A well defined problem
Have you ever felt the urge to mow your lawn? That’s precisely what happened to me this weekend. The month of May 2021 has been one of the most intense ever, work-wise. I have been developing a university course in Building physics with eleven lectures in the course of four weeks. On top of that I have my regular work as an acoustician. I do love my work, both of them, but there is a problem. They are both extremely cognitively demanding. I am always on the edge, slightly – or even a lot – outside of my comfort zone. That’s why I felt the urge to spend my time on a well defined problem. Like moving the lawn.
The problem with cognitively demanding work is that you rarely or never get the opportunity to engage the auto-pilot. The projects require constant tweaking, adaptation and attention. That’s why I love to do field measurements or similar work. It’s not that often, but a field measurement is an example of where I can finally use my body to do the work. Carry heavy equipment, move between apartments, plan out the measurement series and talk to the construction workers. And the best bit is to drive several hours back and forth to the measurement site. It’s a time of inner peace. This kind of work can be done at least semi-autonomously.
I haven’t had any work like that in May. Just cognitive work for a whole month, and a lot of late night shifts and work weekends as well. I guess my brain is about to over-heat and blow a fuse. In the last week I could feel the desire to engage in a well-defined problem increase. I knew the building physics course was about to end in early June. And I could see summer approaching and that the grass on my lawn was gaining height and needed attention. It’s really a strange feeling to have abstinence of moving grass! But honestly, it is one of the most well-defined problems there is. And you get instant feedback when it is done. It looks really bad when you start, and a couple of hours later you have made your home more beautiful, with a great rush of dopamine as a reward. All you need to do is to flick on the autopilot, cut the grass and enjoy the process.
With that said, moving a lawn can be a challenging task too, if you put your heart into it. Our lawn is anything but square-shaped, with many height differences, narrow passages, trees, rocks, bushes and other obstacles. Therefore, when I am driving around on my tractor, I am working with path optimizations – which indeed is a very cognitively demanding problem! The important difference here I guess, is that the stakes are insignificant. The worst thing that can happen if you do a bad path is that it will take ten minutes longer to finish. Or in the absolute worst case, you run out of gas and have to do a refill just to get those final square meters on the premises. But anyway, it is okay to “fail” and you can safely try out different things without anyone getting hurt in the process (other than your pride).
I still have a ton of tasks on my work related to-do list, which probably “should” have been done this weekend. But I chose to ignore them and fire up the tractor instead. I’m pretty sure my productivity has increased as a consequence. What tasks do you do when you need to “turn on the autopilot” and relax your mind for a while?