Building Your Bliss Station
Building Your Bliss Station
In Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about the necessity of your workspace for getting quality deep work done. Deep Work refers to the tasks that require ingenuity and creativity; the kinds of jobs that humans excel at that cannot be recreated and automated by robots and AI.
In his excellent book, Cal Newport talks about some of the giants of knowledge work over the past several centuries and how seriously they took their work by creating fortresses of solitude to do their work in.
Carl Jung built a cottage where he would retreat to for days and weeks on end to do his deep work. Similarly, Bill Gates leaves for a week each year to a cottage without connection to the outside world to do nothing but think about challenges and read.
Joseph Campbell called this the act of building your bliss station; Austin Kleon talks about this idea in his excellent book for creatives called Keep Going.
Building your bliss station means you’ve got a space that you keep sacred from non-work activities - you can get your deepest thinking and creation done. This means that ideally, it’s not in your living room or your bedroom.
Sometimes this can be challenging and unrealistic, especially when the whole family is at home right now. This is why technology can help us to bridge the gap between a bliss station and the realities of modern living.
Ideally, your bliss station is sacred and doesn't have to be converted depending on the time of day but do what you need to at this time to get your deep work done.
If you're looking to optimize your productivity at home and for the future at work, build yourself a standing desk or buy one. Standing to work helps to energize you, ergonomics are better if you're working at the right height. You will also find that you can get more work done by keeping your body more active than if you are sitting and slowly curving forward while bent over your computer screen day-after-day. Try it out for yourself and just see.
I recommend having a chair or something to sit on nearby so that you can alternate your position every once in a while because standing perfectly still isn't ideal either. I also started using an acupressure mat to stand on for a little bit of cushion but also to have something that stimulates me to keep moving and shifting weight throughout the day.
This excerpt was from an article on Performing Your Best While Working From Home on the Flow Academy