Even more problematic, we think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities.

The right kinds of rest would restore their energy while allowing their muse, that mysterious part of their minds that helps drive the creative process, to keep going.

the arguments of psychologists like Viktor Frankl and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that the good life is defined by a search for meaning and an abundance of challenges, make profound intuitive sense.

Companies that put profits first, Kay argues, are more likely to lose money than those that treat profit as a by-product of doing great work.

tennis. Maybe creative achievement needs to be approached obliquely.

Oxford. It was an intense and productive time, yet also oddly unhurried.

They had to learn to rest, to pay close attention to how they worked and what worked for them. They became sensitive to how changes in their routine affected their ability to think. They experimented with their schedules to discover when they had the most energy and focus, and they tweaked their habits to find rhythms and rituals that helped them stay on their game.

efficiency,” American business journalist Bertie Charles Forbes wrote. The experience of the victorious armies, he argued, showed that “how we spend our non-working hours determines very largely how capably or incapably we spend our working hours.”

Their lives also reveal something else. Rest is not something that the world gives us. It’s never been a gift. It’s never been something you do when you’ve finished everything else. If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

Yes, breathing is natural. That’s why learning to control one’s breathing is something that virtually everyone doing physically strenuous and mentally challenging work must master.

They often leave a small task unfinished when they stop work, to make it easier to start the next day.

They renew their creative reserves on sabbaticals, retreats during which they’re free to travel, explore new ideas, and cultivate new interests.

Earlier generations gave children more independence and mobility,

These philosophical arguments might seem arcane, but the assumptions that knowledge is produced rather than discovered or revealed, that the amount of work that goes into an idea determines its importance, and that the creation of ideas can be organized and institutionalized, all guide our thinking about work today.

When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas and that the success of individuals and companies is a measure of their long hours.

abstention and renunciation.” One must avoid distractions like “malicious gossip” and newspapers, the “intellectual dispersion and waste of time required by social activity,” and anything else that loosens “the creative tension of the mind” and “that quality of tone that nerve cells acquire when adapted to a particular subject.”

The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less. —ATTRIBUTED TO LEONARDO DA VINCI IN GIORGIO VASARI’S THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS

seem to be “designed to engage in cognition that isn’t confined by the environment.” People spend a lot of time engaged in unconscious or inward-focused thought: by some estimates, up to half our waking hours are spent mind-wandering. Something that we do that much of, and we do so easily, ought to have some benefit. Just like the default mode network,

psychologists. Many famous stories of problem-solving or creative breakthroughs begin with a period of intense work and focus, during which the scientist or artist or writer pores over evidence, labors over theories, and struggles toward an answer. Frustrated and tired, she stops for a break and turns her attention to something else. Days or weeks later, a solution suddenly appears; she hadn’t been thinking about the problem, but in a flash, the answer is suddenly present in her mind, as clear as day. She then returns to the problem and verifies that the insight is correct.

Graham Wallas in his 1926 book The Art of Thought.

The first stage, preparation, consists of all the visible, conscious activity necessary in modern creative and productive work. It’s where you formulate a problem, read, sketch, write, tinker, and think. You apply formal methods, ponder the details, and try to work your way to a solution. It’s easy to disparage this labor, but most creative breakthroughs happen when you’re immersed in a problem, familiar with all its parts, and examining it from every angle.

next stage in Wallas’s model: incubation.

With small problems, such as crossword puzzles or riddles, the incubation phase may only last seconds or minutes. For much bigger problems, incubation might stretch out for weeks or months.

it.” Instead, you have to trust that your unconscious will drive to the third phase, illumination, the moment when the answer bursts into your consciousness.

said. From there, it is on to the verification phase: you set the solution on a logical foundation, fill in the details, or fit it into a bigger project. Like preparation, verification is largely a conscious, formal activity. It’s something you can train yourself or others to do and something you can make more efficient, just like any job. You can’t say the same thing about incubation or illumination.

