Your brain is an organ that you should treat like any other muscle. To maintain healthy muscles, you have to allow them to rest. Why should your brain be any different?
Meaningful knowledge work needs the support of a mind that is regularly allowed the proper amount of rest. Rest and recovery help recharge the energy needed to work deeply. No one has ever performed any task well after pulling an all nighter and not giving your brain a break is similar to depriving it of sleep.
Attention restoration theory or ART, first proposed in the 1980s at the University of Michigan, claims that concentration is not an infinite resource; it requires directed attention, which taxes the mind. You can restore your ability to pay direct attention to tasks and work if you give this activity a rest. As long as an activity can provide “inherently fascinating stimuli” without requiring focused attention, it can be beneficial. Chatting with a friend, listening to music, or going for a walk are all ways to rest your mind after a day of focused work. My favorite way to rest my mind after a long day of work is to listen to baseball stat podcasts and doodle in my sketch book.
Nowadays, it’s becoming harder and harder to fully allow one’s self to unplug and relax. With smart phones at this point almost being a necessity, we’re expected to be on call and on task at all hours of the day. As Adam Greenfield states in his book Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, “…work invades our personal time, private leaks into public, the intimate is trivially shared, and the concerns of the wider world seep into what ought to be a space for recuperation and recovery”. People are social by nature and smart phones give us the opportunity to bask in the warmth that communication gives us every time we open them. We want to be helpful, we want to answer that email as soon as possible so we’re not holding anyone else up. We want to be seen as a productive member of the team.
We now have a pressure on us to be available all the time, to just do a little more, check one more email, write one more paragraph, read one more article. But more often than not, the work squeezed in to what should be downtime isn’t even that important. That email will be there tomorrow, your ability to concentrate if not given a break will not be. Trying to squeeze out a bit more work at the end of the day will more than likely effect your work the next day, leading you to get even less done. All that is really being done during downtime is shallow work.
I don’t know how to solve every problem in the world being at your fingertips, but a good way to combat attention fatigue is to have a strict endpoint to your workday. Cal Newport calls this a shut down ritual, or a series of steps you conduct at the end of each day that ensures you either have a plan to complete a task the next day or you have left off in a place that can be revisited with ease. Newport stresses the importance of having a phrase to signal the end of the ritual. It sounds very corny but it provides your mind with a cue that it has done its work for the day.
People aren’t robots, concerns and stress don’t vanish from your mind because it’s 5pm and you’re done working. At first, a shutdown ritual is going to feel like a chore but any routine does in the beginning. Reviewing incomplete tasks and coming up with a plan for them in the future not only frees up your mind for the downtime it needs but also helps create a clearer path to achieve what you set out to do each workday. It reinforces confidence in yourself and your work that you have a plan for what you need to do and you will be able to pick back up tomorrow.
In a culture that is slowly headed towards a constant digital flow of work, it’s important to know when to work and work hard but it’s just as important to know when to call it a day. That email can wait until tomorrow. Much like your phone, you also need to recharge.
Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash
Greenfield, Adam. “A Sociology of the Smartphone.” Edited by Dana Snitzky, Longreads, 23 Jan. 2018, longreads.com/2017/06/13/a-sociology-of-the-smartphone/.
Newport, C. (2016). Rule#1: Work Deeply. In Deep Work (pp. 95 – 155). New York: Grand Central Publishing.
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