The magic of a "Do Nothing Day" at work

If you've read my rant about “Above-and-Beyondness” you know my beef with the expectation of overworking. But that doesn’t mean I believe in mediocrity. I just believe in resourcing properly for greatness.

Because greatness takes time.

And it doesn’t always look like “productivity”.

I.

I adore Agatha Christie novels, and particularly Hercule Poirot mysteries. The fictional detective is famous for eschewing typical methods such as crawling on the ground looking for stray scraps of evidence. All the running around, interviews, forensics—to him that’s better done by the police who have their routines. Instead, he claims, “The Hercule Poirots, my friend, need only to sit back in a chair and think.”

Just sit.

And think.

II.

I had a discussion with a client recently on aligning executive leadership on the root of some business issues. They have a culture that is brilliant at executing and is always eager to go about “doing”, but sometimes what is much, much harder is to simply sit, think, and agree on the problem is to be solved.

Just sit.

And think.

III.

I met my husband when he was finishing his PhD in math (love a nerd). There were classes to TA, papers to read, and advisor meetings to prepare for. But the most successful students in the program were the ones that knew the real job: to sit and think. One of his friends had a favorite tree in a favorite park and he would go there to to work. For him, there was no better office, no more productive space:

To sit.

And think.

IV.

A few years ago, I was leading a project in which we were designing an immersive company-wide experience for employees. We knew the work needed to be strategic and brilliantly executed, but most of all, it needed to be captivating.

But “captivating” is rarely conjured in a 60-minute brainstorm session. Our brains struggle to produce truly audacious thinking when we’re distracted by the meeting after this one, wondering when we’re going to refill our coffee, seeing Slack, email, and text pop-ups. With so many distractions our brains are working to reduce the noise: delete the email, snooze the alert, prepare for the next thing. But creativity requires creating noise: dreaming up messiness, noticing the funny wrinkles, letting 73 bad ideas flush from our brains before the brilliant #74 comes.

With this in mind, my colleague, Sue Walsh , and I devised what we call a “Do Nothing Day” for our team. This is the trick: you have to tell your brain you don’t have to produce ANYTHING. For a whole day. And you have to be legit okay with that if you’re the leader or PM. If nothing comes of the day, that has to be expected.

Before we get into how though, let me be clear about what a DND is, and what it is not, because I know, the name is confusing. I hear a lot, “Schedule a do NOTHING day? Impossible! With our deadlines, we need more do EVERYTHING days!”

A DND is:

• A working day. It is a productive day, just not in the way we normally think about productivity. It’s a day of thinking, brainstorming, strategizing without MAKING anything. NOTE: It’s best done at the beginning of something (e.g., a project, a quarter, or in annual planning). It can also be used if you’re stuck. Do not do a DND if you’re cruising in execution or beware the ire of all of your makers.
• A… gulp… “Brainstorm Day” but don’t you dare promise anyone that you’ll deliver a report out of ideas at the end of it.
• An antidote to working really hard on the wrong stuff. In any team or organization, if the thinking is not sound, the execution will be crap. Aren’t your months of sprinting and late nights worth ONE DAY of asking “Is there something we should be doing instead? What haven’t we thought of? What’s a more elegant solve here? What would make for more captivating work?”

A DND is not:

• PTO
• A day for the team to go to a museum for inspiration (a good thing! just different)
• A team-building day (it can feeling bonding-like, but that’s not the goal)?

So here’s what we did, and how you can create your own Do Nothing Day:

1. We found a non-worky location. For us, that was Little Island in NYC.
2. We created some prompts. We had two “decks of cards” (little pieces of paper we wrote on). In Deck A were components of the experience we were designing for (e.g., opening, “our customers” segment, “our culture” segment, closing, etc.) In Deck B were Oblique Strategy -esque creative prompts like “The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten” and “Abandon normal instruments”. (more here )
3. We told our brains: “YOU ARE FREE! You don’t have to do anything. Just play.”
4. And then throughout the day, we picked a card from Deck A, and just dreamed. We walked, sat in the grass, ate some fried chicken, went down rabbit holes. As our momentum slowed, we would pick a card from Deck B and the prompt would take us down a whole new path of exploration.
5. We rinsed, repeated, and captured in notebooks and portable mini white boards, and I dare confess one person had a computer.

Even though the whole point was to be ok with the day NOT delivering, it sure did. The best idea we came up with that day ended up being the highest rated component of the entire experience by far. That idea was in us, it just needed time and space to find its way out.

V.

“To see takes time” - Georgia O’Keeffe

I'd really like work to be more joyful, and less everything, to more people.

I've been writing about this over on Substack and decided to share that same newsletter here. I publish the Substack newsletters ahead of the LinkedIn ones though, so if you fancy yourself an early bird, please subscribe there !

And lastly, I'm writing a book about all of this, coming Spring 2025. I'm really excited to share it with you.