“Time Off” Deep Dive: How Long Do You Let Your Ideas To Incubate?

Most of the reviews I read about Time Off: A Practical Guide To Building Your Rest Ethic And Finding Success Without The Stress claimed that this book was about rest ethic.

I don’t agree with that – at least not entirely.

I think Time Off is about rest ethic as much as it is about work ethic. This book makes you reassess your approach to work, especially its creative side.

• What is the value that you are bringing?

• Are you actually bringing it?

• And what are you doing to keep bringing it?

Let’s talk about this in more detail.

The Art Of Thought

In 1926, Graham Wallas – a founding member of the London School of Economics and its first professor of political science – wrote a book called The Art of Thought where he broke down the creative process into four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

The preparation stage means sitting down and examining the problem or task at hand, coming up with a plan, and gathering all the information we need to come up with a solution.

This part sounds intuitive but how often do we actually do it and, most importantly, how much time do we spend on it?

A typical manager who needs to prepare a slide deck for an all-hands meeting and doesn’t have an assistant or chief of staff to help would be lucky if she could find 1 hour of uninterrupted time to work on it during the day. Typically, she will be working on it while being at another meeting, between responding to emails or messages on Slack, ceasing casual fires, and worrying about the budget meeting happening at the end of the week.

But as Time Off puts it:

Good preparation is itself a form of time off – time off from distractions in order to give undivided attention to the problem at hand.”

Next, comes incubation. This is the stage that I am sure you are very familiar with on the intuitive level. When you put down the problem or task and walk away (either switching to another task or taking a deliberate rest), somewhere at the back of your head, your mind keeps working on it. So when you come back to finish your work (or even before that – on a walk, in the middle of another meeting, or in the shower), you get struck with illumination – an aha moment that makes you realize how to approach your work: finish your slide deck, design your website, resolve a conflict with a team-member, or pitch a new project to your boss.

The next stage involves more hard conscious work – sitting down again and performing the verification of your ideas: finishing that slide deck, making the right calls, having conversations, and doing everything that you need to do to solve the problem or finish the task.

Sometimes, it takes a few cycles of preparation and incubation to reach the final illumination but the overall principle remains the same: you need to walk away from your work to let your subconscious mind connect the dots and work on a solution.

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When I moved into my first Business Operations role, it was March of 2020 – 2 weeks after I got introduced to the global team, everyone went on the pandemic lockdown, and I became free of any office distractions for the next year and a half.

One of the first “creative” tasks on my hands was to prepare a slide deck to pitch a capability mapping project to the department’s leadership.

I remember how I sat down at my new home desk, opened my laptop, opened PowerPoint, and… my mind went completely blank.

See, I was used to the 4 stages of the creative process described above but I was adhering to it intuitively, without realizing what I was doing.

In my previous roles, I would get information about a creative task, think about it a little bit, sketch a few ideas on a piece of paper, and then put it aside for some time while working on something more routine, like building a metric report, which would require no particular creative power. When I would come back to my “creative” task, I would have more ideas and would act on them, repeating the cycle.

This time, though, I didn’t have routine tasks anymore, nor did I have a coffee machine or water cooler to take a walk to. I also had no coworkers around. There was literally nothing to distract me from work, not even traffic noise.

So, I showed up at my desk with full commitment to produce a slide deck before the end of the day – and was struck by the fact that this was not how it worked.

It turned out, that my “creative brain muscles” needed some time to prepare and incubate new ideas.

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Sitting at a desk can often be one of the worst ways to generate novel insights.”

Rest, Sleep, Exercise

So if time off is an integral part of the creative work process, what should it look like?

Should we just stop working and lay down on the couch scrolling through TikTok videos calling it the “idea incubation” process? (A horrendous picture which I’m sure was going through the minds of some executives during the pandemic shutdowns).

The short answer is “no”, and I’m sure that anyone who scrolled down any social media feed for more than 5 minutes would quickly discover that it is never truly enjoyable and can hardly qualify as time off. In reality, this is a distraction from anxiety and boredom, a form of procrastination.

And the difference between time off and procrastination is significant: time off is about focus and intent.

So what should we do to allow our ideas to incubate after a prolonged hard work / preparation stage?

