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It isn't news that culture is obsessed with doing—with being in motion, with being occupied, with being busy. But the upshot of all this doing is that we spend very little time deciding exactly what we should be doing in the first place.

Real productivity is more than just activity, after all. And when we're asked to act upon (or ignore) hundreds of updates, requests, and interruptions every single day, to actually step back and decide can be much more difficult than to simply do. Amid all this bombardment, being truly productive depends upon your ability to say "no." In other words, what you don’t do on a daily basis is at least—if not more—important than what you actually do take action on.

What separates strategic, visionary thinkers from the rest of us? And why do we tend to worry about our ability to remember names—or where our keys are—rather than loss of cognitive memory that makes great performers?

These were questions that puzzled Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas—Dallas. She wondered if high-level cognitive function could be taught or improved and set about figuring out how to do so. As a result, she and her team have developed Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training (SMART), a research-based brain training program that they claim can improve focus, memory, and cognitive function, starting with just nine hours of training.

If that seems unlikely, randomized clinical trials indicate that even relatively short periods of this type of training can have an impact. A 2013 study found that just 12 hours of directed brain training altered brain function, increasing blood flow, enhancing information communication across key brain regions, and expanding the connections between brain regions that lead to new learning in adults over 50 years old.

Most time-strapped executives know they should plan ahead and prioritize, focus on the important as much as the urgent, invest in their health (including getting enough sleep), make time for family and relationships, and limit (even if they don’t entirely avoid) mindless escapism. But doing this is easier said than done, as we all know—and as I, too, have learned during years of trying unsuccessfully to boost my effectiveness.

In my case, I stumbled upon an ancient meditation technique that, to my surprise, improved my mind’s ability to better resist the typical temptations that get in the way of developing productive and healthy habits. Much in the same way that intense, focused physical activity serves to energize and revitalize the body during the rest of the day, meditation is for me—and for the many other people who use it—like a mental aerobic exercise that declutters and detoxifies the mind to enhance its metabolic activity.

Own up to your shortcomings.

There’s a disturbance in the workforce—a lot of them, actually.

You know the ones: the persistent ding of social media alerts, the unending stream of “urgent” emails, the cubicle mate who conducts every call on speakerphone.

How can we get any work done with so many distractions afoot?

The answer is that most of us aren’t accomplishing as much as we could be. Research from the University of California, Irvine, found that the typical office worker spends only 11 minutes on a task before getting interrupted or abandoning it for another project. And once workflow has been disrupted, it can take about 23 minutes to get back on track, explains professor Gloria Mark, who led the study.