Cognitive Training Teaches You to Organize Your Ideas and Your Space
Do you often feel like you have too much to keep track of? Do you find yourself pushing tasks back while you address more urgent matters, saying you’ll “cross that bridge when you get to it,” and letting opportunities slip through the cracks? These are all indicators that your organization skills could use improvement—and cognitive training will deliver that improvement.
Even experienced business executives stand to gain from building their organization skills—after all, as you grow professionally and take on more responsibilities, your schedule fills up and requires more strategic planning to manage.
Cognitive training develops the core skills you use to keep your thoughts, tasks, and spaces organized. This is one of the ways that cognitive training can boost your business performance. Read on to learn about those skills and how Critical Thinking for Success helps you improve them.
How Do Cognitive Skills Factor into Organization?
Cognitive skills are the foundational building blocks of the way you think. They’re so central to how you function that you’re not even conscious of using them, much like you’re not usually conscious of your breathing or your heartbeat.
Your ability to stay well-organized is affected by a variety of these cognitive skills. Here’s a breakdown of the cognitive skills used in organization:
- Classification and Categorization: This cognitive skill assists in grouping and managing objects, ideas, actions, emotions, and time periods.
- Environmental Awareness: This skill aids in seeing the relationships between objects or ideas.
- Field Discrimination: This cognitive skill helps you stay focused on a target despite the presence of distractions and other information.
- Analysis and Synthesis: These skills are used to break ideas and processes down, then manage and recombine them according to the logic holding them together.
- Motor Integration: Developing this skill makes you better at planning your tasks out ahead of time instead of rushing into them.
- Abstract Sequencing: This skill, otherwise known as abstract logic, is key to being able to visualize the step-by-step plan you’re developing to organize something. This helps you strategize better and correct errors in the process before you begin executing it.
- Concrete Sequencing: This skill, also known as concrete logic, aids in identifying problems during the execution of a plan. This makes it easier to correct inefficiencies, learn from hands-on tasks, and train others.
How Does Cognitive Training Help Me Develop and Apply These Skills?
So, how do you improve those skills and become better-organized?
The obvious starting point is to figure out which of those skills need work. Critical Thinking for Success will give you proficiency tests that measure each skill in order to determine where it would be most productive to direct our efforts.
Then, we develop a personalized training plan to help you improve those cognitive skills. This mainly consists of two parts: daily training exercises, and face-to-face counseling sessions.
For each skill, we have an arsenal of simple exercises you can practice each day to start using that skill better. For example, one exercise we use to measure and develop your motor integration is mazes. Visualizing the path you plan to take before you start drawing your line through the maze trains your brain to get into the habit of planning and visualizing rather than rushing into things—a key skill in staying organized.
During our regular sessions together, we’ll discuss your progress as well as your application of these skills in real life. We’ll talk about things coming up in your business and personal lives and suggest strategies and tactics for planning out how you’ll handle them. This way, you’ll be practicing actively applying these critical skills and becoming better-organized in daily life.
Over time, you’ll build up the relevant cognitive skills, which will lead to improved organizing abilities. You’ll have a clearer order to your ideas, your schedule, and even your workspace. This will make you more effective and productive, but also relieve the stress of not having a good idea of everything you need to do.
If you’re ready to build your organization skills, don’t wait—call Critical Thinking for Success today at 847-845-0422 and set up a consultation. We’re always happy to discuss cognitive training and how we can train your brain to be the best it can be!
