And you can find yourself having this list that is way too ambitious for the amount of time that you have in a day to get the work done. So once you have your task list, just literally open your calendar and start blocking time in your calendar for the tasks. And even more importantly, the one last step, again, I'm not saying you need to do this for 2 years or whatever, just for a few weeks to really develop that sense of how your tasks are working, is to reflect on how that went because You'll start using time blocking and you'll realize that something where you blocked 1 hour actually took you 3 hours, or the opposite, something you thought would be very difficult. You're like, whoa, actually I'm pretty good at this. That was very easy. Great. So reflecting on this will help you the week after becoming better at really blocking your time and predicting how long tasks are going to take. And if you see that you cannot fit all of your tasks for the day in your calendar, then you need to remove some stuff. Like it's just, like basic, like physics here, where you cannot add more time to your day, so you need to remove some tasks. So use your calendar as a to-do list for a little while. Is it— this is a great way really to address the problem that you just mentioned.

I think that's what the important part was. There are a few things that you mentioned here that I was not doing in the order that needs to be done. So the brain dump, or the plus minus next, and then the to-do list, filter it out, and then time block it on your calendar. I don't think I was doing it, so that workflow was not established. So I was doing it a bit here and there, and then the overwhelm completely. So I'm going to try that again. Absolutely, this sounds like, uh, nice.

And if it doesn't work for you, then it's completely fine. It means that maybe that's not the system for you, and you can keep on experimenting.

Yes, yes, absolutely. So let's go back to your— I'm at when you were actually working at Google, so you were part of the marketing for their fitness app, Google Fit. That's kind of where you saw a little bit of neurotechnology coming in the productivity and the focus and the mental health space. Was that what really inspired you to get into this? When was it that you decided, okay, I love my job at Google, but it's time to move on?

I think maybe the types of products I was working on. So Google Fit were for, for fitness and health, but also I was working on the Google smartwatches. Uh, so again, there was an element of time tracking, productivity, and focus care. I think these planted the seed maybe of what I worked on later on, but they were not really the reason why I was inspired to leave Google. It was more of a personal decision. I realized after a few years at Google that I had this perfect image and plan as to how I could be successful at Google. And it is part of like, I think most tech companies operate in this way where in order to foster transparency and to make it very clear as to how you can be successful, they have very clear rubrics where they tell you, here's this almost like a checklist of milestones that you need to go through. In order for you to advance in your career in a company like Google. And I felt at the time that it was too early for me to have such clarity as to how I would be successful in my career. I still wanted to explore. I still wanted to take risks. I still wanted to follow my curiosity instead of this pre-written path to success. So I left and I decided to start my own startups. My, my startup didn't work out. It failed. And it was also in hindsight, an amazing learning experience. Obviously in the moment when you're failing, it doesn't necessarily feel this way, but now I really realize that I learned a lot. And I found myself completely lost. I had no idea what I wanted to do next. I went from a career where the next steps are very clearly outlined and laid out in front of you to finding myself in this liminal space where I could go anywhere, but also I had no idea where I wanted to go and where I felt a little bit stuck and lost, to be honest. So I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, what is something I'm curious about? Even if money, success, authority, expertise, or any kind of the traditional markers of success were not part of the equation anymore. And for me, that was the brain. I had always been fascinated with how the brain works, with, you know, how we perceive the world, how we connect with other people, how we do the things we do. It's really a big part of what makes us human. So I decided to go back to school. I was 28. I went back to university to start a master's degree in neuroscience, and I loved it so much that I decided to keep going, and I'm doing my PhD right now.

Wow, that is quite the journey for you. And I, I hear you when you say that, uh, when there are too many options for us, it is an exciting time because you, you know, you can go anywhere, but can it— can also be very scary. So with all that, that you have kind of walked through to where you are, and I'm sure the, the learnings that you get from neuroscience and how you implement it in your business and your research, there's a lot that you have learned about productivity. And mindful productivity, as you call it. Can you kind of give us a little bit of an overview? I know we don't have the time to go in depth into it, but this concept of mindful productivity— there is mindfulness and then there's productivity, which almost seems opposite ends if you really talk about it from that perspective, think about it and listen to people. Where does this concept of mindful productivity— how do you define it? How would you talk about it?

