A Chance to Hit the Reset Button on Junk Work
Reshape your work patterns for high quality output and elevated wellbeing
Caffeine dances through your blood sending neurons firing. It’s 10am Monday morning. You’re hunkered in a chair as the hamster wheel of email triage grinds at full pace. Adrenaline spritzes. You lock into your fourth video conference of the day as an IM from a coworker pings about a supply chain issue. Cortisol spikes. Simultaneously, you get a text from another coworker upset about something that happened in the last meeting. Right when it’s your turn to talk, in a grown-up voice, your toddler thinks it’s a good time to tug your leg and scream. Reality has certainly shifted but not in the ways you might think.
What’s new in this situation? Most likely, it’s the toddler and working from home. The rest of the pattern has become the accepted distraction factory of the modern workplace. These are perfect conditions for what I call junk work and I don’t think it’s working for us.
Like junk food, junk work takes its toll on our health, wellness and effectiveness over time. Sure, once in a while, junk work is no big deal. It’s when the exception becomes the norm that problems manifest.
Lack of natural light during the day throws off circadian rhythm. That screws with sleep, sparking a host of other health issues, such as poor immunity. Sitting and standing for too long can create postural imbalances and chronic pain. And this one’s important if you’re concerned with creating high quality output regularly — we’re busy but we’re not getting much work done. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We have a choice. Do we set up the same cycle of junk work at home or do we reshape our environment and our behaviors for well work instead? This is a chance to hit the reset button on junk work.
Of course, I don’t mean to make light of the true hardship, suffering and actual death happening as a result of the coronavirus. I realize there’s a spectrum of impact happening, so do what works for you. My aim is to find silver linings that help us come out better on the other side as we navigate this newfound level of autonomy at work.
Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic, which boasts a completely distributed workforce of more than 1000 employees worldwide, offers a helpful framework for thinking about autonomy when working from home.
Matt ascribes levels to the autonomy of working from home (or wherever). Level 1 is limping by ineffectively and Level 5, the top of the scale, is where we design our workdays for both maximum productivity and personal wellness. A liberating dimension of Level 5 is that we remove any social awkwardness that comes with weaving wellness behaviors into our workdays.
Now is the ideal time to experiment. Nobody will look at you funny when you’re doing squats between tasks. Who will be the wiser if you take your meeting outside for some natural sunlight? If your energy dips and you need to crank some tunes and dance, then go for it. People won’t think you’re weird for taking a 10-minute meditation or breathwork break because they won’t even know. We’ve just been given a wide-open hall pass to use our new workspace as a personal laboratory for creating well work. It’s time to let our freak flags fly. Ok, so there’s still the toddler but we’ll deal with that later.
Your coworkers and bosses do care about producing high quality work. Regardless of the business you’re in, it’s likely being rocked on some level and most likely quite deep. That means new strategies and plans need to be developed. New ways of collaborating with each other remotely need to be ideated, tested and improved. All of which requires deep thought, clarity, and creativity. As you might have guessed, junk work isn’t going to get us there so it’s time to road test some different approaches.
Below you’ll find a combination of mindset shifters, breathwork techniques, movement practices and resources I’ve found useful in the pursuit of well work. None of them require fancy equipment or buying anything so have at it.
Shift Your State
Before you jump in for the day, take a moment to create a marked change in your mental state. One of the most powerful hacks I’ve found for making this shift is breathwork. Here are two quick and effective techniques.
Up first is the One Breath Reset from Kasper van der Meulen, a certified Wim Hof instructor, breathwork biohacker and author from the Netherlands. This technique can be done easily at a desk and creates a meaningful shift in mindset in a matter of seconds.
The next one is from Dr. Andrew Weil, a prolific practitioner and educator of integrative medicine and breathwork for decades. His personal favorite breathwork technique is called the 4–7–8 Breath, which takes less than a minute for a powerful reset.
Go Deeper
Now that you’ve created clear shift, it’s time to go deeper into your work. The motivation for going deep is simple. It’s where our best thinking emerges, where we are more productive, and where we feel happier — so it’s worth the effort.
And the effort is real. Everything else I recommend here is easy. The elimination of distraction and the cultivation of deep work requires honing a Yoda-like skillset over time so let’s understand it a bit more.
Cal Newport, author and computer science professor at Georgetown University, defines Deep Work in his book of the same name as follows. “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” More simply, the opposite of junk work. As Newport details, the concept of deep work intertwines with what is known as flow state (hence, I’m using “flow” and “deep work” here interchangeably).
Flow is defined by Steven Kotler, the author of several best-selling books on the topic and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, as an “Optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel your best and perform your best.”
If we think about deep work through the lens of flow, it provides a framework for how to get there ourselves. Thankfully, flow isn’t some ungraspable thing that hangs in the ether and only strikes the elite through a mysterious, spiritual force. Instead, flow is a well understood physiological state that has predictable pre-conditions for entry.
