There are certain things you can’t do any faster. Sing faster and it will sound wrong. Breathe faster and you are hyperventilating. Laugh faster and you won’t enjoy the joke. Sleep faster and—that doesn’t even make any sense.

Actually, doing anything faster is like sleeping faster. It doesn’t even make any sense.

When we talk about doing something faster, what we usually have in mind is shortening the amount of time that we spend on that activity. The result, with sleep as with anything else: it’s not enough.

I’ve often puzzled over huge variations in efficiency from hour to hour. There are studies in the software industry that show ratios of as much as twenty times between the least efficient and most efficient producers, but I think that if you look at a day or a week of one person’s time, there will be even more variation than that. Totally unproductive, frustrating periods of work alternate with huge bursts of inspired activity from which you have to tear yourself away at the end of the day to catch your bus or train. How do you rig things so that you are in the super-productive mode all of the time?

You don’t.

There’s a good deal of research and experience suggesting that the “unproductive” periods are actually a sort of mental incubation process, wholly necessary to the creative process. And every activity is creative, more or less. The book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind is a fabulous source on the value of slower mental activity.

My feeling is that when we try to work faster, we give ourselves the illusion of increased activity by shoving a pile of busywork and random “interference” (like checking email) into the mix, turning work into the equivalent of restless sleep. It takes a lot longer to get what we need out of the process.

The real key to productivity is to master the switch from incubation to execution—the equivalent of waking up in the morning after a full night of sleep. I find those beginnings difficult. It seems to take a leap of faith every time you want to actually start something; you have to put up with a bit of feeling useless before you get into the flow. The more willing you are to jump headfirst into those tough beginnings, the more mileage you can get out of the potential you gather up in the slow periods.

It’s just like the willpower it takes to wake up. You have to drag yourself out of your comfortable bed, but once you actually get into the shower, the day starts rolling on its own.