Working and Ideating better

Today’s thought is an analogy between how we work and an indispensable task we do several times a day - breathe.

Breathing involves inhaling and exhaling. When you have both, there’s rhythm, activity, and life. A fast, shallow breathing pattern indicates heightened activity. When you’re running fast, or about to miss your flight notice it. In a relaxed state, we have longer breath cycles.

Whatever you do, there is an intake (breathing in) followed by an output (breathing out).

Both are required.

Yet, our daily life has us consuming content non stop. There’s work, meetings, news, podcasts, WhatsApp messages, telemarketing calls, and after all that we make time for social media and binge watch shows. It’s an endless feed of information. We all regulate our feed to ensure a high quality input. Yet, its all inflow. Like we are just gulping endless breaths of oxygen.

Where’s the outflow?

After our mental stomach has been fed, are we giving any time for digestion? This can be time to think, reflect on what we just observed. It could be talking it out with colleagues or friends or putting it out there on social media. Not for likes and to go viral. Just do it without any expectations.

Its said that good ideas hit you when you’re not working - like running it in the shower. You don’t have to be away from work to get those, btw.

You do need to be in a state of reflection.

Insert a pause in your life. At the daily and weekly frequency, both.

Breathe in and breathe out.

That’s it for today.

Happy Ideating!

Hemang.