As many of us face the challenge of balancing work and home life as they try to co-exist under one roof, I suspect I’m not alone in my quest for ways to accomplish more in the limited time we all have.
Always on the search for ways to be more efficient and productive, I’m a sucker for articles on wrangling an email inbox or YouTube videos on bullet journaling and product reviews of planners. Often the advice requires more work to implement than it delivers in productivity gains, but some of the tips, like daily task lists and relying on email search functions rather than scores of subfolders, have had a measurable positive impact.
One of the areas where I’ve been looking for efficiencies is with deep-focus tasks like writing, one of the most common tasks of my job. Recently I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about using rest to increase focus and get more done. Backed by neuroscience research, the article advised playing mindless games on your phone or letting your mind wander as you watch a pot of water boil – doing less in order to do more. Like a reboot is often the only way out of a hopelessly stuck computer, giving your brain time to wander allows it to engage its “default network,” which enables it to do the background work of problem solving and creative thinking.
This is a hard pill for me to swallow. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t voluntarily take breaks until a project is finished. Rather, I power through even admittedly unproductive periods to finish the job. And if I do take a break, say to let the dog out or grab a cup of coffee, I’m inevitably noodling on the project all the while.
Those aren’t the kind of breaks the article is advocating. According to Barbara Oakley, a writer and professor whose work focuses on the relationship between neuroscience and social behavior, “When you take a break, you may want to do something mind-consuming to help with motivation, but technically your best way of taking a break is to do something mindless.”
The idea was intriguing, and I decided to give it a try in a small, very controlled way. My daughter had told me she was using the Pomodoro Technique to write her college thesis, and that framework struck me as a good way to experiment with intentional rest. Pomodoro, often used to manage distractions or procrastination, involves dividing projects into 25-minute segments of work separated by 5-minute breaks. So, I blocked out time on my calendar, set up timers on my phone for 25 and 5 minutes, and took myself offline.
After four cycles, I had a well-crafted piece of writing and a few observations:
- During my initial 25 minutes I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing much, and my first rest period felt unnecessarily long. As I got into a rhythm, however, I noticed that both the writing and rest segments seemed sufficient in length.
- The transition from rest to writing had been relatively smooth, and I hadn’t struggled to find my place upon returning to work, as I’d feared.
- The writing periods were focused and intentional. Unlike in the past, I hadn’t had any of the unproductive periods where I found myself staring at the page after hours of work, unable to make sense of what I’d written.
- During the rest breaks, I made a point of not doing anything that involved reading or thinking – no checking my email or scrolling the news on my phone. I either stared out the window and let my mind wander or closed my eyes and focused on my breathing.
- Unsurprisingly, it was initially a challenge for me to intentionally do nothing, but it got easier and more familiar as I repeated the process.
Ultimately, this experiment feels like a success, and I intend to employ this technique going forward. I’m curious whether I will be able to use it when I’m under pressure – when improved focus and creative thinking would be especially helpful.
I’m excited to see if this works for me on a larger scale as well. Maybe I’ll try some of the suggestions made in the article like taking a long walk without listening to an audiobook or cooking a big meal without a reason or a schedule.