Do Breathe summary

Bullet journals, desktop calendars, online to-do lists … with so many productivity apps and hacks floating around, it’s surely never been easier to reach peak productivity, right?

Wrong.

Are you the kind of person that lives fearlessly, acts spontaneously, tries new things, takes bold leaps in your professional and personal life? Or are you the kind of person that watches from the sidelines while others chase their dreams?

Odds are, you’re the second person. Most of us are. We know what we want out of life and yet we fail to act on our desires. So, what’s stopping us?

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Forever is composed of nows.” It’s a beautiful poetic sentiment; it’s also completely true. The way you spend the fleeting seconds and minutes of your life makes up the sum of your time on earth. 

Yet many of us spend our “now” analyzing the past or worrying about the future. Worse, “now” passes us by as we go through the motions at work or scroll through social media.

The energy crisis is all over the news. We debate the future of fossil fuels, and look to the promise of renewables. It’s clear the earth’s energy is precious and we need to conserve it.

Yet, when it comes to our own reserves of energy, we’re far less mindful. In fact, we sometimes take perverse pleasure in depleting our energy. We drink to wind down, instead of spending the time we need to meaningfully refresh our minds and bodies. We run on no sleep, slamming double espressos to get through the day, and reach for sugary snacks to ride out the afternoon slump.

Did you know you’re the custodian of a resource so potent and – potentially – so profitable that start-ups, apps, and websites spend millions trying to squeeze it from you? That resource is your attention. Are you making the most of it?

If you’ve never found it difficult to settle down to work or looked up to find that you’ve spent 45 minutes down an internet rabbit-hole, you can go ahead and skip this blink. It sounds like you’ve honed your focus to perfection! For the rest of us, however, there’s no need to despair. Refining your powers of focus might be easier than you think.

Picture this: You’re engaged in an activity, whether that’s writing computer code or painting a landscape, and you get so absorbed you completely lose track of time. Does this sound familiar? If you’re nodding yes, then you’ve likely experienced what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls a flow state.

Flow, says Csíkszentmihályi, is the optimal creative state. We experience flow when a task stretches our abilities but not so much that our skills can’t meet the challenge of said task. This delicate balance between ability and challenge produces a state of total absorption. In this state, we lose sense of time and stop paying attention to our inner critic. All of a sudden, our task feels effortless. New, intuitive connections and solutions present themselves to us, as if by magic.

Ever wondered why Steve Jobs always wore the same black turtleneck? The short answer is, habit. The longer answer is, Jobs did this out of an intentional action, because he knew that when we do things habitually, we do them without thinking about them. Because Jobs chose his clothes from habit, he could conserve his precious mental energy for things like coming up with the iPhone.

We make habitual decisions every day. In fact, researchers at Duke University estimate that 40% of our decisions are habit-based. 40% of what we do each day is done on autopilot.