You know the feeling.
You’re sitting at your desk as the clock ticks toward 5 pm. There’s a half-drunk, lukewarm coffee on your desk and a blinking cursor on the computer screen in front of you.
Productivity
The biggest lie about productivity
When I get on an airplane, I usually follow the same ritual.
I take my seat and open up my laptop to do some work. When it’s time for takeoff, I begrudgingly put the laptop away. I twiddle my thumbs until the plane reaches 10,000 feet and that comforting chime tells me that I can pull out my laptop and go back to being productive.
How to find the unexpected
After his father died, the physicist Richard Feynman went into a deep depression.
He found himself unable to work on research problems. So he told himself that he’d instead play with physics—not for immediate practical results, but for its own sake.
Don’t fill the void
Nature, Aristotle once said, abhors a vacuum. He argued that a vacuum, once formed, would be filled by the dense material surrounding it.
I also abhor a vacuum. Whenever I find a vacuum in my life, I fill it—no, stuff it—with the dense material surrounding it in an attempt to be “productive.”