The Power of a Daily 20 Minute Walk

How wandering around for a little while can boost your productivity and your creativity.

As a social media consultant, I’m mostly working from home. I’m working alone, at my desk, in front of my computer screen. I also often use this same computer to get distracted, by watching YouTube videos, playing video games sometimes, or even reading content on Medium (yes, Medium is also a distraction!).

Having the same tool for professional work and leisure makes it hard not to be distracted all the time. So sometimes, starting working in the morning is hard. It is even harder when you don’t have a boss continually spying on what you’re doing, or making sure that you get your work done by a specific deadline.

As a social media worker, I could separate my tasks into two groups: the casual, daily, monotonous tasks that need to be done, they don’t require a lot of brainpower nor a lot of attention, but I cannot automate them; and the creative tasks. The first category of tasks usually takes up to 2 or 2 and a half hours of my morning. As these tasks are generally what needs to be done, I can’t skip them. So that’s how I start my day: I make myself a cup of coffee, I listen to a podcast, and I start doing these tasks.

When I get done, by around 10 am (I start my day early), comes the time for creative work. Creative work is about creating content, defining strategies, writing an article on Medium, or writing an email sequence for my mailing list or one of my clients. While some of that creative work is necessary and is client-related, a lot of it has to do with self-promotion, personal branding and so on. There’s no external pressure to get most of these tasks done.

Creative work is exhausting. When you have your brain on auto-pilot, doing tasks while listening to a podcast, it doesn’t take a lot of commitment to start to do these tasks. However, when you’re looking at a blank page after not being stimulated for a while, it’s hard to gather the brainpower to get started.

I tried everything: having breakfast at that switching moment of my morning, having another cup of coffee, drinking a bulletproof coffee, nothing was really helping me gathering the brain energy to start creating.

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