Cal Newport

When you are in the normal things you do, it is hard to think about different futures because your brain says, we've got things we need to do.

This is what we care about right now.

So to try to squeeze out original thoughts about what do I want in my life, what could happen, where am I trying to go, is really hard when the things you need to do are all around you right now.

Our brains do not like to do future forecasting when there's present challenges that we face.

When you press pause...

You're hoping to get some distance from this present so that you can look outwards towards more interesting futures that you would otherwise not have noticed.

Now, I'm clearly enjoying all these benefits down on my current pause I'm taking in Nashville.

If you go off on an epic trip, all three of those benefits will clearly be delivered, right?

I've tried to distilled what it was about my trip that's giving me the rewards that I was seeking.

But now that we know that this is what we're going for, these three things, we can actually come up with

alternative strategies to get these benefits that will be less disruptive.

We can think of these almost as like mini pauses.

So what I want to do here is I want to go through four different levels of pauses that you can implement, four different ideas.

And I'm going to order these from least disruptive to most disruptive, okay?

The least disruptive will barely change your day.

The level four most disruptive pause type will be what I'm doing now.

So I want to give you a spectrum of different ways of pressing pause that as we'll see afterwards, all of which to some degree will give you the benefits of pausing, but with a varied levels of disruption.

You're hungry.

Now, it's tempted in this situation to just grab a slice of pizza or crush a bag of chips because it's fast and it's easy.

But this is where Factor enters the scene.