“Recently, I attended a workshop at a Business Forum on whitespace. "Whitespace?" you may ask. "Isn't that the section of a document that is left open around a text or an image?”
So why am I speaking about whitespace in a section on mental wellbeing? Personally, I came into the year feeling tired and needing a break before it had begun. In my Yes, and this space or margin is intentionally created to help a document look less crowded and keep you, as a reader, engaged in the document or help you quickly find what you are interested in reading. coaching practice, I have heard so many people echo what I have felt. By February, diaries were already full, inboxes bursting, and the treadmill had begun, and yet people were feeling flat and unmotivated. We forget that this year is on the back of two and a half years of Covid-19, the impact and trauma of which many of us have not processed. In addition, factors such as load- shedding have left us feeling hopeless and frustrated. Plus, we are living in the Age of Overload, and Covid-19, with the trend of working from home, has caused such a blurring of boundaries, fuelling the overload even more. We have become addicted to our devices, with every ping or notification demanding our immediate attention, regardless of the time, distracting us from what we should be focusing on. No wonder we have been feeling exhausted.
Do you wish that you could stop the mayhem of work and life and just breathe for a few minutes? What if you could pause or create margin, right there in the business of your day? What if you could simply stop and in that stopping make time to reclaim creativity, conquer your busyness, and do your best work? This is what creating whitespace is all about. Research confirms it: pauses are good for performance, and deliberately breaking your attention, not to check emails, WhatsApp, or TikTok, enhances problem-solving. I remember a professor at university explaining how two groups of students had been given a complex task to complete over a six-hour period. Those who stopped for a deliberate break to sleep, walk outside, and simply be; outperformed those who worked solidly for six hours. This is what I am talking about. Whitespace is not meditation, mind wandering, or mindfulness, as helpful as these practices are. Juliet Funt, author of A Minute to Think, CEO of Whitespace at Work, and thought leader on this subject (2), defines whitespace as "the open time, the stepping back, the strategic pause; it's the oxygen that allows our efforts to catch fire. It gives us room to innovate, to strategise, to reflect, to recuperate, and to think. It is, as you say, used to fight exhaustion (recuperative use) but also has a constructive use – as a necessary vacuum into which deeper thinking can flow on strategy, creativity, and problem-solving." (3) "The oxygen that allows our efforts to catch fire" – that statement stopped me in my tracks. Could busyness be the oxygen thief of creativity, while making time for strategic pause moments fuel creativity? It feels counterintuitive, but it is true.
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June 2023 | Collective Action Magazine
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