Whether they know it or not, creative people treat incubation and illumination like skills every day.

That’s why they develop and refine daily routines and practices that preserve time for mind-wandering, sharpen their sensitivity to insights, and allow them to capture moments of illumination.

He noted that “in the case of the more difficult forms of creative thought,” it was important that during incubation “nothing should interfere with the free working of the unconscious or partial conscious processes of the mind. In those cases, the stage of Incubation should include a large amount of actual mental relaxation.

they organize their lives around their work, but not their days.

Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.

work. But at the same time, his days don’t seem very busy to us. The times we would classify as “work” consist of three ninety-minute periods. If he had been a professor in a university

He divided his day into half-hour blocks, a habit he’d learned from his father.

So despite their differences in personality and the different quality of their achievements, both Darwin and Lubbock managed something that seems increasingly alien today. Their lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime.

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon.

style. At five o’clock in the morning, a servant arrived with coffee. He first read over the previous day’s work, then at five thirty set his watch on his desk and started writing. He wrote a thousand words an hour, an average of forty finished pages a week, until it was time to leave for his day job at the post office at eight o’clock.

Dickens shut himself in his study from nine until two, with a break for lunch. Most of his novels were serialized in magazines, and Dickens was rarely more than a chapter or two ahead of the illustrators and printer. Nonetheless, after five hours, Dickens was done for the day.

When it opened in 1954, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located in the hills just above Stanford University, imagined a visiting fellow’s ideal day as a morning working in monastic solitude from eight thirty to noon in two ninety-minute bursts with two fifteen-minute breaks, followed by lunch and an afternoon of walks and conversation.

The pattern of working four hard hours with occasional breaks isn’t just confined to scientists, writers, or other people who are already successful, well-established, and have the freedom to set their own schedules.

Second, you need a reason to keep at it, day after day. Deliberate practice isn’t a lot of fun, and it’s not immediately profitable. It means being in the pool before sunrise, working on your swing or stride when you could be hanging out with friends, practicing fingering or breathing in a windowless room, spending hours perfecting details that only a few other people will ever notice. There’s little that’s inherently or immediately pleasurable in deliberate practice, so you need a strong sense that these long hours will pay off, and that you’re not just improving your career prospects but also crafting a professional and personal identity. You don’t just do it for the fat stacks. You do it because it reinforces your sense of who you are and who you will become. The idea of deliberate practice and Ericsson et al.’s measurements of the total amount of time world-class

“Deliberate practice,” they observed, “is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day.” Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out. To succeed, students must “avoid exhaustion” and “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

Instead, they have more frequent, shorter sessions, each lasting about eighty to ninety minutes, with half-hour breaks in between.

The top performers actually slept about an hour a day more than the average performers. They didn’t sleep late. They got more sleep because they napped during the day.

followed a pattern of practicing hardest and longest in the morning, taking a nap in the afternoon, and then having a second practice in the late afternoon or evening.

The best performers devoted more energy to organizing their time, thinking about how they would spend their time, and assessing what they did.

is wonderful how much work can be got through in a day, if we go by the rule—map out our time, divide it off, and take up one thing regularly after another. To drift through our work, or to rush through it in a helter-skelter fashion, ends in comparatively little being done. “One thing at a time” will always perform a better day’s work than doing two or three things at a time. By following this rule, one person will do more in a day than another does in a week. —THOMAS MITCHELL, ESSAYS ON LIFE

EVERY MORNING AT 5 a.m., Scott Adams wakes up and heads downstairs to his kitchen, has a cup of coffee and a protein bar for breakfast, then goes into his home office. By 5:10 he’s settled into his chair and working on his first task of the day: a new strip of Dilbert, the comic strip

By lunchtime, it’s time for the gym. At that point, “my barely functioning brain is ideally suited for lifting heavy objects and putting them right back where I found them.”

The coffee and protein bar? “The tastes are amazing together,” he says, it prevents him being distracted later by hunger, and it’s allowed him “to enjoy waking up and being productive.”

