Guilt-Free Downtime
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” That’s the mantra I borrowed from the late philosopher Dallas Willard, and it has shaped the last 10 years of my habits and rituals. So much so that at one point my wife told me she was going to have it engraved on flasks or something as gifts at my funeral.
My relationship to Willard’s philosophy has changed over the past decade. At first, I understood it to mean bringing vigilance to what I could cut from my life to make more time for less hurry. No more “power” lunches (that’s code for no lunch), no more cramming work, no more timing my commutes to the minute. But carving out space for the sake of carving out space, especially in my work, left me feeling guilty. “I should at least be catching up on expense reports,” accosted my focus. Moreso, I thought, “Shouldn’t I be getting out of work a little earlier to spend this extra time with my kids?”
Tension arose with this next realization. This “extra time,” or margin in each day, felt like a requirement for me to be the best me. Glimpses of breakthroughs, higher mental and emotional connection toward my work and my collaborators, and some of my best output came on the heels of downtime. What was that about?
When I choose intentionally designed, slow-pace, full-focus activities to do instead of hurry activities, I have significantly increased creative output (more ideas) and higher-impact outcomes (better ideas). Simply put, instead of asking, “What can I cut?” I ask, “What can I choose to do instead?” It’s not just me. We’ve been integrating these what-can-I-do-insteads into our design programs with clients, and they’re experiencing the same results. All the while, we’re gaining a deeper understanding of why.
If you’re an optimizer, squeezing the day like a sponge in pursuit of efficiency gains, you might write this off. Actually, maybe just skim the rest of this to see if it’s worth your time. If you’re willing to embrace a counterintuitive approach to problem-solving, one that unlocks a likely dormant creativity within you, enjoy the read. It’s not long and I expect you'll find at least one new design secret. Here’s the sauce:
4 ways to slow your roll and boost your brain power
1. Design a Morning Ritual
If Microsoft researcher Linda Stone is right in saying, “Continuous partial attention is our new normal,” then that’s the first thing we need to break. Do a distraction audit to identify your attention disruptors. What is always grabbing at your attention? For me, it’s iPhone hopscotch. Hopping through the tiles on my phone inevitably leads to getting swept away by email. Familiar?
Find a ritual, a behavior you can do ceremoniously to signal that a different kind of day has started. Choose something you can do at an intentionally unhurried pace. I read one page of a prayer book each morning. And thanks to inspiration from Miraval wellness resorts, I now have my very own iPhone sleeping bag. (Ok, it’s a thermal phone pouch, but it does the trick). I put my phone on silent and tuck it into its pouch before I read my page. (I did not anticipate sharing that with more than my immediate circle.) That action creates just enough friction for me to overcome my unconscious impulse to reach for my phone to “check the time.”
2. Set an Idea Quota
Brian Lucas’s breakthrough work on the “creative-cliff illusion” states, “Though most people believe their creativity will decline rapidly the longer they spend brainstorming ideas for a given problem, quality — as defined by novelty and usefulness — stays stable or actually increases.” Therefore, he suggests a simple rule of thumb: the 3:20 rule.
“If you’re trying to put three good ideas on the table, you should probably be asking your team to generate 20.” In other words, set an idea quota. Grab a notebook and chop up a full clean page by drawing a three-by-three grid. Now determine a prompt, something currently on your plate that’s yet to be solved. Then here comes the discipline. Patiently persevere with filling the grid, all nine boxes, with one unique idea each. By the ninth idea, you’ll be surprising yourself with something unexpected.
3. Schedule an Accountablock
Accountablock. It’s a silly word merge that represents blocking time on your calendar — a gift to your future self for practicing a creative discipline — and sharing that protected space with someone else for accountability. Schedule time to go for an input-seeking walk, and tag a buddy to hold you to it. You don’t have to do it together, just leave your office or your WFH nook at the same time. Check in with each other by using the last five minutes to debrief what you did and share your refreshed and inspired perspective.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits (the book probably sitting on 70% of our coffee tables right now), refers to this approach as a “commitment device,” or a choice you make in the present that helps control your actions in the future. More often than not, I blow past the blocks I put on my calendar for important creative activities. I don’t when I know someone is waiting there for me.
4. Shift your Modus Operandi
In a recent study from Colombia University, researchers unpacked the crippling effects of cognitive fixation, defined as “the notion that people commonly struggle to conceive creative solutions because they ‘fixate,’ or fail to abandon inappropriate problem-solving angles.” Translation: we get stuck in a mental rut. They found that putting one task aside and switching to another improves creative performance and produces responses that are unrelated to the preceding response.
So, next time you’re tempted to use brute force to overcome a creative block, pause. Shift your M.O. (your modus operandi) and gravitate toward something different. For me, that means heading to my woodshop. I’ve been known to bring chicken scratch breakthroughs scribbled on the back of sandpaper into work the next day. Whether it’s gardening, running, or calligraphy (a recommendation I recently received from a Fortune 100 CEO), find a task that creates space for your subconscious to catch up and surprise you with new angles.
Ok, but why try any of this?
Why give these approaches a shot? I’m going to let my behavioral psychologist sensei (I wish) and Nobel Prize laureate, Daniel Kahneman, explain. He shared, “Once you have begun to reach a conclusion, the rest of the time is basically wasted because you are finding … reasons for doing what you already decided to do.” The remedy to this type of thinking? Kahnaman calls it “delayed intuition” when decision-making is suspended until after a large quantity of avenues are explored. So rather than coming to a quick conclusion, these approaches encourage and build a consistent openness to new ideas and directions.
Yes, margin, aka time repurposed for delayed intuition, can produce better productivity, more focus, better sleep even. But more importantly, it can open you up to way better ideas and way more of them. What better way to obliterate the guilt of slowing your roll than to use margin for better decision-making.