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Embrace seasonality
So one of the things we forget when we think about work, in general, is how unnatural it was once mills and factories came along in the Industrial Revolution to say, let us work all day at full intensity year-round. We’re kind of used to this now, but for three hundred thousand years, our work activity, whether it was gathering or hunting or foraging or farming, had huge variety in it. The fall is an incredibly busy period because we’re harvesting, but in the winter, there’s almost nothing for us to do, so we’re just sort of sitting around and thinking about things. We’re used to variety. Then we get mills and factories, and we said, well, why don’t we try working all day long as hard as we can all year round? This was so intolerable that we had to invent things like labor unions and entire regulatory frameworks just to make this, in some sense, a survivable way of working.
The knowledge work emerges in the twentieth century, and we said, let’s do what the factories did. So we adopted the least natural configuration for timing our work of all of the available configurations. So the principle of working at a natural pace says we can have busy days and less busy days. We can have busy seasons and less busy seasons. We can have sabbaticals for nonacademic positions. You just came off a very hard project, and now you’re getting a three-week sabbatical to just think about what you might want to do next. In the regime of pseudo-productivity, this is all scary. It’s all time in which we’re not doing visible activity, so this must be unproductive. The key to seasonality is getting away from this unrealistic assumption that every day, every week, and every month can be full red-line intensity. This variety in the long term is going to produce better work and be much more sustainable.
Give yourself more time
One of the unfortunate habits that many knowledge workers have is that when you ask them to estimate how long do you need to complete this task or project, what they do is come up with the absolute best-case scenario. Then they fall in love with this best-case scenario. Wow. That really would be great if I was able to finish this in three weeks or complete that in a month. It’s almost always unrealistic. So our work begins to pile up. Things take longer. It overlaps with other projects that have to start, and we become overloaded. So one of the simplest things that knowledge workers can do to work at a more natural pace is to simply give themselves more time for the projects that they’re working on. So a real easy heuristic is take whatever your first instinct is and then double that time amount. Because this is all values we’re just coming up with in our head anyway. We’re all just making guesses. This isn’t scientific. So we might as well give ourselves the breathing room to actually work on a project at a natural pace.
Change your location
So it’s not just timing that matters when we think about working more naturally. Location matters as well. So the setting that we’re in can really make a difference to both the subjective positive feelings we have towards work and also how good of a result we produce. Now setting can work in both a positive and a negative manner. So from the negative manner, if you’re working, for example, in a setting that you associate with many other types of urgent or annoying work. These contexts are going to trigger other parts of your brain that are unrelated to the work you’re doing. So let’s say you’re working at a home office and you’re near your laundry room, and you can see laundry baskets full of laundry. Another part of your brain is going to say, we gotta do laundry. When are we going to do the laundry? What events are coming on? And now you have a cognitive competition. Your ability to produce good work goes down.
On the positive side, if you have an inspiring or otherwise meaningful location that you do certain types of work, your brain can associate that location with that type of work and give you an extra ability to focus and produce creatively. The poet Mary Oliver used to use long walks in the woods as the main location in which she would actually come up with her poetry. John Steinbeck would go out on a rowboat into the middle of Sag Harbor and would write on a legal pad that he had propped up on his knees because out in the middle of the water, he had no associations with anything but his books. Timing matters if you want to work naturally. Location matters as well. For your hardest, most creative work, have a specific place you go just to do that work.