Steve Jobs Swore the 10-Minute Rule Made Him Smarter. Modern Neuroscience Is Discovering He Was Right

creativity appears to depend partly on processes taking place in your brain while you’re not focusing. (Limiting the time allotted to high-stakes work also helps reduce the feeling of being intimidated or oppressed by it, which causes some people to procrastinate.)

The formula that Andreasen and others uncovered is that to maximize productivity, the brain needs to balance spending time focusing on a single task with stepping away and relaxing.26 It’s hard work plus a break that enables our brains to process and play with information that optimizes our brains.

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly i

It's common to push ourselves to overcome this natural low-energy period. Hustle culture and our inner critics demand it. We think needing breaks means we're lazy or weak. We ignore what our bodies are telling us, for the sake of productivity. But this mindset has tricked us for too long. Our brains need rest to function at their best. In fact, sci

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly i