Latest news with #SlowProductivity
New York Times
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
6 Podcasts to Boost Your Productivity and Focus
Productivity has become an obsession, both for individuals and companies. Across numerous industries, employee productivity is now being monitored and scored, with the specter of artificial intelligence automation only adding to the pressure to always be hustling. But there's real value in learning how to prioritize tasks and organize your schedule in ways that work for your brain without compromising your well being. These six podcasts offer steps and tools for making the most of your time and energy at work and beyond. 'Deep Questions With Cal Newport' Cal Newport, an author and professor of computer science at Georgetown University, has long been known for his balanced approach to productivity — his most recent book, 'Slow Productivity,' emphasizes working less to produce higher quality results. In Newport's podcast, he offers detailed advice grounded in a few core concepts: deep work (focusing, without distraction, on a single, cognitively demanding task), digital minimalism (limiting technology use to reclaim the time and energy that digital pursuits can drain from us), and time-blocking (dividing a day into segments during which you focus on one task at a time). As he addresses listener questions and shares concrete tips and techniques, Newport also encourages his audience to question their assumptions about productivity as a goal in itself. Starter episode: 'It's Okay to Slow Down' 'Relaxing White Noise' While many podcasts offer tips and advice on how to focus better, this series is a practical tool in itself. Despite its somewhat bland title, 'Relaxing White Noise' gives listeners access to a smorgasbord of soothing soundscapes. With more than a thousand episodes in the back catalog, the options include soothingly mundane noises (dishwasher sounds or the whir of a fan), evocative nature scenes (a rainstorm in a forest or a cascading waterfall) and even potentially stressful scenarios ('Rain & Stormy Ocean Sounds Aboard Wooden Ship' may be an acquired taste). There are also many white, brown and pink noise options — for the uninitiated, these all describe different audible frequencies with varying effects. White noise has more of a hissing sound than brown or pink, which may make the latter options more soothing, but all three have benefits for focus, not least because they effectively block out other disruptive sounds. Starter episode: 'Super Relaxing Waterfall Sounds for Sleeping' 'Cortex' Since a lot of productivity podcasts are geared toward those with traditional 9 to 5 work schedules, 'Cortex' is a welcome alternative with an emphasis on freelancers and creatives. The show is hosted by CGP Grey (best known among podcast fans for the beloved but now-defunct hit 'Hello, Internet') and Myke Hurley, a founder of the British podcast network Relay FM, who share their strategies for time management and getting things done. The duo affably discusses specific work flows, apps and frameworks that help them push forward with creative projects — for instance, planning your year around a broad theme and using this to guide actions rather than relying solely on rigid, time-based goals. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
14-04-2025
- General
- Forbes
3 Reasons You Should Indulge In ‘Grandma Hobbies' — By A Psychologist
Not old-fashioned, just underrated —'grandma hobbies' might just be the remedy your overstimulated ... More and anxious mind has been needing all along. In a culture hooked on speed, screens and constant stimulation, there's a growing desire to slow down and reconnect with simpler and more intentional ways of living. That's where 'grandma hobbies' like knitting, gardening, baking and sewing come in. Activities once seen as old-fashioned are now being embraced for their surprising mental health benefits. Take knitting, for example. A study published in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy found that frequent knitters often report feeling calmer, less stressed and more uplifted. By focusing on one specific activity rather than general leisure, the study revealed how knitting promotes mindfulness, sparks creativity and even encourages social connection — whether through community groups or online forums. In other words, it's not just something you do to pass the time. It's a soothing and mentally restorative act. At a time when burnout is rising and hustle culture is being questioned; slow, hands-on activities like these are more than nostalgic pastimes — they're practical tools for restoring emotional balance and everyday joy. Here are three reasons why indulging in grandma hobbies might just be one of the best investments you make in your well-being. Amid the pressure to constantly hustle and be productive, grandma hobbies offer a refreshing, pressure-free way to achieve fulfillment and well-being. Cal Newport, in his book Slow Productivity, challenges the pervasive