How Your Hobby Helps to Increase Productivity

What should be done to increase productivity? Is this a serious task only in a work environment or is it also important during your daily routine tasks?

You will probably mention powerful books, useful lectures about effectiveness and productivity, your favorite product management tool as well as success stories of well-known leaders and great managers. That’s true. What about hobby?

We’ve found an interesting story written by the author of Alifeofproductivity blog. He admits that knitting has become one of his favorite hobbies that not only helps to relax but is also really good for productivity reasons.

The author also claims that this activity helps him to plan the future, connect ideas, and recharge. He’re the most interesting moments from the unusual article:

The first interest in knitting may be fleeting. It’s not a secret. However, the author of the article has really fallen in love with this activity.

You may knit to take work breaks, on planes while listening to audiobooks, and in coffee shops, while sipping your morning tea.

He has joined a local knitting group and find himself accumulating more yarn than he can really handle. Lately, he has started to knit for productivity reasons as well.

The benefits of knitting are well-documented. For example, knitting has been shown to distract from chronic pain, stave off a decline in brain functioning as you age, help your memory, and combat depression.

This hobby helps to rest and scatter attention.

Focusing is great: one hour of hyperfocused attention can be as productive as an entire afternoon of distracted work. Scatterfocus, the mental mode where you deliberately set aside time to unfocus, is just as powerful, only in different ways. While hyperfocus is the most productive mode of your brain, scatterfocus is the most creative.

You likely entered this mode during your last shower—when at once, your mind connected constellations of ideas swirling in your head and planned and prepared for the day ahead. The deliberate mind wandering that happens during scatterfocus allows you to do three main things:

• Plan the future. You think about the future a remarkable 48% of the time when in scatterfocus mode. We most often think about the immediate future – setting intentions and planning what we’ll do later in the day. This makes scatterfocus remarkably productive, as it allows us to set intentions more often.
• Connect ideas. Scatterfocus helps our minds wander to the present, to the past, and to the ideas we’ve accumulated. We generate new ideas we wouldn’t have arrived at otherwise when we connect each of these mental destinations.
• Rest attention. Regulating our attention expends mental energy. Scatterfocusing, even if only for a few minutes, becomes a small pocket of time in which we no longer need to regulate our behavior.

These benefits are amplified when we scatter our attention while doing something habitual, for example, knitting. This lets scatter attention and helps new ideas surface in the attentional space.

Habitual tasks show to lead to a greater number of creative insights and make entering scatterfocus more fun.

What do you think about this interesting hobby? Is it helpful in increasing productivity?