Virtues of being Lazy

One of my favorite Bruno Mars songs:

A line from Cal Newport’s Deep Work:

”These efforts, (cartoonist Tim Kreider) is convinced, need support of a mind regularly released to leisure”

..a mind regularly released to leisure. I’ve often found myself at the thin end of not taking breaks thinking I can somehow fix the solutions of my designs by working more on them. But as Cal beautifully puts it in his book

“some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome“

An experience comes to mind of when I attended the writing workshop, Handwash my heart by artist / poet, Christine Herzer. It was very odd for us to be given long breaks to do almost nothing between the sessions that she would have with us. We would have small instigations that would take about 45 mins to an hour in the morning and be set free for about three hours and meet post lunch to discuss if (at all) we had any notes that came off of it and to share it. There were no rules but it was considered ideal to be isolated from each other and we did without persuasion. Needless to say all of us not only wrote some astonishing stuff (things that still surprise me) but found a deep joy in the whole process.

When working on client projects, even now, at times I struggle with taking breaks. Largely an influence of a conditioning festering into our lives from the industrial age where working more would produce more. We are firmly rooted in the information age presently and with it we are flummoxed with the brutality of the plenty and as such, value in this age is not in creating more quantities but processing what we have deeply.

Quoting from the book again:

“for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue”

And taking deep breaks is the only way to ignite our unconscious mind and let it work its magic.

Curiosity - a joyous exploration

In ’The Art of Noticing’ Rob walker quotes Todd B. Kashdan, a professor of psychology at George Mason University.

”(Kashdan refers to) curiosity as ‘joyous exploration’ - defined as ‘the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing”

I feel given the rigours of professional life, the only way to be constantly and fruitfully engaged is to choose the stream one is curious about. Curiosity is the playful tenderness that guides the mind through the joys and tribulations of life, be it in work or otherwise. It is my feeling that no work can be expressed to its peak without having a deep curiosity about it. What all are we curious about? We all have a unique combination of it, it might even be the question that constitutes what we call our identity. Human behavior - blues music - high altitude mountaineering - visual art - films are a few of the things that I’m curious about and in a way, my inclination to them is my current identity.

Conversely drudgery is probably the other end of the spectrum where curiosity has left one’s heart and soul and each task is dealt mechanically. Like an automaton we perform tasks day in and day out, fuelled by our own misguided expectations or the ones we inherit from our society. But without curiosity, this joyous exploration, do we at the end of each day feel fulfilled in our quest or hollow? We do owe to ask ourselves this.

Isolating the tasks at hand

Just started reading ‘Deep Work‘ by Cal Newport yesterday and right away found it deeply interesting.

A new thing I learnt was about Myelin.

”myelin (is) a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner.”

The brain puts in effort to create this fatty tissue around the Neurons for optimum efficiency towards the task at hand. Connecting to other neurons more efficiently and strongly, creating neural highways. Cal goes on to write,

“it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.”

Whenever we are working towards a task, the moment theres a notification on our phone or theres someone calling our name out or there are dogs barking even, whatever grabs our attention and makes us think of something else, theres a new set of neurons that fire and we can’t isolate our task from it in our brains. The energy that our brain should be spending on myelination of the task at hand is used indiscriminately across all the things that are designed to grab attention.

Like a hole in a hose pipe (or many holes depending on how many things distract you) distractions take away from the main effort tremendously to a point where the work you set out doing is painted with mediocrity at best and is unattained at worst.