Accepting boredom

The way we define the concept of "productivity" really influences our perception.

For a lot of people, this word suggests something cold and corporate, that speaks about efficiency and becoming a robot.

It has to do with focus and allows us to accomplish everything we want to do in a smaller amount of time, so we have more time for what’s actually meaningful to us.

Because being able to focus on things, we see more meaning in them.

• Hyperfocus: it means directing your attention outward. It's the most productive mode of our mind, when one task fills our full attention.
• Scatterfocus: it means directing your attention inward. It's the most creative mode of our mind, when we deliberately let our mind wander.

So we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves.

There’s a mechanism embedded within our mind’s prefrontal cortex called the novelty bias, whereby, for every new, novel thing we direct our attention at, our mind rewards us with a hit of dopamine

We’re perfectly productive when we accomplish what we intend to do.

An intention for a day could be to write a few pages. And if we accomplish that, we’re perfectly productive. An intention for a day could also be to watch five episodes of a TV show and just relax. If we accomplish that, then we’re perfectly productive then as well.