Sharif Younes was working as a data scientist when he read Thomas M. Sterner’s “The Practicing Mind” and Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive.” “How can I work better?” He asked himself at the time. “How can I be more productive?” Younes found the answers only after meeting psychiatrist and Harvard lecturer Kevin Majeres, MD. Together, they launched the digital coaching platform Optimal Work in 2018.
Many professionals experience anxiety, reluctance, and dreadfulness towards work in some way. According to Gallup, employment engagement in the U.S. has reached in early 2024 its lowest level in more than a decade. A finding related to the first quarter of 2024 shows that only 30% of workers feel engaged and 17% are actively disengaged. Optimal Work tries to address these and other common issues. Through courses like the recently-launched Overcoming Anxiety, productivity tracking tools and weekly podcast discussions, the founders invite professionals to re-think their goals and understand why they do what they do.
“People can sit down to work with the goal of just getting this task done, and then they’ll dive into the work, but they have a subtly negative attitude towards that work as they just see it as something to get done, something to get rid of, something to just check off their list,” Younes, 33, said. “Someone who approaches work in this way is missing out on some of the greatest opportunities that they have to shape themselves through their work.”
Younes and I discussed how to practice mindfulness, overcome distractions, and how ideals can improve our attitude toward our tasks.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
There are many productivity tools available online. What makes Optimal Work different?
Three things. The first is that it’s grounded in science, in psychology and neuroscience paired with Dr. Majeres’ clinical experience. The second is that it’s focused on psychology but applied to work. The third piece is the focus on ideals. That we work at our best when we’re motivated by our highest ideals. Not just for personal gain or to achieve particular outcomes, but that when we’re really working to serve other people, to serve the common good, to serve our colleagues, to serve our communities, to serve our families. That makes life more meaningful and also helps us to work at our best.
The three main skills you teach at Optimal Work are reframing, mindfulness and challenge. How can these three skills help people like entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily have a fixed routine?
As kind of an entrepreneur myself, it’s so important to see that you face many, many setbacks. So, to be able to maintain positivity, resilience and to keep going, you need a deeper purpose behind it. Reframing helps you to stay rooted in that deeper purpose that gives you the constancy you need to be successful when you’re working on something new or on your own thing. Reframing doesn’t necessarily require that you’re doing the same task repeatedly. Actually, one of the things that we talk about is making the task new in the way that you approach it.
There can be a pressure to see certain results or achieve certain objectives, because you need to make money or to satisfy the demands of shareholders. I think that’s one of the keys for entrepreneurs: to go beyond the outcomes and to get to the ideals of what kind of person I might become through this task. We encourage people to go beyond quantity goals. Ultimately, we want to help people focus on the quality of their work and their challenges.
What should guide us when practicing mindfulness before we start to work?
I love mindfulness. There’s an element of it that’s just letting go of distracting thoughts, the stress or pressure and peacefully attending to the here and now. Typically, before people do mindfulness, they reframe a task. They identify how this task is an opportunity for growth, for learning, for practice, for service. And then mindfulness is a way to deepen your bond with that ideal. It can be helpful to think about who’s going to benefit from this work and to try to foster the cheerfulness that you would like to serve with.
I did Optimal Work’s Master Class a couple of years ago, and one thing that struck me was the difference between distraction and interruption. Can you elaborate on how they are different and how we can navigate them?
People who start working, maybe out of college, I think they realize, ‘I need to focus better.’ And oftentimes the first thing that occurs to them is to arrange their external circumstances: read in the evening, do harder tasks in the morning, work in a quiet place, work with only orange light, etc. Those things are important, but we also help people focus on what’s going on inside. How are they approaching this task? That’s where reframing comes in. Where is their attention focused? That’s where mindfulness goes in. How are they stretching themselves? That’s where a challenge comes in. Distraction is about that internal dimension where something within you pulls you off track.
So if you’re working on a task and then you say, ‘I don’t really want to work on this anymore. I’d rather check my phone. I’d rather watch a YouTube video’ and then you go to that other thing. Typically, it’s not going to be helpful. It’s a mistake in prediction by what’s called your default mode network. If you don’t have a clear idea in your task of what the next thing to be done is or the next thing to be done seems too difficult, your default mode network will often suggest something easier or something that you’ve done in the past. In that case, we suggest that people break whatever they’re working on, identify the smallest next step and break it down into a smaller step. Over time, you’ll gain a greater dominion to resist distraction.
In terms of interruptions, it’s not that you’ve gone off task. There’s something new that needs to be considered. Some new factor, which is the needs of a colleague, for instance, or maybe the needs of a family member. You don’t want to multitask and be answering their questions while you’re still working on your own thing. You don’t want to be rude and ignore them or tell them to go away. We invite people to turn their full attention to whatever is interrupting their work and handle it with the spirit of service, and then when it’s complete, then you can return to your task. There’s no reason why an interruption has to break your sense of flow.
About breaking down tasks, how small should steps be?
The general rule of thumb is that a step should be about 10 to 15 minutes. You can adjust the length of the steps based on your level of mastery. I practice piano every day. With a piece I don’t know, I have to practice one measure at a time. But with a piece that I know very well, I can just sit down and play the whole thing. A master writer maybe could sit down and write an article and they have such a command over the different steps that they don’t have to be so explicit about them. And that works for them. But someone with less mastery, after five minutes, they’ll start getting frustrated that they aren’t making the right progress because they don’t have the kind of subconscious awareness of every step that they should be going through.
As we learn and develop and practice steps, they become more second nature and that enables us to do a larger task or project for a whole hour or two hours or 90 minutes. It requires this awareness of your own level of mastery and knowing how big you can make each step and still keep your whole attention on it.
So, the higher the level of mastery, the fewer steps are necessary.
Less explicit steps. Someone with that mastery has probably done a certain task many times. They’ve kind of laid out the steps and worked on their strategy and hone that over time. Whereas someone earlier in the process has to be not only more deliberate about laying out the steps and breaking them down into smaller sub-steps, but they also have to be more creative and experimenting with ordering the steps differently or trying new steps so that they can develop a strategy that’s going to work for the challenge they’re facing.
How can ideals help us shape our lives and ourselves? How do they help us get things done?
Ideals are positive inexhaustible qualities that we can use as models for our present action. Like kindness, patience, generosity, order, intensity, constancy, sincerity, humility, magnanimity. I think the question is a funny question. Because in some ways, the whole point of ideals is to try to transcend the getting things done mindset and see that actually the more valuable thing is that we’re shaping ourselves and serving others. At the same time, our mind works better when it’s pursuing something good, when it sees the opportunity rather than when it’s avoiding a threat. Ideals help us to stay in that positive frame. So, in that way, actually, they do help us to get more done, by keeping us in that positive mindset.
