Contrasting Personal and Professional roles If you’re productive in one way at work, take the opposite approach in your personal life. The goal is to essentially flex different social and cognitive muscles.

Open “loops” When you fill up all the gaps in your day by checking your messages or browsing on social media sites, for example when you’re standing in line or commuting, you lose opportunities to get lost in thought, the moments when the best ideas happen. When our mental guard is down, it’s easier for one’s thoughts to break away from existing, dead-end patterns. We might land on a solution to a problem without consciously thinking about it.