Microshifting. “From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks. When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” This is how I’ve worked for the past decade+…bursts of work throughout the day & week.
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Comments 2
And after that decade+, I'm not sure it's necessarily a good idea!
I think there's something to it, but not as it's presented here when it's intermingled with non-work. That might be too much cognitive start-and-stop and context switching. But just an hour ago in a meeting with a lawyer who's same age-ish as me, and a much younger co-worker who's only 31, the lawyer and I got to talking about faxes.
We chatted how much time we used to spend faxing things at work, and I was joking about how at one job there was a single fax machine, and so I had to stand there waiting for a break in incoming faxes before I could load my outgoing fax. It could be five minutes waiting! And then we moved on to shredding, how we'd end up around the shredder with other folks, shredding 100s of pages, and the chats we'd have while doing it.
My young co-worker was astounded to hear it all and said, "how'd you guys ever get any work done?!" But we did, somehow. Because we had breaks from the mental load. So what appears now to be dumb wasted time in retrospect was likely very productive. Even if we didn't call it microshifting!
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