My morning routine is solid. I stay off screens until after my workout and offline until after doing at least some writing.
But inevitably I fall off my solid track. Once I start working I can get lost in the hyper focus zone.
Even alarms don’t pull me out of it. I’ll break for the alarm, take care of whatever the alarm is prompting me to do, and go straight back to what I was working on.
This might seem ideal. It’s what the cult of productivity aspires to: the ability to get right back to work, to sit all day and crank out content.
Except it’s not productive. It’s not generative. It’s destructive.
The longer I persist in this state the less effective I am. After several hours of this my brain is fried and I’m useless. Not to mention frustrated and defeated.
The brain is a muscle and must be treated like one. Nobody would think it’s wise to carry heavy weights all day with your arms in the contracted state of a bicep curl. I think we can all agree that’s pretty self-defeating.
In the same way, trying to keep the mind engaged all day — or even for several hours at a stretch — is also counter productive.
The brain needs time and space to rest, to come offline in order to go back online.
Productivity isn’t only about what you produce. It’s also about how you recover.
your mind is muscle
it needs breaks from heavy lifts
give it space to rest
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