When coffee doesn’t cut it: how to keep going

“There are a few optimal windows for doing your most creative and focused work,” [Assistant Professor Christopher] Barnes says. Most people are at their best in the mid-morning and late afternoon. You might match your circadian rhythm to your schedule by organizing your to-do list around these peaks and valleys. Tate recommends doing “any type of highly detailed work,” such as writing, important decision-making, or technical coding during high-energy hours. During the lulls, you can then turn to tasks that don’t require a great deal of focus: cleaning out your inbox, filling out expense reports, or returning phone calls. “That’s when to do tasks that are like muscle memory work,” she says.

How to Overcome the Midday Slump – Carolyn O’Hara, Harvard Business Review (1 July 2015)

Are we sure coffee doesn’t do the job? It would be helpful. Tea would be even better. But according to O’Hara, moving around and then the opposite, mediation, are what you need. There are reasons and there are more ways to get yourself moving, though: Read the full piece.

Walk it off, walk it off

One day, when Marc Andreessen, the money man behind such tech giants as Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, was out driving around his home in Palo Alto, California, he nearly hit a crazy old man crossing the street.

Looking back at the fool he had nearly run over he noticed the trademark blue jeans and black turtle neck. “Oh my god! I almost hit Steve Jobs!” he thought to himself.

Why Everyone From Beethoven, Goethe, Dickens, Darwin To Steve Jobs Took Long Walks and Why You Should Too – Andrew Tate, Canva (6 March 2015)

In comparison, my Apple Watch just told me it was time I really stood up for a minute and I ignored it. I am evil.

It really was Jobs, by the way, not just any old nutter in a turtleneck, and writer Andrew Tate says: “through history the best minds have found that walking, whether a quick five minute jaunt, or a long four hour trek, has helped them compose, write, paint, and create.”

I’ll think about the quick jaunt, okay? Read the full piece for five persuasive reasons why walking is good for you and your productivity.

Bugger. Walking is good for your creativity

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

This research – as well as the nifty soundbites or anecdotal quotes that have been around for hundreds of years – suggests that the act of walking itself, not just what you enjoy along the way, is what’s beneficial. The science to back this up is long established and trusted.

Exercise, of course, gets the heart pumping faster, thus circulating more blood to the brain. This is even true on small ambles – not just powerful sprints. All this extra oxygen-rich blood getting to the brain allows it to perform certain tests much better, especially those concerned with memory and attention.

More recent research showed that walking actually encourages the brain to create new connections between cells and helps transmit messages between them much more effectively. Furthermore, it can reduce the speed of tissue degradation and even enlarge the hippocampus, which is responsible for spatial navigation and converting information from the short-term to the long-term memory.

When it comes to a boost in creativity, though, researchers said there might be something else at play. They argued that walking distracts the brain’s prefrontal cortex, as it’s this which is responsible for decision making and rule learning – among other things. With the prefrontal cortex otherwise occupied, it enables left-field, alternative suggestions to sneak in where they may otherwise have been rooted out.

Does walking really improve your creativity? – Tom (no surname given), Ordnance Survey Blog (23 September 2014)

China’s Chongqing city gives texters their own lane

Not on the roads, not for driving, but for pavement walkers. Take a look at this picture from News.cn: you get the idea immediately yet I’m not convinced it’s been entirely thought through. That’s the main smartphone user’s lane with a No Phones lane to the left. But don’t those arrows make you suspect you’re going to walk into people coming the other way?

IMG_0716.JPG

Stroll on

Look, I made certain career decisions and I made them early. I refused to go into banking because I didn’t want to be forced to take all those bank holidays. (This is not worked out as well as I hoped.) And I became a writer because I could spend my life sitting down.

(I fully believe Dorothy Parker: “Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.” And I fully love Dorothy Parker for being so clever as to call me an ass yet make me enjoy it.)

But.

There is an argument for going outside. Yadda yadda yadda. Walking. Yeah yeah. The Huffington Post is the latest to make this case and it’s argued well. I could only believe it more if the Huffington Post paid its writers.