He purposely excludes external stimulation. “My morning is all about stilling the outside world so my mind can soar.”

They concentrate on their most challenging work first, when their creative energy is likely to be at its peak.

Developing and maintaining a morning routine creates space in the day for rest, and makes rest more valuable.

For creative workers, in contrast, the dominant pattern is to wake up and get right to work.

For many, the aim is not to shake off sleep quickly and start work but to ease their way from a state of dreaming to wakefulness. Selye would allow himself a half hour’s “conversation . . . between my conscious and unconscious self” before getting out of bed.

As a student I burned lots of midnight oil, but once I had a job and children, I struggled to muster the energy to write at night. So I tried getting up before dawn and writing before anyone else in the house was up. To my surprise, not only did I have more time to write, the words came more easily: I was less prone to self-distraction and had just enough energy and awareness to write.

After a couple weeks I discovered that if the night before I programmed the coffee machine, outlined the next morning’s writing task, and even set out my clothes and queued up music to work to, I could, like Adams, put my body on automatic and focus even more tightly on writing.

This suggests that people might be more creative during the low points in their daily circadian rhythm (the natural twenty-four-hour cycle that governs energy levels, hormones, and other bodily functions). Psychologists Mareike Wieth and Rose

outside your circadian peak is that you’re more easily distracted.

For Toni Morrison, “Writing before dawn began as a necessity”: when she was working on The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon in the 1970s, she was raising two children and working as an editor, and the pre-dawn hours were the only time she could write undisturbed. Later, when writing Beloved, the “habit of getting up early . . . became my choice,” she said; “I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning.”

An early start also opens space in your day for rest and allows you to establish a clean division between working and resting time. One should “either work all out

They work the same hours of the day, every day, often seven days a week.

Trollope’s word count, seem to stimulate concentration and prod creativity but aren’t make-or-break:

It is quite nice to have an office and even nicer to have a warm, well-furnished home. But my mind often comes to a standstill after some hours indoors. So I take a walk. Once outside, my mind immediately begins to move freely and instinctively over my subject. Ideas come rushing to my mind, without being called. Soon enough, the best answer emerges from the jumble. I realize what I can do, what I should do, and what I must abandon. —EUGENE WIGNER

walk is an essential part of their daily routine, a source of exercise and solitude. Thomas Jefferson advised his nephew to walk for mental relaxation and for physical endurance and added, “Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind [and] divert your attention by the objects surrounding you.”

Such walks were occasions for contemplation, not conversation: “Walking and talking are two very great pleasures,” he wrote, “but it is a mistake to combine them.”

notes, many executives who are smart about maintaining their energy take afternoon walks to recharge.

In other words, it isn’t being outside that stimulates creativity; it is actually the walking itself that is most responsible for helping people be more creative.

walking. But a few accounts show that, like other forms of deliberate rest, walking for creativity involves skills that we can cultivate.

I really nap a lot. Usually I get sleepy right after lunch, plop down on the sofa, and doze off. Thirty minutes later I come wide awake. As soon as I wake up, my body isn’t sluggish and my mind is totally clear. —HARUKI MURAKAMI

Later at the White House, Kennedy would normally take a 45-minute nap after lunch; like Churchill, he wouldn’t sleep in the office, but would head for the residence and change into pajamas.

afternoon. (The habit of lying down isn’t just convenience: a Chinese sleep science lab measuring the effect of physical position on levels of sleepiness, fatigue, mood, and alertness found that people who napped lying down got more out of their naps than those who napped sitting up.)

rules.” Creative people often become as attuned to their mental states as elite athletes are to their physical condition and energy levels. As a result, creative people who have to keep long hours and people whose demanding jobs require imagination and an ability to react, discover the restorative power of an afternoon nap.

instead, he started taking “wonderful, intense” short naps. After twenty minutes, he would “come surging back up to the surface and go straight to the desk and write.”

