Cal Newport

This trip is helping me get unstuck.

The three days I spend down here will yield benefits to

for many months to follow.

These are the types of rewards you get from pressing pause.

The big issue here, of course, is that most people don't have the ability, as we said, to simply drop everything and step away from their jobs and their responsibilities to regroup.

So to figure out if it's possible, this is our challenge here, to figure out if it's possible for you to achieve most of the benefits of pressing pause without major disruptions in your life,

We should start by trying to identify more precisely exactly what it is we're trying to achieve.

And then we can step back and say, what are some alternative ways, some alternative strategies for getting the same benefits?

All right.

I got three benefits of pressing pause that I want to identify here.

Number one.

Your brain struggles to think when it must be constantly context shifting, right?

So when you are in a busy normal day, you constantly have to shift your cognitive context from one target to another because we're busy, especially in the age of digital.

There's text messages, there's emails, there's Slack messages, there's social media.

there's news streams, there's podcasts.

All of this is pulling out our attention all the time.

We're jumping back and forth.

A brain that is constantly switching its context has a hard time thinking well.

There's terminology I use in my books where I say context shifting leads to reduced cognitive capacity.

It's a way of saying when your mind is busy, it gets dumber.