Taking a break, going for a walk, or doing some light exercise is one of the best ways to keep yourself healthy and sustain (or reinvigorate) creativity. The absence of distractions is a bonus that allows your thoughts to go even deeper.”

Let’s take a closer look.

1. Take a productive rest.

When I say “productive”, I don’t mean doing something that will help you to do your job better when you come back to it (although you can if it’s something you enjoy). No, I just wanted to catch your attention (sorry!) because in reality, as the Time Off authors reference the USC neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, any real rest is actually productive.

Rather than an overall decrease in activity, the activity just shifts to different parts of the brain … collectively known as the Default Mode Network (DMN). […] DMN activity is highly correlated with intelligence, empathy, emotional judgment, and even overall sanity and mental health.”

This means you don’t have to watch a useful webinar or find an elaborate way to transform a cute dinner conversation with your toddler into an important leadership insight that you will post on LinkedIn later that night.

It means that from now on you should see your rest as a way for your brain to take some important time off to process everything that happened at work and after that, assimilate it, connect more dots, and make you ready for the next day.

And another good news for all my overworked friends and colleagues is that good rest doesn’t necessarily entail an hour of meditation, taking a spa day, or spending a week in Fiji.

One unexpected form of rest is gaining control over our rest activities.

Remember, in my last article, one of the key steps I suggested for you to try was to plan your time off like any other work activity in your life? Apparently, when our lives are full of ambiguity and unpredictability, gaining some control over our activities helps us to recharge faster and more efficiently.

And another unexpected form of rest is the mastery experiences.

Learning a musical instrument, doing pottery, taking painting lessons, or mastering a yoga pose require a lot of focus which forces you to zone out of everything else. This is one of the best ways to take the conscious part of your brain out of the work environment. gain fresh perspective, and acquire some new dots to connect.

If you don’t have time for a hobby, maybe you should take some time off for it!

2. Get enough sleep.

Most people massively overestimate how well they perform on low sleep.”

The World Health Organization recently declared sleep loss a public health epidemic. Mind you, they say that “habitual short sleep duration” is anything less than 7 hours a night.

When was the last time you slept for 7 hours at a time?

Yet sleep is essential to process information from the day, including the knowledge you gained, emotions you experienced, and problems you faced. Sleep heals our body and mind, and gives us energy for the next day.

Sleep is like housekeeping for the brain.”

So next time you are stuck on a problem, instead of working on it late at night, try to get a good night’s rest and see how you feel.

3. Do some exercise.

It turns out that working out doesn’t “just” keep you healthy.

While sleep is often considered by some cultures (mostly corporate ones) a necessary nuisance, working out is a very legitimate and socially accepted type of time off. Not only this gives time for your ideas to incubate, but exercises also have a beneficial influence on your brain.

Countless studies have shown that exercise can increase brain stamina, expand intelligence, and provide the endurance and psychological resilience necessary to do creative work.”

And it doesn’t have to be an extensive workout either – after all, we are not aiming to be Olympic champions here, we are merely taking time off to incubate some ideas.

So why not take your body out for a light jog or a quick walk?

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This is what I ended up doing when working on my capability mapping project pitch that I described at the beginning of this article.

I sat at my desk for a while, very unhappy with myself for being incapable to produce good ideas on the spot. At some point, it became clear that I could sit there indefinitely but still produce nothing. So I went out for a walk.

As I walked around the block (it was a pretty large block), I realized that my team was approaching this project from the wrong angle and it would’ve been much better to design it differently.

I came home and prepared the slide deck. And while a lot of its content changed over the following weeks and got adjusted for different audiences and stakeholders, the core ideas remained the same – and they came to me while I was on a walk.

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Taking Time With Yourself

Coming back to the questions of our work ethic and the value we bring, I will take a somewhat philosophical turn to talk about the most unusual form of time off – solitude.

And first, let’s take a look at the 2 scenarios below.

1. A Department Head cannot find time on his calendar to sit down and think through his strategy for the next year and instead spends most of his time attending various steering committees and firefighting. In this scenario, we know that something is deeply wrong with his priorities.
   