Churchill’s habit of an afternoon nap and bath may seem fussy, but his valet, Frank Sawyers, observed, “The effect of this complete break is usually to make two working days out of one—and he literally does twice the amount of work of the average person and exerts himself for twice the length of the conventional eight-hour day.”

Neuroscientist Sara Mednick found that napping for an hour or more during the day—a nap long enough to allow

one to dream—improves performance on memory and perceptual tasks.

Sleep scientists have long observed that our need for sleep is governed by two things: sleep pressure and our body’s twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm. Sleep

Under normal circumstances, you reach peak alertness around 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.; your alertness dips a little in the early afternoon, then rises through the rest of the day until late evening.

Under normal circumstances the two are in sync:

But they can be thrown out of sync by jet lag, night shifts, or irregular work schedules.

Mednick discovered that you can use knowledge of the relationship between sleep pressure, circadian rhythm, and sleep type to tailor a nap to your needs. About six hours after you wake up, your body’s circadian rhythm starts to dip and you’re likely to feel drowsy, especially if you’ve had a busy morning and lunch. A twenty-minute power nap at this point (say at 1:00 p.m.) is enough to give you a mental recharge without leaving you groggy: if you keep it short, you’ll wake up fairly alert and can quickly get back to work. If you stretch it out to an hour, the balance between your circadian rhythm and sleep pressure will produce a nap that balances REM and short-wave sleep. If, on the other hand, you take a nap an hour earlier, five hours after waking, the balance will be different: more REM sleep, less slow-wave sleep. This kind of nap will deliver a little creative nudge: you’re likely to dream and more likely to enroll your subconscious in whatever you were recently working on. If you wait until an hour later, seven hours

after waking, your body needs more rest, and an hour-long nap will be richer in slow-wave sleep and more physically restorative than creatively stimulating. These aren’t

Of course, any nap is going to provide benefits: creative work is both mentally and physically demanding, so a physically restorative nap is likely to be as useful as a creatively energizing nap. No sleep is going to be lost time.

Science fiction writer William Gibson says, “Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.” These writers all learn to linger in the hypnagogic state, the transitional phase between

being awake and asleep.

For those who want to try it but don’t have an artist’s studio, University of Montreal psychologist Tore Nielsen recommends a variation that can be done at one’s desk. In his Upright Napping Procedure, when you start to feel drowsy, don’t fight it; instead, close your eyes, relax, and let yourself drift toward sleep. With practice, the involuntary movements your body will make as you get drowsy can prevent you from nodding off for too long and wake you up in time to write down what came to mind as you were falling asleep. It’s a bit less eccentric than Dalí’s method and better suited to an office: your coworkers might not appreciate the heavy sound of a falling object hitting the ground repeatedly. But as Dalí warns his readers, this is not something that comes naturally. “To achieve a painter’s slumber,” he warns, “will, in fact, require a long period of training.” Dreams offer access to the unruly, creative depths of the unconscious, but dreaming—at least, dreaming like an artist—is a skill that takes time to learn.

A COUNTERINTUITIVE BUT EFFECTIVE form of deliberate rest is to stop working at just the right point: to see your next move, but leave it until tomorrow.

Creative work is a marathon, not a sprint, as writer (and marathoner) Haruki Murakami put it. In both running and writing, “once you set the pace, the rest will follow,” Murakami says. “The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.”

done. Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as “contemptibly slack,” even though they produce superior results.

extremes. Like designing a distraction-free morning, cultivating a routine that creates space for both focused work and fulsome rest, and using walks and naps to restore creative energy and promote creative insight, stopping at the right time requires understanding the demands of your work, learning to monitor your energy and attention, and appreciating how focused attention and mind-wandering can become partners in creative enterprises, and in a creative life.

Sleep deprivation doesn’t just erode your reflexes, decision-making, and ability to learn; it also has physical effects. Sleep deprivation lowers your immunity and erodes your body’s ability to fight off infection.

Instead, they follow Graham Wallas’s four-stage model of innovation, in which a period of preparation and an incubation phase consisting of a night or more of sleep precede a clarifying dream or morning epiphany.

