What to do in breaks?

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow)

Its a nagging feeling I get at the end of every weekend that I’ve resolved not to work. Did I enjoy taking the break more than doing the work, were my weekend breaks more fun than my weekdays? Surprisingly, more often than not I’ve come to crave the mundanity or safety net of the weekday, especially at the end of Sunday, realizing the weekend was a blur of things happening that neither left me happy nor rejuvenated.

One interesting thing Cal Newport suggests in Deep Work is our minds crave less for empty blocks of time in our life and more for a change in tasks. What we really want when we mean we need a break is to stop doing the task at hand and do something else. This is a fascinating thought in itself. That means your weekends are more fun if you know what you are going to do in those days as opposed to chilling out on the couch or ambiguously relaxing.

One can even populate the break days (or hours within a day) with tasks that might seem like ‘work’ to others but is basically offering you a contrast from your occupation. When I used to be a techie, sketching or drawing would offer me a good break from my 9 to 5s but now that drawing dominates my working hours, sketching doesn’t contrast so well with my daily life. I find it much fulfilling to ride my bike, write a blog or learn the guitar for example.

What Csikszentmihalyi seems to say is as long as you populate your breaks with tasks that have intrinsic goals and challenges, you can truly lose yourself in it and be physically and mentally away from your ‘work’. Some tasks I can think of are, cleaning your vehicle, arranging your room, playing a sport, learning an instrument, learning any new skill, cycling, fixing a broken object, crafting a toy, etc.

Why draw and write?

Its been about a decade now that I have been maintaining visual journals as a regular practice. Basically a journal with some sketches, doodles and notes observing the occurrences around me and the feelings within me. Bulk of these years I’ve religiously scanned and put across in a tumblr page. These are some of the benefits I gather from maintaining the practice.

Seeing Clearly: Our mind is used to relegating large amount of details to the background and creating only a minimal picture in our heads of the things we see in our day to day life. Drawing objects around allows you to discover more deeply the subject and allows for discoveries hidden in plain sight.

Documenting our life: Journal entries might feel uneventful while they are written but are deeply fruitful to look back on years down the line. I have captured people in my journals who have left their earthly abodes, objects that are lost not just physically but to the mind over the years, written thoughts that are sometimes seeds of the person I’ve become, written occurrences that seem incredulous now to have happened to the current version of me. Times change, people change, you yourself are no more the person you once were and through it all the journal is a documentation of your life and a reminder of what you saw and how you thought.

Feeling Deeply: Journaling not only allows you to see but also feel more clearly. I make it a point to write not just what I see visibly but also what I feel about the situations around me and sometimes explicitly within me. The combination of word and image is an incredible tool to go deeper within yourself. There are many feelings documented in my journal that would have fleeted right by me with little notice had I not written or drawn them down. Feeling deeply is living deeply.

Organizing our thoughts: The more we are bombarded by information in this hyper connected age the more thoughts we have wandering around in our head. Journaling is a good medium to structure the thoughts that are moving around in your head and thus be able to process it. Language, be it writing or drawing, allows you to structure thoughts and structured thoughts can then be classified as important or unimportant to the endeavors we have in life.

Finally, we don't have to be good at drawing or know how to draw, we don't need to be proper at our grammar. In the end what matters is we see more clearly, feel more deeply and think more optimally. It matters that we have the ability to look at the moments of our lives we spend someday into the future.

Don't Focus on the Goals

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important - Mads Mikkelsen (Vulture Interview)

The goal in any game is to finish with the highest points but it would be stupid to focus on the scoreboard. The score takes care of itself, focus on the ball. The only way to actually win is to get better everyday. - James Clear

Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world. - Charles Eames