ITL114: The Surprising Benefits of Spending Time Alone
In the Loop with Andy Andrews
Matt Lempert
4.9 • 614 Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2014
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode, I talk about the surprising benefits of spending time alone.
Why is it important to spend time alone?
• Spending time alone is the best way to concentrate my thoughts.
• It’s a good way to stimulate creativity.
• If I can wake up before my family and refrain from checking email, my phone, or turning on the news, I can have amazing results.
This isn’t so much about being alone as it is about spending time with my boys, but while driving the boys to school, I reach my hand back and say, “Hands!” and we pray for…
• Teachers
• Friends
• Mom
• Our day
Sometimes, it’s necessary to leave the house in order to be alone. Here are some of the places I go:
• The woods are a great place for me to get away.
• I’ll go alone to a cabin sometimes and spend several days by myself.
• Most of my novels are not written while I’m at home.
• The water is not a particularly good place for me, as I’m always wondering what is in the water.
As much as you may be thinking, I wouldn’t say that I am alone a lot.
• It doesn’t have to be for long periods of time every single day.
• It’s important to make a habit of finding at least small portions of the day during which you can be alone.
We also had an interesting question come in: would I rather spend a year alone in a box, or 15 years alone in a hotel room? Tune in for my answer!
Questions for Listeners
Do you have a question? Call in and your question might be featured on the show!
• Phone: 1-800-726-ANDY
• E-Mail: InTheLoop@AndyAndrews.com
• Facebook.com/AndyAndrews
• Twitter.com/AndyAndrews
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to In the Loop, a unique opportunity to see life from a different perspective with New York Times bestselling author, Andy Andrews. |
| 0:10.1 | Now here's your host. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to In The Loop with Andy Andrews. |
| 0:15.9 | I'm your guest host, David Loy, glad to be back here with Andy again. |
| 0:20.5 | Andy, how are you? Good, good. And we're |
| 0:23.1 | glad to have you back, David. So you did good last time, so you get to try this again. |
| 0:30.1 | Back one more time. Yeah, they're letting me stay on here too. So that's fantastic. We've got a |
| 0:35.0 | great topic that we, that we're going to talk about today. |
| 0:38.5 | It's called Benefits of Time Spent Alone. We get a lot of questions from people about, |
| 0:44.4 | Andy, what's your process? What's your creative process? We've had a lot of people talk about |
| 0:49.3 | the early to rise concept. Right. Right. What are your views on spending time alone? |
| 0:55.4 | Is this something you do on a daily basis? |
| 0:57.6 | You know, I am so, I am so scattered, I think. |
| 1:04.4 | You know, ADD, I guess would be the term. |
| 1:08.2 | I am so scattered sometimes that I find I have to get alone to concentrate my thoughts |
| 1:16.2 | if I'm going to be creative. |
| 1:18.9 | Now, I can be witty in a group and we can do something like that. |
| 1:23.9 | But if I'm going to put something down, if I don't put something down on paper or record |
| 1:28.4 | something that isn't kind of scattery, I have to be alone to figure it out. And I have to be |
| 1:38.9 | alone in a way that doesn't provide constant distractions. |
| 1:44.9 | Now, you know, the morning thing, that's, I think that kind of evolved because of knowing |
| 1:52.7 | certain people that really, really got amazing stuff done in the morning. |
... |
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