It’s also noteworthy that while figures like Pauling respect the mind’s ability to continue working while they are asleep, they don’t expect revelations in their sleep. Rather, they see their sleeping minds and waking minds as partners and recognize that each has abilities that complement the other. They treat sleep as active rest.

The supreme quality of great men is the power of resting. Anxiety, restlessness, fretting are marks of weakness. —J. R. SEELEY

kind that allows what sociologists call detachment, the ability to put work completely out of your mind and attend to other things—turns out to be tremendously important as a source of mental and physical recovery from work.

For individuals, burnout can lead to emotional exhaustion, a decline in performance, poorer decision-making, lower empathy, and higher rates of errors.

It was an early sign of his fitness for leadership that he recognized the need to restore his psychological reserves, to literally make space for rest. Eisenhower’s hideout highlights

Given the high costs of exhaustion and burnout, it’s worth asking what kinds of breaks provide the greatest degree of recovery.

Workers who have the chance to get away mentally, switch off, and devote their energies elsewhere, are more productive, have better attitudes, get along better with their colleagues, and are better able to deal with challenges at work. They’re also better able to focus intensely on work tasks.

The researchers expected to see a U-shaped pattern that followed circadian rhythms: a peak in the morning and later afternoon, when energy levels were high and sleep pressure low, with a midday trough when energy dips and sleep pressure increases. The well-rested programmers indeed experienced a drop in flow after lunch. Less well-rested programmers, in contrast, didn’t follow the same pattern: their flow levels started low and steadily got worse.

Sonnentag and her colleagues argue that there are four major factors that contribute to recovery: relaxation, control, mastery experiences, and mental detachment from work.

For people who don’t have much control over what happens at work and whose schedules are filled with family duties and chores, being able to control their time is liberating and restorative.

Mastery experiences are engaging, interesting things that you do well. They’re often challenging, but this makes them mentally absorbing and all the more rewarding when you do them well.

recovery. An activity that is challenging and absorbing, and pushes thoughts of work out of your mind, increases your sense of detachment.

They also suggest that we should reassess the role of breaks, and the rhythm of vacations, in our lives.

Regularly and decisively breaking from our jobs, disconnecting from the office in the evenings and on weekends, and choosing to do things that are relaxing, mentally absorbing, and physically challenging—in other words, engaging in a form of active rest—will promote recovery of our mental resources and make us more effective, productive, and focused.

The daily lives of creative workers have already shown us how they use early mornings and routines, walks, naps, and deliberate stops to stimulate their day-to-day creativity.

find that exercise provides a break from work, strengthens the physical foundations of creative performance, and—as scientists have recently discovered—keeps their brains healthy. Deep play—hobbies that are challenging, mentally

students even tried out “different regimes of working, exercising and sleeping until they found what they believed to be the most productive combination.” You don’t self-experiment like this if you want to fit in. You’re trying to stand out. To be outstanding.

Brown became part of a third community of scientistathletes: mountain climbers. The mountains have attracted many of the century’s great scientists: Marie Curie and Albert Einstein went hiking together in the Alps.

but studies now show that for people of any age, gender, or athletic ability, exercise can increase brain power, boost intelligence, and provide the stamina and psychological resilience necessary to do creative work.

(running in place for forty-five minutes, a hundred push-ups, and two hundred sit-ups) gave Mandela a way to take charge of his own

and “I worked better and thought more clearly when I was in good physical condition”—

Consequently, “training became one of the inflexible disciplines of my life,”

Under the right conditions, hobbies and physical activities become what anthropologists and psychologists call “deep play,” activities that are rewarding on their own, but take on additional layers of meaning and personal significance.

Because play is voluntary, intrinsically rewarding, mentally and physically engaging, and imaginative, it’s often absorbing and effortless; even when it’s physically challenging or uncomfortable, it’s not difficult in the same way a hard day at work is.