culture of busyness, urging us to reject constant multitasking and return to work that is meaningful and rooted in quality. His approach emphasizes the importance of doing fewer things at a natural pace and shifting away from hyper-visible activity that often masquerades as productivity. This philosophy aligns surprisingly well with the practices we often associate with grandma hobbies. Indulging in any sort of grandma hobby — which tends to be centered on craftsmanship and mindfulness — helps you inherently reject the pressure to hustle. A 2025 study found that participants who engaged in creative practices rooted in their heritage, like traditional crafts, reported feeling less anxious and more emotionally balanced compared to those completing puzzles with a clear end goal. The key difference was that the creative activities were not focused on finishing a task, but rather about being present in the process. These kinds of hobbies gently challenge the idea that time must always be optimized. They remind you that time spent doing something slow, quiet and meaningful is not wasted; rather, it is restorative. It's a way of choosing presence over pressure and imagination over efficiency. In a world wired for hustle, that choice becomes a radical act of self-respect. The cherry on top is that you end up with something tangible like a scarf, a jar of pickles or maybe a blooming patch of flowers, which you can hold and cherish as a product of your presence and patience that brings you quiet satisfaction. The act of doing something slowly and mindfully becomes your quiet rebellion against a world that insists on constant speed and output. Engaging in grandma hobbies provides more than just a creative outlet. It nurtures your mental and emotional health. A 2020 study highlighted that home gardening, for instance, gave participants a level of happiness and satisfaction comparable to activities like biking, walking or dining out. In fact, gardening ranked among the top five activities that participants found most meaningful, which speaks to the deep, intrinsic satisfaction such hobbies bring. What's key here is that these hobbies tend to be slow and rooted in the present moment, allowing you to detach from the constant buzz of modern life. As the study showed, these activities don't need to be complex or demanding; they just need to be authentic and centered around personal engagement. This aligns with the therapeutic aspects of grandma hobbies, which are not about producing something for the sake of it, but instead about enjoying the process. Whether it's tending to a garden, making homemade jam or crafting, these hobbies offer a calming and stress-reducing experience that enhances emotional well-being. By slowing down and focusing on the task at hand, you allow your brain to release stress and anxiety, shifting your focus to something grounding and fulfilling. Indulging in such activities is a powerful way to create space for self-care and resilience, boosting both mental clarity and emotional stability. Incorporating simple, traditional hobbies into your daily routine can have a profound impact on your cognitive health. While these activities may seem outdated or simplistic, they play a critical role in maintaining brain function and cognitive resilience. Research shows that a diverse range of activities is linked to improved brain health, particularly in areas related to memory, learning and spatial navigation. Researchers found that engaging in varied activities can lead to greater hippocampal volume, which is crucial for cognitive functions like memory retention and spatial reasoning. The hippocampus benefits from activities that require sustained focus, learning and creativity — characteristics inherent in many traditional hobbies. Reintroducing traditional hobbies and learning new skills can significantly boost cognitive health. These activities engage the brain in multiple ways, from improving memory and motor skills to enhancing spatial awareness and problem-solving abilities. Manual tasks like knitting and sewing require focus, dexterity and memory, while gardening encourages both physical activity and mental engagement through planning and tracking growth. Similarly, puzzle-solving and brain games can stimulate cognitive functions like attention and processing speed, providing consistent mental exercise. Learning new techniques, whether in crafting, baking or other hobbies, challenges the brain and strengthens neural connections, contributing to overall cognitive resilience. Revisiting these timeless activities can serve as a simple yet powerful way to enrich your cognitive well-being, offering a holistic approach to brain health that blends creativity and mental agility. The true value of indulging in grandma hobbies lies in embracing the freedom of slowing down and savoring the process. By carving out time for yourself to engage in mindful hobbies, you reconnect with a softer pace of life. Approach these activities without an agenda of achievement. Let your