How Steve Jobs’ Simple 10-Minute Habit Made Him Smarter, According to Experts

A vision­ary and the icon­ic co-founder ofApple, Steve Jobs, was known for his cre­ative and out-of-the-box think­ing. His biog­ra­ph­er Wal­ter Isaac­son not­ed how “tak­ing a long walk was his pre­ferred way to have a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion.” Design­er Jony Ives who worked close­ly with Jobs for more than 10 years in Apple, recalled how so much of their time togeth­er was spent qui­et­ly walk­ing.

Jobs per­haps under­stood what most peo­ple didn’t. Numer­ous stud­ies have demon­strat­ed how walk­ing helps boost cre­ative think­ing and cog­ni­tive func­tion. Being on the move helped him find cre­ative solu­tions to tough prob­lems, and a neu­ro­sci­en­tist in her lat­est pod­cast says that any­body can ben­e­fit from his 10-minute rule and become more effi­cient and cre­ative. There is a sci­ence behind it, and a fas­ci­nat­ing one at that.

If you have been glued to your screen all this while, even while read­ing this arti­cle, this is the time to get up and take a stroll.

What is Steve Jobs’ 10-minute rule?

Mithu Storoni, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge-trained neu­ro­sci­en­tist and author of the book Hyper­ef­fi­cient: Opti­mize Your Brain to Trans­form the Way You Work, empha­sizes the impor­tance of a short walk to come up with quick solu­tions, dur­ing her recent appear­ance on HBR Idea­Cast pod­cast.

The 10-minute rule is if you are not able to solve a work prob­lem for 10-min­utes, you should leave your desk and go for a walk.

She quotes an exam­ple of a client who fol­lows this rule.

“So for instance, I have some clients, and they’ve adopt­ed a rule, one man­ag­ing direc­tor has adopt­ed a rule of if he’s sit­ting in front of his com­put­er with a prob­lem that he hasn’t man­aged to solve for 10 min­utes, he leaves his desk, he goes for a walk,” says Storoni.

What happens when you take a short walk

“Tak­ing a walk, for instance, first of all, it aligns your brain and your body’s phys­i­ol­o­gy. Sec­ond is it keeps you in the right alert men­tal state, so you don’t just drift off, you don’t just fall asleep, or feel lethar­gic, or look­ing at your phone. But at the same time, it keeps your atten­tion mov­ing, because your sur­round­ings are mov­ing while you walk, so your atten­tion can’t real­ly fix on any­thing. So it drifts into your head, and explores your prob­lems, and tries to solve them from dif­fer­ent avenues,” she says.

When you are walk­ing, you have to be mind­ful of your sur­round­ing and rumi­na­tion is also not pos­si­ble. This helps get your brain into an opti­mal state.

“You can’t rumi­nate, because your atten­tion can’t stick to one prob­lem for too long, because you also have to pay atten­tion to where you’re walk­ing. So there is this mix­ture, this very inter­est­ing, very help­ful con­di­tion cre­at­ed by the process of walk­ing. The body and brain are so con­nect­ed in this way that you can actu­al­ly use your body to cre­ate, to nudge your brain into opti­mal states for the dif­fer­ent kinds of work you want to do,” Storoni fur­ther added.

What the studies say about this rule

Study approves Jobs’ 10-minute rule and what Storoni says about walk­ing. Stan­ford researchers in a 2014 study found that walk­ing boosts cre­ative inspi­ra­tion. They stud­ied the cre­ativ­i­ty lev­els of peo­ple while they walked and com­pared them to when they are seat­ed. A person’s cre­ative out­put increased by an aver­age of 60 per­cent when walk­ing.

The act of walk­ing itself, rather than the envi­ron­ment, was the main fac­tor improv­ing cre­ativ­i­ty. This high­er cre­ative out­put sup­ports bet­ter prob­lem-solv­ing and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty at work.

Out­door walk­ing is also linked to increased cog­ni­tive func­tion, atten­tion­al process­es and faster reac­tion times, con­tribut­ing to bet­ter focus and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty com­pared to indoor walk­ing or sit­ting, accord­ing to
a study pub­lished in Nature Sci­en­tif­ic Reports.

Sys­tem­at­ic Review on Micro-Breaks found that tak­ing short breaks – includ­ing walk­ing breaks – improved well-being by reduc­ing fatigue and increas­ing vigour, which in turn improves per­for­mance,