Cool Down (15 page)

People pause to enjoy their tea. They slow down just long enough to take in a cup or two. They gather their thoughts, they talk. Tea is used to help people collect themselves after a harrowing experience—not because of any healing properties in the tea itself, necessarily, but those found in the ritual.

All of this may seem like a lot of words to describe coffee and tea breaks, but these two products typify, both literally and figuratively, the value of
slow
in a high-speed world. They also make blue-skying more accessible.

In Chapter 1, we met the wireless PDA owner who was able to get all of his Monday work done on the train, and then pretend it was Tuesday. I mentioned at that point that he would probably have been better off spending his train ride staring out the window, and I meant it.

Previously in this chapter I have attempted to illustrate the value of staring at your shoes during an elevator ride and staring at your coffee in a coffee shop. The idea behind all of these points is this: It takes time for creative thought to step out of the box into which high-speed action has pushed it.

It's hard to say what types of things will come to you when you let your mind relax during blue-skying opportunities. Your ideas might lead to the invention of the next great widget, or they might form the central message of an upcoming presentation. Perhaps they'll be the plans for supper for the next four nights. Your mind knows what it wants to talk about. Whatever that is, it's essential that you first let these ideas come out and then store them somewhere—somewhere, permanent—on paper, for example. And here's the best part and the central point about blue-skying: The more you do it, the more ideas will come.

If you think about the times in your life when you've suffered through a cold or perhaps allergies, you've probably been amazed at the speed and efficiency by which congested sinuses refill with even more disgusting mucus just moments after you have blown your nose. Who would have thought there would be a life lesson in that? Well, there is. Because a creative brain works in much the same fashion, except you use a pen and paper (or a PDA) to receive the results, rather than a Kleenex. The more good ideas you liberate from the short-term memory area of your brain, the more space you make for new creative ideas to take their place, and they will.

The key words here are “liberate” and “from.” When ideas are forced to remain where they are, in short-term memory, your creative mind becomes stuffed. It is only when you get them out of there that new ideas can pour forth. Hence the next lesson in the art of blue-skying after actually giving yourself permission to do it, is to keep the ideas coming, simply by receiving them and recording them elsewhere. Flush them out. And do it regularly. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. And the more opportunity you give to yourself and your future.

Some people might think that encouraging a free flow of ideas in this way is overdoing it. They think that too much creativity, like too much preparation, can stand in the way of actually getting things done. But I disagree, and I disagree as someone who likes to see things get done. I base my argument solidly on the shoulders of all the project managers of the world. Because, in the world of project management, success is best reached through thorough planning. Thorough planning is perfected by discipline. Even when he feels great pressure to get started on the project, the experienced project manager must recognize the greater value in going slowly at this point, rather than rushing ahead. For as he writes out the future life story of the project, on paper or on screen, he envisions it, and his thoughts come out. First, they realistically quantify the elements and actions that go into a project, but then, second, they allow room for other thoughts, for new and better ideas to follow. Though project management might seem to be an analytical process, whereas blue-skying is more synthetic and less consciously purposeful, they have in common this essential principle: Creativity comes from allowing thoughts to appear in the short-term memory area of the mind, at which point they must be flushed out and preserved. Thoughts can't appear in the mind if other thoughts are occupying that space. So, by allowing the thoughts to come forward where they can be captured and recorded, the creative process continues. Slowing down in this fashion works for the practical needs of the time-pressed project manager, just as it can work for everyone.

The commute in to work is a great opportunity for blue-skying. This is why, in Chapter 1, I picked on the guy who owned the wireless PDA. I think there's more value in blue-skying than in working according to Parkinson's Law. On the one hand, the commute presents the same opportunities as the coffee shop and the fountain mentioned earlier in this chapter. The visual vagueness of the passing scenery allows the mind to drift and do its creative thing. This is most obvious for those who commute passively, e.g., by train, bus, or as a car passenger, but it applies also to those who drive. It
is
possible for experienced drivers to both drive and blue-sky at the same time. All it requires is that the driver not use the radio or cell phone.

Blue-skying during the commute not only allows for creative thought to occur, it also contributes greatly to stress management. For most professionals it's a given that negative stress will build up over the day to come. (This, of course, depends on how much they choose to
cool down
during the day.) The more that stress can be alleviated or tempered during the commute in, the better able your mind and body will be to both receive and process additional stressors, and implement
slow
techniques as the day continues. Put another way, those who arrive at the office already stressed, will find their day getting correspondingly worse. Your commute in is a buffer, and should be used as such.

The ride home offers similar opportunities for creativity and stress management, the most important of which is the build-up towards healthy sleep. Healthy sleep doesn't just happen overnight. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness brought on by an influx of hormones in the blood. The release of these hormones starts in late afternoon, around 4:00 p.m., and builds up over the next six hours. Tasks that force the body against this natural progression merely end up diluting these sleep chemicals, resulting in a reduced quality of sleep throughout the night. Thus, there is heightened value in actually relaxing and blue-skying on the way home—staring out the window of the train, or enjoying the drive even in clogged traffic by listening to music or spoken-word books. The ride home, in my opinion, is not the place to do more work on the phone, PDA, or laptop. Work is done. It stopped when you left the building. Life happens now, and a successful sleep cycle starts its incubation now.

A lot of people argue with me on this point, and they're welcome to. It's a contentious issue. My conviction seems to go against the mainstream idea that to be “on” all the time is the single pathway to success. But I believe that a comfortable blue-skying commute home is valuable to people through creativity and chemistry. It represents a conscious knowledge of the value of time and effort, which outshines reactionism and pays greater dividends.

 

 

This chapter looks at some more activities found in a typical workday, to observe just how the act of
cooling down
can contribute to greater productivity. The items here are listed chronologically. Please note, though, that some key elements of the workday (such as meetings and email) have already been covered in previous chapters, and you might therefore wish to refer to those sections.

5:59. One minute left. The numbers on the clock tick over to 6:00 a.m. and the buzzer sounds. You open one eye and look at the clock. No more opportunity left to sink back into blissful slumber. It's time to get up and leave your warm bed behind. In less than an hour you'll be rushing out the door, already late, and another stressful day will be underway.

Sleep is little understood by most people. It's very necessary. If you went without sleep long enough, you'd die. The longest a person has gone without sleep is nine days, and that was in a carefully controlled lab experiment.

But this book chapter is about maximizing your productivity during business hours, long after sleep is done. So why talk about it here? Because when you wake up in the morning, your sleep cycle is not finished. Because sleep, like many other elements of the body, is actually a 24-hour thing. When you exit the sleep phase in the morning, your body is already hard at work doing lots of things on your behalf, and one of them is regulating the chemicals and brainwaves that will ultimately bring you back to sleep.

If your day starts on a stressful note, it will be harder to handle the additional stressors in the hours to come. Not only will this make it more difficult to handle stressors, it ultimately will make it harder to get a good night's sleep later that evening, which will make getting up the next day that much more painful. This, in turn, will reduce your productivity, creating a negative spiral of wasted effort. One major benefit to
cooling down
and taking things slower right from the start is that it maximizes the positive benefits of your entire 24-hour cycle.