The Secret Ingredient to Improving Your Productivity: Big Blue
Do you find yourself dreaming of some open space to think, some time to sleep in, some fresh air to breathe and get away from it all? Yes? But the reality is that your demanding job provides a hundred reasons why it’s impossible to truly get away.
Not wanting to waste those precious vacation days—or the chance to jump in the lake—you may be tempted to work while you’re vacationing here. Yet the surprising truth is that working on vacation can hurt your productivity more than it helps.
Every day, I work with leaders of companies who ask, “How can I improve my performance, innovation, or influence at work?” When I ask what they have tried already, I hear things like: “I work weekends to stay ahead,” “I add networking events to my calendar,” “I start working as soon as I get up in the morning to get the most out of my day.” But almost everyone I work with is missing a key ingredient to success … rest.
If you want to innovate, solve complex adaptive challenges, or navigate tricky relationships, you need rest. What I mean by rest is any activity, or non-activity, that releases your mind from intense focus and allows your body to restore itself. Such an activity could be exercising, sleeping, enjoying a hobby, being in nature, connecting with those you love, taking a vacation, or even daydreaming.
Not resting takes a serious toll. In fact, a study at Stanford showed that people who worked 70 hours a week didn’t accomplish any more than their colleagues who worked 56 hours a week. Let that sink in. The wild part is that, when you chronically trade off rest to put in more hours at work, it’s difficult to recognize your own impairment. Much like when someone has one too many cocktails and says they are “just fine.”
Rest does two important things:
- It helps renew your self-regulation, the ability to control behavior, emotions, and thoughts in the pursuit of long-term goals.
- It gives you access to your default mode network. According to Seligman and Kellerman in their book Tomorrow Mind, our default mode network is where our best ideas come from.
Let me explain a little about Seligman and Kellerman’s research. Your brain has a default-mode network and a task-positive network. The default-mode network activates when you allow your mind to wander or daydream. It specializes in imagining and planning and allows you to discover and learn deeply about what doesn’t yet exist.
The task-positive network is used when you’re hard-focusing at work, doing things like designing a spreadsheet or writing reports. The task-positive network gathers existing information about the world and exploits these knowns.
When you think of rest as a luxury or as a selfish act, you rob yourself and your brain of time to prune neural connections, make disparate connections between unlikely things, and imagine new solutions. You empty your self-regulation tank, leaving you susceptible to becoming critical, judgmental, and defensive. Your focus loosens, your patience wanes, your emotional agility falters. And this is just in the short term. Long term lack of rest leads to increased medical bills, poor health, cognitive decline, unwanted weight gain, weariness, and exhaustion.
If you are in the Tahoe area on vacation, get out and ride the single track! Let your mind wander as you stroll by the lake. Doze on a crisp fall day and take time to daydream amid tall pine trees. Give your default-mode network the time it needs to solve some of your stickiest work problems, to hatch your next big idea for a start-up, or to answer big questions like, “What do I want out of life?”
Remember this: work + work + work = 2, but rest + work = 3.

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