Increase work efficiency in mathematical professions via free time activities

You get an increased work efficiency in mathematical kind of work via the following:

* recreation in the nature: just spending time in the nature while admiring the beauty of nature

* sports: doing enjoyable physical exercise relaxedly the senses open and according to what feel best for you - as long as it is a varied and demanding real sport

* painting, drawing, etc. - especially structured landscapes with a sensitivity to atmoshperes

* following feelings in healthy natural ways while having a holistic picture of what one feels about each kind of thing

* singing, playing an instrument and learning to compose

* meditation, prayer and healthy natural ways of living

* doing anything that you like emotionally - including a rich social life and sex

In the following I give explanations to how all these help one's working ability in mathematics etc.

For a more detailed explanation see MY BOOK "Hard Rationality of Feelings and Instincts", to which there is a link here. (It is a whole book: a large PDF file, so give the page time to load.)

Most of mathematical work is pictorial thinking, so it matters a lot what kind of ability you have to imagine abstract structures in your mind's eye.

The nature is a multitude of all kinds of structures. It trains our sense of sight and our pictorial memory, which we both use in mathematics, much better than anything else. It is a very natural kind of exercise, refreshing at the same time as effective training for your work.

The nature views are enermously complex: at least a hundred or a thousand times as complex as the views in the build environment. So a nature hobby gives you a great advantage for your work!

I would recommend at least a half an hour each week wandering in the nature just to enjoy its beauty. But the more, the better!

Thinking is very much like doing handicrafts: you examine things and try to build something from them with some goals in mind and a some kind of picture of the enviornment that you are in.

So doing handicrafts, doing physical labor and enjoying sports gives you concretical experience of the possible abstract situations that you meet in your work and of how to cope with each of them skillfully.

The easiest example is our concept of space: by touching and feeling we conceive the shapes and places of objects. This comes to a more abstract level but works very much the same when we think of what are the places of the things in our memory: how we conviently find them, handle them and rearrange the memory neatly. That is often like extending your hand to the memory place, bladdring through some things there, finding the right one, taking it closer for inspection, possibly making some changes to it and then placing it back again to where it belongs.

Likeiwse, if you meet some obstacle in your work, meeting it wisely is very much the same as if you would meet a physical obstacle when exercising yourself physically, like on a walk in a forest: you take a look at it and try to climb over. These analogies are in our nature, so that our concretical experience with physical objects teaches us wisdom of life taht is useful whatever do, so also in our work. And since the most repeated actions, the main guidelines of your work, cumulate the most, it matters a lot for your work which amount of wisdom of life you have. The easiest and most natural way to increase your wisdom of life is to have a demanding but absolutely enjoyable sports hobby...

Engineering work is work requiring a sharp attention: one must be quick to notice new things and to handle complex wholes in thinking.

But one's attention tires easily, so if the working day gets longer, one starts to use one's memory instead more and more and becomes like a robot not capable of anything new.

So at least for me the limit between sharp capable thinking work and bored repetitious slow non-productive work goes at the maximum of four hours of thinking work a day. That is the time that our hunter-gatherer forefathers worked each day.

Anything more than four hours makes the whole working day unproductive, while a working day of a couple of hours gives full speed with good quality working results brought by a sharp attention.

So the best lenght for an engineers' working day would be a maximum of four hours.

In addition one would need to ban the same type of work during the rest of the week, because here 4+4 < 4 while 3+1 might be even better...

Feelings help to answer needs, that is the evolutionary reason why feelings exist.

Answering needs safeguards the ground for full functioning: for working ability and for the functioning of the group and the society. The last of these translates to meaningfulness, so it too agrees with the work efficiency point of view of producing things of worth from which to earn one's living.

Needs are important just the same way as bensin is important for a car. Like a wise person does not forget the need of bensin of a car, neither does a wise boss or a worker ever forget to answer the major needs of workers!

The most skilled objective thinkers make use of all their observations in their thinking work, that means not just those that they can put to words but all kinds of impressions and sensations.

I call the natural bunches in which your impressions come "atmospheres". These atmospheres are your perceptions in their pure undisturbed form that is the very best for thinking.

Like in mathematics it is typical that you estimate some spatical characteristics of the things that you examine, like "dense", "spatious" etc - all kinds of impressions for which we can find easy analogies in nature landscapes. Those are real observations of what each object is like and what the whole is like. So a really skilled thinker uses them too fully in one's thinking!

How this goes in practice, is easier to understand if you read my short guide to holistic objectivity to which there is a link here. It teaches you step by step what is needed for objectivity and it applies also in mathematics and engineering, even though the guide has been especially planned for science...

You can learn more about the role of feelings in thinking if you read my book, to which there is a link at the top of this page.

All arts increase one's sense of atmospheres. In other words: they make one's observational abilities better and teach one a better vocabulary of different kinds of abstract structures. Having an art hobby, like music or poetry for example, is enjoyable and fun: you exercise yourself in natural ways and so learn to find better functioning ways to do your work.

Questions of work efficiency touch very many people indeed. And when computerization of just about every side of life proceeds, ordinary people start to resemble what engineers were like some twenty or thirty years ago. So the life of an engineer is a question concerning the future of the whole world. Please work for a better future for engineers and for all!

And if you have friends who too are engineers, please pass the word that more enjoyable free time and more room for feelings in the future is a real possibility in the tough world... Maybe they would like to get a link to this page and to my book? Wish them luck!

Thank you for visiting! I hope that you can enjoy your life more than this far...

More videos loosely on the same subject you can find on my playlists here.

If you have some difficulty in applying these ideas to practise in your working place, please make sure that these things get entirely decided by fellow engineers, however money oriented they may be.

This is important because people with very different backgrounds often have different situations of life and cannot understand why engineers need more free time than those who work in natural human resources work or are bosses handling mostly human relationships and teaching instead of the dry unnatural work with mathematics and computers.

So a fellow engineer can understand that if an engineer looks exhausted, he propably needs more free time, while someone with a different background might just guess that it is natural for engineers to look somewhat dry, and so they are likely to push the "lazy" engineers (or is it ufos?) even harder...