There are days where my head is racing with ideas, my fingers are moving a mile-a-minute and I’m at some point faced with the fact that I have without a doubt accomplished more than I do during a normal week. Some might celebrate this flurry of activity. But I’m a rather pessimistic person so I inevitably get depressed and can’t help but ask myself: why doesn’t this happen every day? Or at least a bit more frequently?
Perhaps if I was an experimentalist, I could make up a litany of excuses about why my project is stuck. Cell’s aren’t growing. The machine I need is being used. My reagent has gone bad. The list can go on. And on. And on. But in reality, I’m a (predominately) computational biologist. When things aren’t working (save for the few occasions that my office has a power outage) I am the thing.
So I was fascinated to read this series at Slate (based off of a book ) that investigates how great minds in the past have managed to accomplish so much. It’s not quantitative, but rather a collection of stories and anecdotes from which patterns emerge. I recommend that everyone give it a read but for those with slightly less time on their hands (or need to procrastinate), I’ll touch on a few basic points that I found the most interesting.
First, drink lots of coffee. And when that fails, moving onto amphetamines isn’t such a bad idea. I personally struggle with this issue, because one recurring pattern of my super-creative bouts is that they often occur when I am in a state of coffee-induced mania. These manic phases are fantastic for my work, but they are unfortunately completely unsustainable. I drink coffee every day (and was refreshed to hear that most famous artists/scientists/writers did/do as well!) but generally only enough to bring me to a non-headached baseline. Were I to require that feeling of mania on a regular basis, I’d quickly find myself consuming more and more per day (trust me, I’ve tried) until I’d be left with pretty much no options other than to make the leap to amphetamines (haven’t quite got there yet, but, according to the series, plenty of incredibly intelligent and creative artists and scientists did).
There are great lessons in this series about when to work, how to work, and with whom to work. But aside from the self-indulgent ‘you should probably binge on soft-narcotics’ argument presented above, the biggest take-home lesson for me is that you can sometimes get more done by working less. Many people agree in principle that breaks and vacations are good for long term mental health and intellect, but when it comes time to tell your boss that you’re taking 2 weeks off for the sake of your research, sudden changes of heart in this principle are not unheard of. And it’s not just employers and co-workers who may judge you, you may very easily judge yourself. It is a difficult principle to grasp: “will I really be better off by not working today?”. Surely, I won’t get more accomplished tomorrow if I take the day off. But will the work that I do the day after more than make up for this lost day? Or is my return on investment period 3 days? One week? It’s impossible to know, but I truly believe that making ample room for personal time is probably the single most important thing that you can do for the sake of your own productivity.
Of course, these personal stories about myself or Ernest Hemmingway are all anecdotal and the reality is that some people work better in the mornings, some people work better in the night time. Some need a cup of coffee, some need 30. But my lab focuses a lot on tools to organize and share goals and ideas. There are countless productivity tools and ‘systems’ available for people, be they old fashioned (post-it notes) or modern (Google Calendars). But recognizing that the basic patterns in your life aren’t entirely random, and that there are likely very basic steps -such as taking a 30 minute walk every day – that you can take to accomplish more while doing less is something that at very least deserves a thought. Perhaps over a three-martini lunch?
—Adam Hockenberry