Yeah, completely see why they may seem almost antithetic, uh, and different. And that's also how I felt at the beginning, but then I realized that there was a lot of overlap in between the two in the sense that mindfulness is really about paying attention to your attention and about directing it in a way, uh, that makes you feel more in control. While also knowing when to let go. And to be productive is almost exactly the same thing. It is about managing your attentional states, and it is about paying attention to the cues and signals from your body and your mind to then adapt all of your cognitive processes. And you can only really be focused and get in a state of flow if you are able to pay attention like this to your body and to your brain to unlock those mental states. So mindful productivity is really about paying attention to those signals and adapting your thinking and your behaviors based on those signals. And it's complete— it's the complete opposite of what I call toxic productivity, where in toxic productivity, when you notice some of those signals, you almost try to shut them down. So if you, you look, you feel like you're— if you're procrastinating, for example, you're going to force yourself to work. You're going to use your willpower. You're going to almost blame yourself for not being able to do the work, right? In mindful productivity, it's the opposite. You will take a break and you will sit down and you will write down for a few minutes, why is it I'm procrastinating? Is it the task that is maybe too difficult? Do I need some help from someone? Am I really tired? Do I need a break? Is it that maybe the task is not enjoyable? And is there a way to make it more fun? In a very similar way to, you know, the science of building habits, where it's easier to build a habit if it's enjoyable. Same thing with your tasks. Or is it simply your brain trying to tell you that this task is irrelevant? Maybe you should not be doing this task at all. Maybe you can cross it out of your to-do list, but because you put it on your to-do list, you feel like, no, I need to do it, and you're forcing yourself to do it. So in listening to your procrastination, you can actually be more productive, be more efficient by making decisions that are smarter when it comes to your work. So that's just one example, but that's what mindful productivity is about, is working with your body and with your brain instead of trying to over-control them.

So when— so when you, you approach mindful productivity through a very science-backed, evidence-backed research aspect of it, but there's also a mindfulness element that's often talked about lately, which is, you know, through meditation and through practices of quieting the mind. Do you talk about that as part of mindful productivity, or is that something that is different depending on where you are in the time of the day and the kind of work you're doing?

It's different, adjacent in the sense that you can absolutely use meditation as one of your tools as part of mindful productivity. Meditation is a mindfulness practice, and I do recommend for mindful productivity to include some form of mindfulness practice, but it doesn't have to be meditation. It can be meditation, but it can also be journaling, it can be breathwork, it can be some movement. You know, something I do, for example, is that if I feel a little bit stressed or anxious about a work project, I'm sitting in front of my computer and I'm not making any progress, I will get up, put some music on, and I will dance for 5 minutes. And that doesn't necessarily look like the maybe common perception of what mindfulness is, but to me it is a mindfulness practice. It allows me to recenter my emotions, to reconnect with my body, and to be in a way better mental state where I can get back to the work instead of forcing myself to do it and instead of pushing through. So meditation, yes, but it's optional and it's just one of the many mindfulness practices that you can use as part of mindful productivity.

You, you talk about curiosity, uh, in a very different way than I have typically heard about. You say that, you know, it's one of our greatest strengths, right? It helps us explore the world, helps us grow. But you also say that it can be a double-edged sword when you, in terms of productivity. What is the experience or the work that has led you to come to that perspective?

