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The argument for why you should step away from the screen.
You read a lot about productivity in this space, how to maximize it, how to use your own circadian rhythm to unleash creativity. And yet nothing is as essential to your writing life as your time away from it. It’s a scientific fact. As author Ferris Jabr says, “Work and rest are actually partners. They are like different parts of a wave. You can’t have the high without the low. The better you are at resting, the better you will be at working.”
It’s a hard lesson for Americans to learn, especially the American creative type who because of the upheaval of legacy media must now be ever-more entrepreneurial. I’m as guilty as anyone of overworking. But the older I get the more I realize the people who create work that breaks through, that endures, are often the ones who make rest part of their working routines.
A few months back I talked about Yuval Harari. For most of his academic career he was a middling medieval historian. Then he began a practice of Vipassana meditation that led him to consider history on a much grander scale. Which led him to write Sapiens, a book he couldn’t have written without Vipassana:
When you train the mind to focus on something like the breath, it also gives you the discipline to…
