Cal Newport

When you press pause and you get away from this busyness,

You, in a quite literal sense, get smarter.

Your IQ goes up because you are not reducing your cognitive capacity with all that context shifting.

All right.

The second specific benefit from pressing pause.

New physical context can support new ideas and insights.

When you're surrounded by the familiar...

your brain is firing familiar circuits.

When you're in a novel situation, other parts of your brains turn on.

And more importantly, networks that are associated, semantic networks that are associated with normal things in your everyday life don't fire up, which leaves you more capacity for original thought.

I actually talked about this a little bit in my book, Slow Productivity, where I talked about the unusual locations that professional writers sometimes go to to help do their writing and

One of the examples was Maya Angelou would go to a motel, take the pictures off the wall and write on the bed.

Why would they do this?

Well, in the book, I made the neuroscientific argument that when you're not seeing things that you're used to, that cue thoughts that you're used to, you have more clarity on the new, you have more clarity on the novel.

If you're just at home going through your day, you could be trying to have big thoughts, but you're going to see the laundry pile and you're going to think about laundry and

and you are going to see your baseball hat and think about the baseball game you're coaching the next day, and you're going to see whatever, your dog walk by and you're going to be like, oh yeah, I got to take the dog to the vet.

Suddenly a lot of your brain is caught up with the familiar.

So you go to the unfamiliar, you have more of your brain open for thinking in more original ways.

All right, the third benefit from pressing pause, you need to distance yourself from your present to better see your future.

All right?