Step Back

That's what first responders say to people gathering around an incident on the street.

It's also what a subject matter expert might say when asked to offer advice.

In the first instance, "step back" is simply a matter of physical space. First responders need not be tripping over their patient.

In the second, "step back" is clearly metaphorical. It says to people, "Wait, there is a pattern here that you might recognize, but you can't see it because you are zoomed in too close."

There's yet a third way to hear this (and probably many more). It says, "slow down, take a break, go do something else for a while."

This version puts faith in Bluma Zeigarnik's theory that we are more apt to remember unfinished tasks that finished ones. When people are deep in a task it does not seem logical to stop doing it for any reason... but it works.

We know from her work and her fellow Gestalters is that an interrupted task gets more attention from the mind than one that's already finished. It's one reason to set goals in small increments. It allows us to complete something and then free our minds to start the next thing. By telling our mind that a task is finished it removes it from our proverbial desktop and clears some RAM for the next task.

Adam Grant, in his book Originals, spends a fair amount of time speaking of this in terms of 'planned procrastination', postulating that if we step back from a task before completion that our minds will more likely find potentially new and interesting variations on patterns relating to that task as a matter of memory maintenance. These new patterns are the source of 'originality' that were less available to us while we were still actively hammering away at the task.

It's not clear yet whether the pending forced break in our work patterns will have the same effect as a break of our choosing, but it won't surprise me when researchers in the future step back and find myriad pattern shifts across industries that led to inventions that will appear as though they were right in front of us all along.

We were just too close to see them.

Don't Lose Sleep

It's hard not to lose sleep over the growing health crisis, but working from home might just give us back the hours we need to keep our immune systems topped up.

Americans commute 27 minutes each way and sleep an average of 6.8 hours or 408 minutes each night. Those 54 minutes of commuting could mean an extra 13% of sleep time.

However, if you've never worked from home, this gain will not happen overnight. Efficiently working from home takes practice and discipline.

Many work-from-home veterans end or start each day by writing down a minute-by-minute plan for the day. They include realistic times for breaks and potential interruptions like kids coming home from school if that's a factor.

If you are reading this and you've never tried working from home, then that one suggestion is more than enough to help you maintain some sense of control and focus.

If you have worked from home you'll be able to relate to the fact that I had a line in my schedule right after "dinner/kids" 7-9pm that said "Monday blog entry on Sleep" 9:00-9:30pm . . . and no longer.

GN.

It's a stretch

Strength training is a stretch according to this article at Vice.com.

I stumbled on this while googling around wondering why I was being bombarded with stretch-related blog posts and social media articles over this past week.

I was wondering if March was national stretching month?

It's not, but September's for Yoga.

Ok then, maybe I'm seeing more about stretching because people are coming out of their Winter slumber and working out again. When we work out for the first time in a while we feel sore and maybe worried that we might get hurt... so we think about stretching.

Maybe it's because January was about new beginnings.

February was about committing to those beginnings.

Now in March we might be feeling a bit 'uncomfortable' with some of the changes and writers are sensing this and suggesting flexibility as a metaphor. Maybe that's a stretch too.

But back to strength training as stretching. In the time it took to write this, I had my imaginary research team look into this by checking in with some more 'traditionally credible' sources for health-related questions than Vice.com.

That means Alex Hutchinson of course. Just a few weeks ago he wrote this: The Case Against Stretching.

If he's confused about it all, then I'm going to rest easy being confused too.

But then, I couldn't resist. I read the NIH abstract upon which Hutchinson based his article.

Now I'm doubly confused and my hamstrings feel tighter than ever.