Rest: The Most Underrated Productivity Hack

Ev Chapman
September 4, 2021
1 min read

We have come to glorify the cult of 24/7/365 culture.

Hustle, productivity, grind, doing, busyness, more, bigger, better. We glorify people who are busy, hustling on the weekends, building their side hustles. Cause after all, if you're not hustling on the weekend then what are you doing with your life?

I see tweets on a Friday afternoon asking what everyone is working on in the weekend. And in the same scroll a tweet from someone saying they don't want to work, but feel guilty if they don't.

Most of us are so conditioned to keep busy that we actually need to practice and learn rest more than we need to practice productivity.

And yet rest is an essential part of our cognitive work.

Think about that time that you went out for a walk and came back with the answer to that problem you sat at your computer the whole day trying to solve. That's rest at work.

It's easy to think that nothing is happening when we rest, but exactly the opposite is actually happening. When our brains are resting they are doing something called consolidation.

Working Memory, Consolidation & Rest

Consolidation is your brain sifting through everything in your short-term memory and transferring what it needs into your long-term memory, which is much better at holding lots of information.

In a way, it's clearing out your working memory, so it can function at its best. Kind of like when you close all your tabs in the browser and things start to run faster.

So rather than glorifying the 24/7/365 hustle culture, as you start your weekend, why not look for opportunities to rest and let your brain do its best work.

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