Why I spend every afternoon lying on the floor
How I Finished My Book, Part 2
Last week I wrote about the schedule I developed over the course of finishing my book. Its centerpiece is floor time, the 30 minutes to two hours after lunch I spend sitting, stretching, but mostly lying on the floor. I started doing floor time because I had to lie down to do one of the physical therapy exercises for my neck, which I had to do at least twice a day. I kept doing floor time because I felt so refreshed afterward, and so ready to to write, which, for the last four months, was my life’s only priority.
I didn’t have any rules for my schedule, and I didn’t consciously think about its patterns for most of the time it was taking shape. The schedule didn’t exist outside of me, but bubbled up anew out of my cycles of energy and fatigue each day. Looking back, I can see that I was responding to my own attentional rhythms, rather than trying to control them as I so often had in the past. But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew is that if I wanted to be able to go back to work in the evening, which I absolutely had to do as many days as possible, I had no choice but to lie on the floor to prepare.
What helped bring my schedule to consciousness, in the way I articulated it last week, was listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Gloria Mark. Mark is a psychologist who studies attention, especially attention at work, and even more especially attention while working on computers and other digital devices. I’d heard the interview when it first ran earlier this year, and its conclusions seemed kind of basic to me: Distraction and attention-switching are rampant, breaks and rest are important, nature is restorative. I knew all those things—who doesn’t know those things?—and knowing them had never made much difference to me. But when the episode re-ran at the end of August, I’d been doing floor time for almost three months, and I could hear what Mark was saying differently.
“We start our day with a tank of cognitive resources. You can think about it as attentional capacity,” Mark says. We start to work, ideally along with our natural attentional rhythm (for most of the people Mark has studied, focused attention first peaks around 11 a.m.). But by working, by getting the most out of that natural period of focus, we inevitably expend our cognitive resources. They aren’t coming back until we refill the tank, which doesn’t happen by continuing to try to focus long past the point of usefulness, never getting up from our computers, or just trying a little bit harder. Attentional capacity is replenished only by switching to a different kind of attention, such as rote attention (cross-stitch!), mind-wandering, or even boredom. If, instead of respecting our attentional rhythm, “we try harder to stay on track, to stay focused,” Mark says, “the end result is we get ourselves exhausted.”
Her point seems intuitive, but in my experience, it’s very hard to recognize when I’ve hit an attentional wall, especially if the wall appeared sooner than I’d expected or if I haven’t yet finished what I’d hoped to do before taking a break. That’s because of an insidious cultural script Klein identifies later in the interview. When he gets tired working in the New York Times newsroom, he says, he’s much more likely to check the paper’s homepage or go on social media—activities that, for a journalist, “are akin to work”—than do a crossword puzzle or leave the office for a walk, which “would look like I’m goofing off.”
“It seems to me,” Klein says, “we’ve been taught that what we want, if we can’t be maximally productive for a period, is to be minimally productive, as opposed to being nonproductive to actually create a break. And that this is actually a little bit toxic. It means you’re never really recovering.”
When I was at peak book-finishing productivity, I didn’t find more time by cutting out rest. What I cut out was all that minimally productive, work-like non-work. I used all my cognitive resources on focused attention, in two bursts a day, and in between I refilled the tank. With floor time, recovery became the center of my day, literally. The book deadline was so tight, and I was so desperate, that I had no choice but to throw overboard all of office culture’s work scripts, as well as my own expectations about what productivity meant. I had to tune into my own rhythms, and I had to follow them, and I had to not care what it might look like to anyone else, or even to me if I stopped to think about it.
Mark’s research shows that focused attention takes a lot of energy—often more than we expect or think we’re using. Next week, I reveal the secret to making sure you have that energy when you need it. (Spoiler: It’s eating food.)