Mastering doing nothing
The productivity secret of high achievers, boredom and tech guilt, & 'doing nothing' time.
The chatterbox won’t shut up when you want it to focus. When you want it to come up with creative ideas, it freezes.
Mind is like a mischievous child who’s always running in the direction opposite to where you want her to go.
As most of us are knowledge workers, we can't afford a rebel mind. We need a mind with conscious as well as unconscious thoughts working for us, not against us.
How do we achieve that?
By doing nothing.
This doesn't mean leaving things as-is. In fact, mastering doing nothing takes work. More so if you secretly take pride in being a workaholic.
If an overbooked calendar defines a productive day for you, you’re missing out on a productivity secret of high achievers.
Creative thinking, the underrated productivity secret
A good designer doesn’t fill up every inch of the page with text and images. She leaves white space to draw attention to what’s really important.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The problem with busyness is that it leaves no room for the important stuff.
High achievers realize that it’s not about filling up every square inch of your time. Our mind needs more and more white space, i.e., non-busy time.
Non-busy time breeds uninterrupted, creative thinking.
More than 500 years ago, when Michelangelo started work on the challenging statue of David, rumors began that he was making very little progress. It was said that he stared at the marble for hours and hours, doing nothing.
When a friend asked him what he was up to, Michelangelo replied, “Sto lavorando” (I’m working).
And working he was indeed. The 25-year old, ignored block of marble became the great statue of David.
Michelangelo’s friend and painter wrote:
“Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least.”
— Giorgio Vasari
There are so many examples of brilliant ideas coming to people while they are doing nothing much:
Archimedes in this bath.
Newton in his garden.
Ramanujan in his dreams.
Even the wise minds of our time follow this philosophy.
Bill Gates takes time to meditate 2-3 times a week.
Author Yuval Noah Harari takes a 2-month retreat each year from a busy life.
Having a non-busy time is not just for geniuses. Companies like Pixar, 3M, Google, Facebook, Twitter realize the relation between non-busy time and creativity. They have a disconnected time for their employees.
In this time, they want their employees to become not busy, self aware, even work on side projects. Gmail, AdSense, and Google Maps were all born from this time.
As the big companies have discovered, keeping people busy keeps creativity away.
If you think you or your team aren’t the ‘creative’ types, put some free time on the table and see the magic happen.
Does your company encourage doing nothing time? Forward this newsletter edition to encourage a culture of non-busy innovation in your team.
The other extreme of busyness is boredom. People avoid doing nothing time in fear of getting bored.
Boredom and tech guilt
Dealing with boredom is a problem for both adults and kids. So what do we typically do?
Easy, pick up our screens.
Scrolling through your social media feeds, binge watching shows, playing video games, technology has given us enough solutions to not get bored.
Somehow, the problem of ‘getting bored’ is becoming worse.
As soon as we put the screen down (after binge watching the entire series or after playing Roblox for 4 hours), we don’t feel satisfied.
Unlike the satisfaction we get after a long run or a game of tennis. A kid back from playground is physically tired and happy. A kid back a long screen time is mentally tired and cranky.
Real life feels dull. And in our minds, we know that nothing meaningful has been done.
We experience what they call tech guilt — feeling bad about spending so much time with tech products and achieving nothing meaningful.
Let kids get bored
Alright, so spending time on devices to kill boredom is a bad idea. How about keeping kids busy in other activities?
As kids keep moving from one structured activity to another, they are losing the ability to do anything beyond following instructions.
This culture of ‘keeping busy’, ‘following instructions’ evolved during industrial age. The assembly line work mostly meant repetitive, low-skilled jobs.
‘Do what you’re told’ and ‘do it for long hours’ worked well for factories.
But in today’s world, the mantra isn’t do as you’re told but innovate.
The first step towards innovation is non-busy time. It’s the time you experience boredom.
“A bored child is preparing for something he is unaware of.”
— Adam Phillips
The problem is that a threshold needs to be crossed before the subconscious thought process kicks in.
Before that happens, we give up and make our kids busy.
What does ‘doing nothing’ time look like?
Bed, bath, and bus, also called 3Cs of creativity, is a concept offered by the early 20th-century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He proposed this idea to help people achieve their peak creativity:
Bed: Sleeping or napping as a way to let your unconscious thoughts kick in.
Bath: Many ideas are born while showering.
Bus: Traveling helps shift perspective.
Nowadays, we easily screw it all up:
Bed: We binge watch in bed.
Bath: We listen to podcasts while we shower to ‘make the most’ of time.
Bus: Our work emails, meetings keep us occupied even during holidays.
Doing nothing time is time with no agenda.
It’s the time you don’t multitask. It’s the time when your physically and mentally 💯 present in the moment.
Maybe your body is moving but your mind isn’t pressed for deadline. Any of these activities or something along the same lines will do the trick:
Long walk or a run 🏃🏻♀️
Shower 🚿
Power nap 😴
Playing with your pet 🐶
Sitting under a tree 🌳
Spending 10–15 mins with a child, or my personal favorite,
Staring the ocean (or the sky)
Taking a break is the best way to synch our conscious and unconscious thought process.
Let’s add ‘do nothing’ to our daily calendars.
Not working is the most productive time for creative work.