The Most Overlooked Way to Increase Your Productivity: Take More Time Off
How to let your curiosity find its voice again
Close your eyes for a moment and think of the most productive days you had in the recent past.
What did they look like? Where were you? What did you do? And why did it make you feel productive?
Personally, I had three of my most productive days in a long time last month, and my guess is that they didn’t look the way you just imagined yours.
Tuesday of that particular week was a public holiday here in Japan, and I took Monday and Wednesday off to give myself a nice three-day break in addition to the weekend.
On Monday morning, I set off on a 60km bike ride to an Airbnb I had rented near Lake Sagami, a beautiful lake in the mountains just outside of Tokyo.
I didn’t bring a laptop, and my phone went on airplane mode the moment I arrived. The only things in my backpack (besides some fresh clothes) were several books and notebooks.
Instead of being connected, and distracted, I spent my time walking, reading, and writing. Or just sitting by the lake and staring out over it for two hours while slowly sipping on a beer.
Over the course of these three days, I felt a transformation.
Gradually, I sensed an old feeling that I had almost forgotten about slowly coming back to me: a boundless, childlike curiosity, that made the whole world suddenly appear extremely interesting again.
Philosophers on Time to Contemplate
The Ancient philosophers deeply understood the importance of this frame of mind for creative work.
Aristotle talked of noble leisure as the highest ideal a human could aspire to, seeing it as the basis for contemplation and deep thought.
Similarly, Heraclitus described the work of the philosopher as “listening to the essence of things.”
Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper, whose work heavily built on that of Aristotle, talks about “God’s intuitions,” essentially the big creative breakthroughs and eureka moments, visiting men during times of rest and leisure.
Only in those calm and silent moments is our soul receptive enough to receive the creative gifts that are waiting to be discovered all around us.
Our subconscious mind is constantly on the lookout for them, but we’re often either too distracted to take note of its discoveries or too focused on “the work” to allow our subconscious to roam freely to make the discoveries in the first place.
“Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck. You’ll sit there going, ‘Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?’ But it is trying to tell you nicely ‘Shut up and go away!’”
— Anne Lamott
The entire notion of the “intellectual worker” is decidedly modern and shows just how much our thinking and perception of work have changed.
Traditionally, intellectual pursuits were always reserved for the leisure class, far removed from work. The Ancients thought of knowledge as mostly receptive, we passively receive it through observing the world.
Knowledge needs space to breathe and time for contemplation.
But over the centuries, we started conflating business with productivity. And worse, we started associating a feeling of guilt with not working.
In the 18th century, in stark contrast to Heraclitus, Immanuel Kant came to describe philosophizing as “Herculean labor.” He actively dismissed quiet intellectual contemplation because it is effortless.
To Kant, his contemporaries, and many of us today, hard work came to equal moral good, almost independent of whether it actually leads to productive outcomes or not.
And as a result, because we buy into this belief and are unable to shake off the ingrained guilt, we’re stifling our productivity and creativity.
A Flow of Ideas
By the third day of my distraction-free solo trip, I felt like my senses started to become amplified.
It was almost like I had forgotten how to properly see, hear, or smell things, and now I suddenly remembered.
Smell was probably the most noticeable, many times unexpectedly taking me to distant times and places. This is something that usually only happens once every few weeks to me, and suddenly it started happening several times a day, and with increasing rate the longer I was disconnected.
I once again started marveling at how the world works. This deep interest in nature was something I used to define myself by, from a young age all the way through doing my Ph.D. in quantum physics. But somehow after leaving academia, I felt like I had lost this curiosity, and it really troubles me at times.
But sitting there by the lake, being amazed by the waves and the reflections, I started to deeply think about wave equations and light propagation.
For the first time in a long time, my thoughts were guided by pure curiosity rather than some utilitarian purpose.
Not only did it feel extremely good, like I had rediscovered a part of myself I had feared lost, it was also immensely productive.
The world came alive, and I became perceptive of it. And with it, ideas just started flowing out of me.
Cycling home, I had to stop several times to take out my notebook, easily filling many pages with thoughts and ideas.
One of the books I was re-reading during these three days was Anne Lamott’s wonderful Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. In it, Lamott describes how on good days, writing can feel almost like you are just a receiver, an instrument that listens and writes down what the universe wants to have written.
I understood exactly what she meant when I was filling my notebook that day. The ideas were effortlessly coming to me, flowing out through my pen onto the pages.
And they ended up fueling my work and writing for weeks to come.
In what was probably less than an hour of active time taking notes that day, I laid the foundation for future work that would have taken me countless hours had I been “grinding things out.” If those ideas had come to me at all, I think is questionable.
As the noise of the world was quieting down, my mind and senses finally found their voice again.
And, inspired by the world they were taking in, they were eager to create.
A Reset of Mind and Body
Times have changed, we cannot recreate the ways in which the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome went about their “knowledge work.”
But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from their wisdom and try to repurpose their methods in a modern context.
In the future of work, with machines and AI doing all the busy-work for us, embracing this ancient wisdom and focusing on our innate human skills like creativity and empathy will be the key to staying relevant. And those skills are fuelled by rest and leisurely contemplation.
It only took me three days of solitude, stillness, and contemplation to recapture this wonderful and highly productive state of mind.
Punctuated by the bike ride at either end, which I think helped to tell my body and mind that something different was about to come, I could effectively break out of my usual daily routines and mental patterns.
While I would ultimately recommend a larger behavioral shift, incorporating more time off and a better rest ethic into our everyday lives, an intervention like this can be very powerful in showing us the way to a more balanced life. It can remind us of just how much we can achieve if we’re not always too busy to “listen to the essence of things” and actually being creative and productive, rather than just being visibly busy.
If you decide to follow my example and invest some time off into your creativity, I would love to hear how it went and what kind of epiphanies you got from it.
Let your curiosity find its voice again and guide you on your journey.
And remember: Rest is productive!