Take a break when you stop making progress

by Jen (May 22, 2008)

I learned early on the importance of working when you don’t feel like it. Whether I was sick, tired or just out of touch with my creative muse, I mastered the art of staying on task no matter what. The problem is, I didn’t know when I was burnt out. In adulthood I realized this was just as bad an issue as not having any discipline in the first place. We humans tend to celebrate extremes, but the extreme opposite of being a couch potato is being a workaholic.

You want to be somewhere in the middle.

Here’s a little trick I’ve learned: when you’re having a productive day and suddenly you slow way down, it’s time to take a break. For example, today I was writing articles. It was going great - I was getting so much done. Then suddenly I… wasn’t. I realized I’d been doing the same things I’d been doing all morning, only now it wasn’t working. My usual hunts for inspiration and writing ideas weren’t generating anything. The ideas I was getting seemed dull and not worth pursuing. My first thought was: “My sources of inspiration have dried up.”

Then I realized it was my brain that had dried up. It was tired of this activity and needed a switch. Because I was forcing it to work past its productive point, it was no longer perceiving opportunities where there clearly were opportunities.

I decided to come back to the articles tomorrow, and went to do something else. About five minutes later, inspiration for another article hit me, and when I came back to it, everything flowed like it had been flowing all morning. Five minutes’ break - that was all my poor brain wanted. And normally, I’d have kept at it for another three hours, getting more tired and frustrated and blah feeling.

We have this idea that people are supposed to be super robots of productivity, but we’re not. Sometimes I think we’d be more productive if we cut the 40 work week to 20 hours and no one ever worked more than a few hours a day at a job or on chores. I know that calls for more revamping of the world than you or I alone can do, but it’s something to consider when you feel like you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.

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Posted in Organization, Personal Development
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