“Thankfully, flow isn’t some ungraspable thing that hangs in the ether and only strikes the elite through a mysterious, spiritual force. Instead, flow is a well understood physiological state that has predictable pre-conditions for entry.”
Kotler describes these pre-conditions as “flow triggers,” in more detail on his website. However, to get there, it helps to strip away distractions.
Eliminate Distractions
Step one is all about radically reducing digital distraction. Go ahead and turn off all notifications on all your digital devices. Yes, all of them. If you want more info about how to turn your phone into a tool instead of being a slave to it, here’s a helpful piece (long read, great reference) by Tony Stubblebine, founder and CEO of Coach.me.
Next, clear your calendar of unnecessary meetings, the enemy of deep work. If you’re honest with yourself, you know a high percentage of meetings are useless and they are the number one reason you end up doing more work after hours.
Jason Fried, the cofounder of Basecamp, a successful project management and communication tools company, doesn’t mince words about meetings in his Ted talk, “Meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous, things during the day at work.”
In their iconoclastic book, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (link), Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share a poignant message for leaders and bookers of meetings, “It’s time to give people the uninterrupted time that great work demands.”
Speaking of people, I absolutely cherish my work relationships. At the same time, people are often the worst depth detractors (myself included). Coworkers wandering into your work zone, bosses that manage by walking around, and housemates all hold the potential to detonate your depth like a stealth drone. You’ll need tactics at the ready.
In my house, we’ve developed a common “I’m in flow” body language that acts like a deep work force field. You know the posture, intense concentration, keeping eyes down when people walk by, and headphones on sends a clear signal. When that fails, a quick “Let’s talk later, I’m in flow,” tends to work.
The most pernicious distraction is us. Our own minds. Remember the last time you started working on something and your mind thought it was a good idea to start thinking about the grocery list, the project in the garage or replaying a conversation that happened yesterday?
To offload these thoughts, jot them on a piece of paper and snap right back into flow. Meditation is another powerful tool because it trains the Jedi-like ability to simply notice our thoughts and let go of them instead of chasing them. Now is good time to rescue that Headspace or Calm app from your phone, move it to the front screen and use it. Developing a quick 5–10 minute meditation practice everyday can help melt distraction in favor of depth.
Cultivate Depth
Now that you’ve shifted your mindset and put some firewalls in place for eliminating distraction, it’s time to plunge deep.
The Pomodoro Technique is one that I’ve found to be a sure-fire way to drop into deep work predictably. Essentially, it’s an alternating series of set time for intense concentration and short breaks that enable deep work. Putting pomodoros on rinse and repeat as much as your schedule allows can be a game changer for depth.
Please Move
Once you arrive in flow, it’s so juicy and productive, you may want to stay there forever but beware. Our bodies need movement to stay healthy.
An easy approach is to squeeze in movement between pomodoros. Take a quick walk, dance, shake it out or whatever works for you. Another effective hack is to combine your work with your movement.
Tony Riddle, a movement specialist known as the Natural Lifestylist, advocates for blurring the lines between work and play by changing positions frequently.
You might find it helpful to ease your way into this style of work by practicing some basic ground mobility first. Movnat, a natural movement system, offers a free beginner series, which is a solid primer.
Follow the Sun
Natural sunlight is the secret sauce for enabling deep work and recovering from it. When the sun rises, it sparks a cascade of biological reactions, including a drop in melatonin and a rise in cortisol. This is nature’s way of saying “Let’s get rocking for the day.” The sunset cues a rise in melatonin that signals to our system that it’s time to downshift.
As I’ve written previously, sleep scientists recommend getting about an hour of morning sunlight as a powerful way to entrain the circadian rhythm. Even a few minutes can make a difference. Just don’t stare directly into the sun, which can permanently damage your retinas.
Go into Recovery
Recovery from flow is underrated but it’s the essential ingredient for creating repeat performances. That’s because flow is biologically taxing. If we expect to enter this state regularly, as in tomorrow, we need to put as much emphasis on recovery as we do on getting there in the first place.
Step away from the screens. Digital devices like tablets, laptops and phones emit blue light. After sundown, blue light can mess with melatonin levels and sleep, which interferes with recovery.
Eat well. I’m not going tell you what to eat as that’s highly personal but whatever you consider to be healthy food that makes you feel well, eat that. Michael Pollan’s maxim of “Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much,” from In Defense of Food holds up nicely.
Chill. Relaxing styles of yoga, meditation, breathwork, a walk (around sunset for some natural light, of course) or even just taking a bath are time tested techniques for recovery.
Sleep. During sleep is when we upload and consolidate memories. It’s the brain’s opportunity to sort out and make sense of the work we’ve done all day. It enables us to wake up with fresh insights, ready to dive deep again.
A few weeks ago, some of these suggestions might have seemed absolutely ridiculous. I can hear the thought, “Yeah, like that will ever happen!” But I think we can all agree, stranger things have happened, and are happening right now thanks to COVID-19. Maybe choosing deep work over junk work is one of the most practical things we can do right now. Next Monday is coming soon. What will be different?