First, deep play is mentally absorbing. It offers the player challenges to face and problems to solve. Like all recovery experiences, that engagement doesn’t require effort; the player falls into the game easily. It may give the player the chance to learn new things, or discover things about themselves, that they would not in their work.

Second, deep play offers players a new context in which to use some of the same skills that they use in their work. If using those skills well is a pleasure, it’s not surprising that people would enjoy using them both in their work and in their leisure. Indeed, finding them useful in a new game can provide its own gratification.

Third, deep play offers some of the same satisfaction as work, but it also offers different, clearer rewards thanks to differences in media or scale or pace. Ben Kazez’s description of app development and musical performance as requiring collaboration with smart people,

interacting with audiences, and making choices in interpretation and performance is one example of finding similar rewards in different domains.

Finally, deep play provides a living connection to the player’s past. It may build on things the player did with parents, have features that remind the player of a childhood home or activities from the player’s youth, or in other ways serve as a way of keeping links with the past alive.

Busy people need to cultivate forms of rest, he began, but are temperamentally unable to simply do nothing. “It is not enough merely to switch off the lights which play upon the main and ordinary field of interest,” he argued. “A new field of interest must be illuminated.” Fortunately, “the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts.”

The answer is that undertaking harder, more daring climbs allows for more complete absorption and allows them to discover stronger connections between their climbing and science. Unlike a long walk

He sees deep similarities between climbing and mathematics. In both fields, you’re always searching for “an interesting result—ideally an unexpected result—in an elegant fashion, with a smooth flow, using some unexpected simplicity.” When you begin a climb, “you stand upon the threshold of something new, something that requires not only brute force (whether it be physical or intellectual force) but a certain insight, a certain quantum jump from point to point.” Finally, the “reward, in both activities, is almost continual enlightenment.”

For Louis Reichardt, “climbing a route is in some ways like designing an experiment;” in both cases, “you don’t even know what you have to know to solve the problem in many cases. And so you just take it a step at a time, and use your best judgment and hope for the best.”

For creative and prolific people, seeing outside activities as expressions of the same interests that guide their professional lives builds a bridge between the worlds of work and rest and helps turn these activities into deep play.

As Root-Bernstein put it, elite scientists shared the belief that “time relaxing or engaging in their hobbies could be valuable” to “their scientific efficiency and thus to their careers.”

EVERY SEVEN YEARS, designer Stefan Sagmeister stops talking to clients, closes up his office, and takes a year off.

Sagmesiter’s

“Obsessions make my life worse and my work better” with two hundred fifty thousand

What they all teach us is that to stay ahead, it’s necessary sometimes to step back. To keep up, it’s good sometimes to slow down.

Successful sabbaticals are also periods of detachment from one’s regular life.

It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness. —THOMAS JEFFERSON

world. Taking rest seriously requires recognizing its importance, claiming our right to rest, and carving out and defending space for rest in our daily lives. We have to choose to make an earlier start to the day to earn time to rest later; we have to reserve space on the daily calendar for a walk, or keep time free on the weekends for a hobby or sport; we must arrange our finances and business affairs so we can take a sabbatical.

After spending a weekend at High Elms, Herbert Spencer observed a “remarkable peculiarity” about John Lubbock: his days were full of “many and varied occupations,” yet “he never seemed in a hurry.” Even when turning his attention to business after a morning spent hunting with his brothers, moving between meetings and his bank, or running off to deliver a lecture, “by his habitual calm, [Lubbock] gave the impression that he was quite at leisure.”

fortune.” In The Book of Five Rings, written around 1645, Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi advised, “Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm.”

In his essay on recreation published in his 1895 book The Use of Life, John Lubbock makes a distinction between idleness and leisure: “Leisure is one of the grandest blessings, idleness one of the greatest curses,” he argues, and “one is the source of happiness, the other of misery.” Rest, he argues, is often mistaken for idleness, but it is not. “To lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day,” Lubbock wrote, “listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means a waste of time.”