Marie Curie at the Dinner Table: the balance of Brainfood (part two)

This is part two of a three-part series that started with an overview of Cal Newport's Deep Work.

Part two looks to balancing force for Deep Work via Catarina Gutierrez, before hinting at an alternate (and complementary) way of working to be explored in part three.

To read the full article now, head to the little CURIOUS on Medium.

Growing up, my family seldom ate our evening meal at the dinner table. It was something my mother would occasionally attempt to institute but she never quite gained the support required for the takeover of our dining habits. For us, it was dinner in the lounge watching the evening news or, if I could somehow swing it, The Simpsons.

It’s something of a surprise then that my family now eat dinner together at the table every night. The TV in sight, but off.

Aside from the location of our dinner, there is another constant to our routine: we ask each other the best thing that happened in our day.

For my son, four-years-old and filled with equal measures of knowing everything and curious about everything, his favourite things are moments of connection: playing with his friends at kindergarten, an outing with his mother and sister, or simply eating dinner with his family.

While the adults tend to have more varied answers, and sometimes struggle to come up with anything after a weary day of "adulting", they share the same theme: we value the moments where we connect, where we have an impact, where we are human.

In a recent post, fellow-Wellingtonian, Catarina Gutierrez introduced her own way of working to sit alongside Deep Work: Brainfood Work. For Gutierrez, this is the work “you do […] to grow and improve your work life”, the tasks you want to do.

The brain is something that Newport also discusses, however his work and thinking comes out of the emerging knowledge economy which colours his view that any organisation’s greatest resource is the brains of its people.

Not the people.

Just the brains.

Unlike this zombified view, Gutierrez acknowledges the brain as something to be nurtured with an altogether more fulfilling and self-care focused goal,

Improving upon your work is a journey that takes two kinds of work. You need to make space for both so you can sustain yourself throughout the week, month and year. You need to feed your brain to do many things and keep it healthy.

I’m hungry for the stuff that makes me better.

Brainfood Work can, however, be undertaken in a state of Deep Work: particularly through isolation, scheduling, and targeted focus. I often find myself scheduling time on a Monday morning to read the newsletters and articles that have come in over the weekend. This is Brainfood Work that feeds my curiosity and creativity: discovering new ideas like the very ones I’m writing about. However, the way I do this is more akin to a Deep way of working: I reduce distractions, schedule the time, and focus on interpreting the words and concepts of others.

Cal Newport has suggested the future of work will see people become even more specialised in their roles through positions that are specifically Deep and others that are Shallow. In his example, journalists who currently rely on being hyper-connected, largely through the web, will be able to focus on their writing while other staff become communication facilitators, watching social media or email and then alerting the journalists when a source replies or a situation emerges.

At the moment, however, we’re still in a world where we seek a balance between brain-straining tasks, brain-feeding tasks, and brain-resting tasks. While a combination of Deep, Shallow, and Brainfood ways of working can provide us some balance in the office, for most of us, these philosophies sit on one end of our desire to balance a bigger set of scales. The one where work and life sit opposite each other.

The elusive work/life balance is a focus for many employees and facilitating it is a focus for many employers. With this in mind, the Deep way of working feels isolating. Even if you’re feeding your brain, you’re doing so by removing yourself from the technological and physical connection to your workmates, and perhaps even your family. Considering the increasing dialogue around the Western world being in a Loneliness Epidemic, the disconnect within Deep Work could exacerbate the anxieties of many.

At the end of the day, when you step out of your work headspace, the search for this balance means it’s often the connection moments that linger.

Just like at my dinner table.

Want to read the rest right now? Head to the little CURIOUS on Medium.