Why downtime is essential for your productivity (and happiness).

Last week, I was on a short flight home, and as I settled in my seat, I considered how I wanted to spend my 90 minutes of flight time.

Read a book about copywriting? Maybe listen to a different book about marketing online? How about one of the two podcasts I had cued about self-improvement?

I’d just wrapped up a busy week of work and travel and had to give a short talk the following day as well as meet with a coaching client.

I was stuffed to the gills with work. I couldn’t possibly force down one more piece of content or personal development nugget of wisdom!

I needed to be fed instead of needing to consume or accrue.

So, I found a downloaded playlist I had on Spotify and just listened to music, and stared out the window at the night sky.

My brain needed some downtime. It needed time to recuperate and synthesize everything we’d done for the past few days. It needed to rest and recover.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because I think we can habituate non-stop self-improvement. I think we can forget to rest and recover. There is so much content to consume, so many books to read or podcasts to listen to or videos to watch that we can forget to just shut our eyes and listen to a favorite record, or read some shitty fiction and just sit quietly for an hour.

I can trick myself into thinking that I don’t work that much, but when I’m constantly consuming more information that I hope will help me do my job better, then I’m never taking a moment off. Not even nights and weekends.

Of course, this ultimately ends up being counter-productive because if I don’t allow ample time for recovery and sense-making, I end up not having the capacity to do good work in the future.

As the infamous novelist Jack Torrance famously typed out in the movie The Shining: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”