This was mostly inspired from my research that I'm doing as part of my PhD. And this is not what my thesis is about, but more something I started thinking about while reading papers. And, you know, being a scientist yourself, like sometimes you fall into a rabbit hole of papers and you start reading things that are not completely relevant to what you should be doing right now, but it's just too interesting. And my research at the— at King's College London is at the ADHD research lab. So I was researching ADHD and I noticed that there was a connection in the brain in terms of brain networks between impulsivity and curiosity, which I found absolutely fascinating. And to me, basically, like, that's how I fell into the rabbit hole of seeing like that, those two sides of curiosity. There's this curiosity where you're a little bit more in control, you know, you're falling into a rabbit hole, but you know that that's because that's what you want to do right now. Um, you're exploring new ideas, you're having interesting conversations with fellow curious minds, and it's a very generative form of curiosity, but there are also times where you feel like, oh, I just wish I was— my curiosity was not so strong and that I would not get distracted so much by all of those irrelevant pieces of information that have nothing to do with the work I'm supposed to do and that I know I'm never going to use ever again. So that's kind of the double-edged sword. And to me, figuring out this balance, you are using the power of your very strong curiosity to do great work. But also you try to manage a little bit that other side of it. And I don't think it means you need to completely kill that distractive kind of curiosity, but more building containers around it and saying, for example, okay, for an hour I can go and scroll and click on whatever. And that's completely fine if that information is not going to be useful. But that other time is going to be used for more intentional curiosity. Where I'm directing it towards something that is useful or generative, or at least makes me feel better.

So there was another, uh, tantalizing concept that I came across on your Instagram. I had to scroll out a bit, but I was very intrigued by it. It was the term idea sex. So tell me about it. I just have to know, what exactly did you mean by that?

This term is actually a term that someone called James Altucher came up with, but I found out about it while I was reading papers about combinational creativity. Then I started looking at blog posts about it and his name came up and I thought, wow, idea sex, that's such a great way to put it. And what it is, so the research term, scientific term is combinational creativity. The cooler term is idea sex. And it's really the idea that you can take any two ideas and you can make them reproduce together and have little idea babies, really. So you can combine any ideas and you can actually be a lot more creative when you do this. And the problem with creativity is that a lot of people, they think that we have this kind of mythical muse that is supposed to whisper ideas into your ear. This is an idea that is very ancient. You have had, you've had countless poems that have been written by poets who were like, where is my muse? Why has my muse left me? Right? And it also perpetuates that idea that some people are creative when other people are not. Some people get ideas and some people do not, right? Whereas when you understand the concept of combinational creativity, you understand that creativity is combinational in nature. All ideas are born from combining existing ideas together. And instead of waiting for you to see that random association as you go about your day, you can do it in a more proactive manner. And it can be a really fun way to come up with new ideas. So you can take two things. This is how I came up with the term mindful productivity. Mindfulness and productivity, you get mindful productivity. You can do that with everything. You can ask yourself, what would it look like to run a restaurant like you build, for example, or you can ask, what would it look like to run a city like a forest self-regulates itself? You can take two different ideas. And ask what-if questions, or what does that look like? What do they have in common? What is different about them? Another example that I absolutely love, a real-world example, is how, uh, the scientists who discovered the very vast network of fungi that are connected in the soil decided to name it the Wood Wide Web because it connects trees together and allows them to connect together as well. Obviously inspired by the World Wide Web. That's another example of combinational creativity where scientists were like, what does that vast network in the soil have in common with the internet that we have created? And obviously they're not the same, but they allow, they allow you to think about things in a different way, to look at them from a different perspective, and to have more creative ideas.

I love that. And I think that is such an important concept to teach young kids on how to think and how to come up with ideas. It is something I don't see talked about enough. We need more idea babies. That's, that's how we have to look at it. So I, I want to talk a little bit about AI because that seems to be what is on everybody's radar lately. And you have been very open about how you find it and incorporate it into your daily workflows and all the projects that you do. Can you tell us a little bit about how you find AI what are the tools that you use, uh, work best for the kind of work you do?