only goal be to enjoy and immerse yourself in the experience. To make this a consistent part of your life, start by dedicating small, non-negotiable time slots each week for your chosen hobby. Whether it's 15 minutes of knitting or tending to your plants, make it a priority. Remember, these hobbies aren't meant to impress others or gain validation. Don't do them for social media, for likes or for others' approval. The real magic lies in indulging in these activities purely for your own satisfaction, without any expectation of a perfect outcome. In doing so, you'll experience the creativity and solace that come from doing something simply for the pleasure it gives you. Are your habits helping you stay present or just keeping you busy? Take this science-backed test to find out: Mindful Attention Awareness Scale
The Guardian
15-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
It's time to rethink boredom, procrastination and regret
We all procrastinate, but most conventional advice for conquering it doesn't work, at least not for me, beyond chores like cleaning the kitchen or going to the gym or getting my tax return in on time. It certainly doesn't work for the kind of procrastination that has obstructed my best life: swerving that relationship I craved; postponing for years a book on the philosophy of love that I yearned to write before finally putting pen to paper; failing to pursue the hobby – piano playing – to which I've been devoted since childhood, while my piano sat in a corner, closed and silent. It's no use being told by self-help books to formulate my top priorities when I already have core goals that define who I am or want to become. Or to be urged to break up tasks into bite-sized steps, with a deadline for each step, because how does that work when it's a relationship or a vocation that I'm avoiding? Conventional advice says I should forgive myself my paralysis rather than beating myself up about it but, soothing as this is, it doesn't magically give me either the focus or the energy I need to fulfil those prized goals. I can remove external distractions, especially online access, but what am I to do about distractions inside my head: fantasising, say, about a holiday or a romance as an escape from the task in hand? When the philosopher Augustine (354–430 AD) begged God to grant him 'chastity and self-control, but not yet,' he, too, wouldn't have been helped by, say, Cal Newport's core recommendations in Slow Productivity: 'Do fewer things', 'Work at a natural pace', and 'Obsess over quality'. Augustine knew exactly what his top priority was: to abandon sensual pleasures for a life of total devotion to God. His problem wasn't doing too many things, a manic work schedule or poor quality. Rather it was that he couldn't unleash his inner motivation to live his best life. And so he was putting it off, helped by procrastination's crucial illusions: that deferral is always temporary and that nothing decisive will be lost by it. When it comes to avoiding, resisting, even sabotaging our highest priorities, we need a very different approach to conquering procrastination. First off, let's realise that a priority's very significance – it is our ticket to a meaningful life and self-esteem – can paralyse and overwhelm us. So why not imaginatively lower its stakes and think of it instead as our favoured displacement activity, there to sneak off and have fun with while we sideline everything else? Then let's reimagine our priority not as grim slavery to a maximally successful life, as if we're machines to be optimised for efficient productivity, but rather as play. By play I mean an explorative, joyful mindset by which to loosen those paralysed cogs of our mind, releasing it from servitude to the managerial dullness of the to-do list mentality and allowing it to move nimbly. Play is a way of becoming open to new ways forward, new ideas, surprise. It's entirely consistent with clear goals, tight focus, hard work and ambition. Which is surely why, historically, the spirit of play has catalysed so many innovations, from 9th-century Baghdad, where far-sighted engineering breakthroughs were developed that, centuries later, fuelled the west's industrial revolutions, right up to today's digital and AI revolutions. It's why corporations such as Google and Nvidia cultivate an environment of free-wheeling exploration. When dull, dutiful routine is bogging us down, the spirit of play can be just what's needed to break the logjam. But if neither the spirit of play nor lowering the stakes of our priorities suffices, then it's time to harness the creative power of regret and boredom – two emotions abundantly created by procrastination and often, wrongly, seen as entirely negative. Yes, they can further paralyse us procrastinators, corroding our self-esteem and wasting our one shot at living. But sometimes the message they're sending us isn't to try again and try harder. Rather it's that our ambitions are unsuited to us, even when they're strongly held. Or that how we're