The Refreshment of Blessed Oblivion — Newsletter issue 007

I had my routine twenty-minute sauna after the gym today and realised I was the only one without headphones in.

For me, it's twenty minutes I give myself to think without distraction.

I sometimes have to pry myself away from my desk mid-way through a problem I've been fighting with all morning to make sure I never miss it.

It's a moment in my day when my mind is present and is given the space to daydream, distraction-free.

And often, those problems I spent hours fighting at my desk get solved almost immediately upon my return.

I once went through a phase of listening to podcasts everywhere I went. On my commute, at the gym and on my morning walk.

I told myself it was my responsibility to consume as much information as possible — to become a better designer, a better leader, a better asset to my clients.

But I've since realised the opposite is true.

I was filling every waking moment with input, but never giving my mind the time to do anything with what it had absorbed.

It's why the most famous ideas in history arrived when their creators were least expecting it.

We all know Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple tree. You can't force a eureka moment. You can only create the conditions for one.

Friedrich Kekulé, the German organic chemist, discovered the ring structure of benzene after daydreaming about a snake eating its own tail.

Henri Poincaré, French mathematician and theoretical physicist, stepped onto a bus and solved a problem he'd been working on for weeks. He wrote about it extensively. The idea came precisely because he'd stopped thinking about it.

Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the melody for Yesterday in his head. He was so convinced he'd subconsciously stolen it from somewhere that he spent weeks asking people if they recognised it.

None of them were working when the answer came. They'd done the hard thinking.The breakthroughs arrived at rest. As Don Draper says:

There's neuroscience to back this up. Researchers call it the default mode network — the part of the brain that activates only when we're not focusing on something. Some of our most generative insights emerge not when we are concentrating. The mind needs unstructured time to connect what it already knows in ways that focused thought simply can't.

Winston Churchill famously understood this before the science did. He kept a bed in the Houses of Parliament so he'd never miss his daily nap. He credited it with getting a day and a half's work done in twenty-four hours.

So while we know this to be true, why do we not value this time?

In the modern working day where every minute must be accounted for, it's not measured.

The idea that arrived on your morning walk doesn't get credited to your morning walk. It gets credited to the meeting where you said it out loud.

The thinking that actually produces the breakthroughs goes unrecognised, and so we're trained to fill our time with something that looks more like work. A podcast, an audiobook, or another email notification cleared.

Bertrand Russell wrote about this in 1932. He called it idleness.

A century on and we still haven't listened.

If you're lucky enough to have moments of idleness — a commute, a walk, twenty minutes in the sauna — ignore the urge to fill it. Bask in it. Let your mind go where it wants to go.

The ingredients are already there, you just need the space for them to form into ideas.

I've ditched the headphones altogether.

When I walk, commute or train, I am present.

My mind wanders and I observe, without focus.

And you know what's happened?

The list of ideas in my notepad has grown.

I solve problems faster.

And I relish the rare moments in my day when my mind is free to idle.