How Not Working Helps Me Get More Done
The following is an excerpt from my Producing Guide: How to produce a video shoot (without pulling out your hair). If you’re stressed about your next production, go pick it up today.
Pre-production work is mentally taxing. After a few hours, you’ll get really tired. Your brain will become foggy. This is because decision-making is a finite mental resource. Research has shown us that we don’t have an unlimited amount of decision-making energy. Every decision we make reduces that mental capacity a little bit. Until, in the late afternoon, you’re staring at a screen for 25-minutes straight, distracted by social media, unable to decide what to work on next.
This is why taking breaks is so important, especially during the pre-production process. As a producer, you need to be consistently moving tasks and vendors and bookings forward, every chance you have, in order to get the production ready in time. There’s no time to get lost in a doom-scroll session because you didn’t take breaks.
So take breaks. A great Google Chrome plugin I use is called Otto. It sets a timer for a predetermined work session, and blocks all social media sites during that session. Then, it goes off at the end of the session, reminding me to take a break. I usually set my timer for 49 minutes, then take an 11-minute break. During my breaks, I walk outside for a minute, chat with a friend briefly, watch a video or two, or just stare at the ceiling. Anything that gives my mind a break is good.
Taking breaks isn’t just to refresh your mind. It’s also to make your work more manageable. You might be tempted to work through a break when you’re in a groove. But after doing this once or twice, your mind will lose its edge. You’ll slip into despair. You’ll feel as though the tasks you still have to do are endless, and the work you have to do to get them done is endless as well. But when you take a break every hour, each work session is less than an hour. You may not be able to work through the night to complete a mountain of tasks. But you are able to put in another 49-minute work session. That’s easy. And when you start stringing together a few 49-minute work sessions, that mountain starts to shrink. Those tasks get crossed off, one by one. That day flies by.
P.S. Go check out my producing guide here.