Yes, absolutely. So mainly I use ChatGPT and Claude, right? They're really cool. It's like co-thinking partners, really. I brainstorm with them, I clarify my ideas with them, and it just helps me think better and faster. So something I will do sometimes, so for example, I'm preparing for a presentation that I'm going to give on Thursday, so What I did yesterday is that I went on a walk with my phone and I recorded myself just talking to the phone and saying, okay, maybe I could talk about this. This is a good idea. Or maybe, oh, let me backtrack. Actually, I think first I should mention this thing. So it's a very rambly audio recording of me thinking out loud about what I could talk about during this talk. And then I downloaded the transcript and I put it in ChatGPT and I say, can you tell me what are the 5 key ideas in this like mumbo jumbo of like rambly thoughts I just uploaded. And I used that then to build the outline for my talk. So this is one example of how I use it. I sometimes use it to scan research papers quicker. So I upload a research paper, I can ask a few questions, and that allows me to check very quickly if it's worth for me reading this 30 pages paper and if it has the information I'm looking for inside of it. So that's saving me a lot of time. So I used both ChatGPT and Claude for this. I don't really have a rule as to which one I'm using. Sometimes I upload it in ChatGPT, I'm not very happy with the results. I'll try it with Claude and I get better results. So it's a very intuitive, organic process here. Another one that I use for research is Scite.ai. S-C-I-T-E. Which is also great to find related references around a topic. And it has helped me when I was working on literature reviews in preparation for a research project. It's much smarter when it comes to research papers than ChatGPT or Claude AI because it actually has access to a database of papers that it can scan using AI. So this is really, really great. Those would be the main 3 ones that I'm using at the moment.

Yeah, I think for me as well, ChatGPT for sure, but I found Claude to be more to my taste in terms of the output it gives. It's more conversational and I feel it's, it's a little bit more aligned to the tone of voice. I do have to feed it my examples of how I speak and how I, how I write. Another tool that I've lately found very useful is Perplexity because they source everything. And as you know, as somebody who comes from a research background, I'm like, I need to know where they got this information from. So it is, it is a tool that I found works very well. But again, as you said, sometimes when you input something into one tool, you're not happy with it, you can always take it back to another one. And in the end, we still have to use our human judgment and creativity and come up with what is our what works for us and what is something that we are confident putting out there as our ideas and our thoughts. So in terms of just how people are talking about AI and how they are using these tools, where do you think most people— I know there's a big proportion of people who are still very hesitant on using these tools. Where do you think people are missing the mark in terms of, or are misinterpreting what AI can and cannot do in your opinion? Based on how you have, uh, worked and see other people working with the tool?

I think at this stage you really shouldn't use AI as if it could think for you. You should really use it to think with you. And I think that's where some of the resistance is coming from. And that's also a lot of the cases where it's misused is coming from. Some people think that it's about saying, write me an article about this topic and then copying and pasting the output and publishing it online. This is not an interesting use case. This is not a use case that is expanding your creativity or helping you think better. So I think people are missing out on AI if they're not using AI, if they think that's the only way of using it to, to think for you. You should really see it as a, again, a thinking companion, like someone you co-create with, almost like a brainstorming partner, very similar to how you would ask a colleague maybe to grab coffee together and maybe, you know, solve some problems, make some decisions, explore some potential avenues for a project. We've been doing that forever. It's just another colleague coming to the table who happens to have a very large brain with a lot of data inside. And so that can provide maybe more ways of approaching different problems than would just a regular human colleague. And I think that's the best use case at the moment. For AI, I'm talking specifically about the chatbot-based ones, right? Where I think this is where this would be more interesting. Obviously there are so many other use cases, which are not really the ones that I'm using, but you can use it for visual creativity. Some people use it to compose music. There's so many different ways to use these, but I can't really speak about those other use cases. For research, writing, and any kind of knowledge work, just think with AI. Don't think— don't let AI think for you.

Yeah, I think that's, uh, super important, and that is where a lot of people, uh, as you said, hesitate to get into it because they just assume it's going to replace you. Uh, it's, it's a tool in your toolbox. I can keep peppering you with questions, but I will let you get back to being, uh, beautifully, brilliantly productive. Uh, but Before I let you go, is there any parting wisdom that you'd like to leave? Any project, any sneak peek of something that you're working on?

I'm currently working on a book, as I've mentioned. It's going to come out later this year, so I'm very excited about that. And if anyone wants to learn more about my work or stay in touch, they can just go to nestlabs.com, and I send a weekly newsletter about these topics, including mindful productivity.

Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing all your experience and insights, and I wish you all the best for your PhD and I'm go— I can't wait for your book to be, uh, live. Keep us fed.

Thank you so much for having me. Take care. Bye-bye.