The Best Kept Productivity Secret is Deep Chill

We talk a lot about and productivity and the benefits of carving out space in your calendar to sink into deep focus. Research suggests that the human brain can’t focus intently on any one thing for more than 4 hours a day before showing cognitive decline. So, it’s no surprise that after 2 hours of deep work, we’re mentally exhausted — that’s half of our daily capacity!

Because so many of us are unaware that the brain has its limitations, we often continue working well beyond what’s actually productive. There's a point of diminishing returns where we move from doing good work into doing busy work and pushing beyond that limit becomes detrimental to your creativity and decision making.

Many of us ignore the warning signs because The Grindset tells us we can only stop when the tank is empty.

But paradoxically, allowing time for idleness and daydreaming is what makes our periods of deep work more effective. Creating space to allow the mind to unwind is essential for maintaining and sustaining your performance in the long run.

We’ve been playing with an idea called deep chill that feels like permission to take the rest our brains need after a period of deep work. Deep chill is downtime in which you’re fully disengaged from intense cognitive tasks — yes, not even scrolling on your phone. When you’re new to this, it can be jarring just how uncomfortable (and boring) it can feel, but remember: that’s the point. Your brain is downshifting.

Deep chill is about allowing your brain to replenish and recalibrate with a little bit of proverbial cloud-watching. One of the primary qualities of deep chill is that you have to be okay with nothing coming out of it, though it’s likely that a lot of good stuff will come out of it. It’s very much a trust-the-process kind of thing.

Nobody questions the fact that you need rest after a physically exhausting experience, and the same is true for our brains. In fact, the Spacetime calendar of focus sessions has 1-hour breaks between sessions, and that’s entirely intentional.

As a general rule, we follow our deep work sessions with a period of deep chill.

Are you sensing a theme here? Deep chill is about engaging in low-stimulation activity to give your brain a chance to recover, which means your phone isn’t invited. For many of us, justifying rest or deep chill can feel like a mental hurdle, but this is your reminder that If you’re working intensely, make sure you’re also resting intensely.

Let your chill time be as uninterrupted as your work time.