   
2. An overworked middle manager doesn’t have time to notice the inefficiency of the processes his team is involved in and doesn’t have the energy to address them, report them, or correct them. In this scenario, we usually just shrug and say “he is just very busy” not realizing that something is deeply wrong with the organizational culture.

Perhaps, we experience so many layoffs, toxic working cultures, and poor executive strategies because everyone is just too tired to object, speak up, and make the right decisions to bring the real value.

One of the core themes of Time Off is making deliberate choices to focus our time on things that actually matter (this includes our job responsibilities).

And to make these choices we need self-awareness (knowing yourself and what is important to you) and reflection.

How do you know what is right if you don’t take time to reflect on it?

And this is when Time Off talks about solitude – a surprisingly intense form of time off that requires taking time off from everyone else but yourself.

Only in solitude, in the absence of external input, can we find our truly unique voice.”

Solitude doesn’t equal loneliness.

In fact, loneliness is a “failed solitude” – the state in which we are longing to be with someone else but can’t. Solitude is a conscious decision to spend some time with yourself and dive into your inner world.

And here is the kick which I believe is at the core of all the issues we as a society (or maybe – as a humanity) are having with the time off.

We are not comfortable being with ourselves.

It is so much easier to bury ourselves into perpetual activity (attending meetings, creating documentation, making endless slide decks, binge-watching Netflix, doing TikTok scrolling, whatever it is) than to spend a few minutes, not to mention a couple of hours with our very own thoughts.

Maybe this is the root cause of our problems?

Perhaps, we make bad decisions not because we are overworked but we overwork ourselves into making bad decisions because we cannot stop and think about the decisions we already made, about the systems and processes that are broken but are so hard to change, about how we already contributed to the mess and bad practices?

Maybe it’s just easier to keep running. If we run fast enough, the landscape around us will become a colorful blurry line, and then the details will no longer matter. At least, not for ourselves.

Time Off Practice You Can Take Today

As you can see, time off is not just a personal matter – it’s a cultural necessity that we as a society should embrace if we are to change anything for the better and start bringing real value to the world around us (and this includes our jobs).

A strong work ethic requires a strong rest ethic and if you are still feeling guilty about taking a few hours to put your work aside, tell yourself (and everyone else) that this is your act of servant leadership: you are slowing down and taking a break to incubate new ideas and connect the dots to find better solutions that bring higher value.

And with that, here are a few more things you could do:

• Take some time off for work: pick a task or a project that requires some of your “creative muscles” and remove all distractions (turn off your phone, set a no-disturb status on MS Teams). But instead of gluing yourself to your desk and forcing yourself to come up with a solution, go for a walk. Give yourself space and time (even if it’s just 20 minutes) to think about the project without trying to produce immediate results and notice how your mind wanders around as you are thinking about the problem.
  
  What is that you need to know about it? Who do you need to talk to? What are you concerned with? Is this the real problem? What are you trying to achieve here?
  
  Bring your pen and a piece of paper if you are anxious to lose an important thought but don’t respond to calls or texts. You are working right now!
  
  
• Try “slow-motion multitasking”: introduced by English economist and journalist Tim Harford, this method promotes working on 3-4 projects or tasks at once, but not in the same moment – rather switching between them to incorporate variety in your work and allow for the incubation of ideas without losing time. You can learn more about this method from Tim Harford’s TED Talk A Powerful Way to Unleash Your Natural Creativity
  
  
• Allow wind-down time before going to bed: silence your gadgets and instead of watching an episode of your favorite show right before bed, watch it a little sooner and take a few journal notes about the day.
  
  What did you learn today? What do you wish you had done? What is one good thing that happened? What is one good thing that you made happen?
  
  
• Take some time to be in silence with just yourself: set some time on your calendar (it can be 10 minutes, it can be 30 minutes; if you are audacious enough, you can try 1 full hour) and just be with yourself, without any distractions. You don’t have to meditate (unless you want to), you can journal, take notes, or have some coffee in your backyard. But no gadgets and no company allowed. Try to enjoy your own presence. Maybe you will like yourself more than you think 🙂

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Next week, in our last deep-dive into Time Off, we will take a look at playing and traveling as powerful ways to take time off and look into the way technology can help or hijack our way to a good rest ethic. See you next Monday!

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The title photo is by Vitalii Khodzinskyi on Unsplash