pursuing them is unthinking and ossified by routine. Or that we're not yet ready for them; for it can be perilous to come too early to, say, our vocation or an important relationship. In other words, regret and boredom can turn procrastination into a blessing: a rebellion against stale priorities and soulless routines; a life-giving refusal, arising deep within us, to go on as before. The 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard describes how regret fuelled, but was eventually key to resolving, the greatest dilemma of his life: whether or not to marry Regine Olsen, whom he loved. One of history's great amorous procrastinators, Kierkegaard discovered he would regret it if he married Regine and regret it if he didn't. No sooner had she accepted his proposal, after a three-year courtship, than he panicked. Gradually, however, his regret afforded him deeper insight into who he was, propelling him to the wrenching decision to forgo the woman he loved for his vocation as a writer – a vocation he came to believe was incompatible with the duties and responsibilities of marriage. He learned how regret's clarifying pain – its tremendous power to make vivid to the mind's eye what is lost by pursuing one life priority over another – can impel us to choose and then to live our choice authentically and to the full. What, however, if we successfully choose a course in life, or accomplish a long-cherished priority, yet we soon feel empty, unfulfilled? We're besieged by that fatal little question, 'So what?' – fatal for procrastination because it leeches all motivation, as the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy discovered at age 50, already world-famous and with timeless novels like Anna Karenina and War and Peace under his belt. 'Well, fine,' the question whispered to him, 'so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?' In the face of inevitable death, Tolstoy agonised, what is the greatest success worth? If that question can paralyse a driven superachiever like Tolstoy, it can paralyse any of us. How then can we recover our motivation? To start with, by abandoning our expectation of stable fulfilment. The reality is that fulfilment – like most pleasure – is temporary. Our memory is remarkably poor at retaining the experience of it. Nor can we ever know – as the 'So what?' question assumes we can – what exactly our achievements add up to or how and whether they'll endure. Like Tolstoy, none of us can sum the net value of the meanings, delights, fulfilled desires and other outcomes we've secured on just one of our top priorities, say being a writer, a parent or a charity worker. Let alone across all of our top can't even know to what extent we've fulfilled our potential, because the very idea that we each have a fixed potential waiting to be fulfilled (or, even if we do, that we could know when we've attained it) is probably an illusion. What really matters are the delights of the journey. Shakespeare's Cressida surely expresses this when she says: 'Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing'; as does a remark attributed to Confucius: 'Roads are made for journeys, not destinations.' A well-lived life is one where we richly employ our energies and talents in the activity of pursuing those ends we most cherish. What then of death annulling all our achievements, which was at the heart of Tolstoy's paralysing nightmare? How do we stop that thought from miring us in procrastination? The answer, ironically, is by diving deeper into death's reality. Here we need to learn from the experience of so many of the incurably ill who, alongside fearful uncertainty, discover thrillingly fresh vitality, clarity of purpose and joy in life, whether in its most routine moments or its largest priorities. These brave people teach us that nothing can commit us more powerfully and meaningfully to the people and projects we love than truly experiencing ourselves as mortal. But this requires us to go far beyond 'mere acceptance that we'll eventually die', transience, or the shocking brevity of even a long lifespan – acceptance that remains too abstract to motivate us more than sporadically. Instead we need to attain a deep awareness that death can arrive at any moment. To achieve this awareness, those of us who have no experience of a terrible diagnosis will need to use that most powerful of all motivators: our imagination. For the most vivid possible relationship to our mortality is the key to rediscovering the living force of our hopes and commitments, and so to conquering procrastination. High time, therefore, for me to get back to the piano. To reimagine it as my favoured displacement activity. To enjoy it as disciplined, goal-driven free play. To learn from my boredom with my own playing. To delight in the beauty of sound right now. And above all, to realise that life could be over in just a minute. Jump! A New Philosophy for Conquering Procrastination by Simon May is published by Basic Books at £16.99 on 25 February. Buy a copy for £15.29 from
