Want to boost your productivity? Take a break — a real one.

I really like daily planners and journals. I still remember the thrill I felt when I bought a Day Runner system in 1982, when I was 12 years old. It must have been an amusing sight to see: a short, curly-haired kid lugging a heavy, two-inch think organizer around and furrowing her brow as she consulted it to check her calendar. Planners were my secret sauce. I would make long lists of tasks I wanted to accomplish and I would not stop working, even on weekends, until there were checkmarks in every box. 

As I got older and technology surged forward, I never stopped using my paper planner. Instead, I added digital tools that promised to help me track my exercise, my water consumption, my sleep, my meditation, birthday cards I needed to send, and just about every aspect of my life that I wanted to improve.   

I wasn’t setting one goal, I was setting dozens. And if I sat on the couch at the end of a long day and read a book instead of planting bulbs in the garden, or ordered takeout instead of cooking the healthy dinner that I’d planned, I would berate myself. At one point, while talking to a friend on the phone, I remarked that I was being lazy and not working on my chore list. There was a moment of silence and then my friend responded, “Celeste, you are the most un-lazy person I think I’ve ever met. Choosing to relax doesn’t make you lazy.”  

This exchange came back to me while I was researching my book on work ethic and idleness, as did my son’s offhand remark to a friend that his mom “doesn’t actually know how to relax.” In essence, my years of research into society’s obsession with productivity were an attempt to solve a personal problem: my own obsession with goal-setting and to-do lists.  

In an attempt to manage my goals, I had to take an inventory, and was shocked to find how many things I did each day simply because someone, somewhere, said it would make me a better person. Getting up a half hour early to lay out my day’s task in my journal, reading 500 pages every day of a self-improvement book, doing a recommended series of stretches, following a specific skin care routine, drinking turmeric, eating a handful of nuts... the list goes on and on.  

I think I, like so many others, fell into the trap of setting new goals too quickly and without enough thought. I would read an article claiming that most successful people make their beds in the morning and I would instantly decide I was going to do the same. I would hear from a colleague that Tom Brady drinks 20 ounces of water at the start of each day, so I would decide to do the same thing.  

However, simply picking up the habits of a successful person won’t make you successful. No amount of water will make me the athlete that Brady is. When setting goals, we all need to be sure that the goals we set are actually helping us to reach a broader, more significant objective. In order to fix this, I had to flip my goal-setting process on its head. Instead of starting with small, specific changes to my daily life, I started with the big, important, life-time aims like “making the world a better place” or “enjoying my life.” 

If my goal is to enjoy life, what steps can get me there? Does getting up 30 minutes early, making my bed, and guzzling water get me closer to that goal or does it make me miserable? I made a list of all the things I did because they promised to make me better and I evaluated them based on whether they brought me closer to one of my life-long objectives. Not surprisingly, at least half weren’t helping me in the long run, so I dumped them. 

But there was something else I noticed after completing this exercise. One of my end goals was to enjoy life, and yet I had created no routines or habits that were focused on enjoyment. What, I wondered, are the activities that I really enjoy for their own sake, and not because they reap rewards for my career? Most of those things that I used to do so often when I was a kid, were activities I didn’t have time for as an adult: sitting in a cozy chair in the library and reading a novel, going to a park and writing in my journal on a bench, riding to the movies on my bike. At least, I didn’t think I had time for them. 

I had become so absorbed with hundreds of habits that I believed would make me better and happier, I forgot to ask if I was actually happier. It’s no surprise that I was unhappy; I wasn’t making time for the things that make me feel joy: dancing around the house to Prince, throwing impromptu parties, buying an impractical number of flowers and planting them all in my yard. I was so focused on becoming that I had left no time to be. 

At this point, society is so focused on being productive, we’ve forgotten how important it is to take a real break. Not only is it unhealthy for the brain and body to be striving and working during all of our waking hours, it’s also literally counterproductive and we’ve known this for at least a century.  

In the early 20th century, while observing the lines at his Michigan factories, Henry Ford noticed that when his employees worked too much, their productivity sank and the number of errors rose by double digits. As a result, Ford decided to mandate an eight-hour day and a five-day week for his employees. “We know from our experience in changing from six to five days and back again that we can get at least as great production in five days as we can in six,” he said. “Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity, so the five-day week will open our way to a still greater prosperity.” In other words, taking breaks was more productive than keeping the proverbial nose to the grindstone. 

Perhaps the reason long hours are unhelpful is that human brains are not designed to put in excessive hours of uninterrupted work. That was true for the employees on Ford’s assembly line and it’s doubly so for the knowledge workers of today. 

In 1951, two men at the Illinois Institute of Technology kept track of nearly two hundred of their colleagues in the scientific and technical fields. They found that those who put in excessive hours were the least productive of all. After people passed a couple dozen hours in the lab, they saw decreasing returns on their labor. In fact, the most productive of the group were those who put in between ten and twenty hours a week, or two to five hours a day. 

It’s important to remember that if you’re leaving the office and then going home to answer emails and watch DIY videos on the web, you are simply bringing your work home. Your body doesn’t distinguish between the work you do on the job and the work you’re doing as part of your side hustle or self-improvement regime. It’s all work, and it may not be worth the sacrifice of our time and mental health. 

“Overwork” is defined as more than fifty hours of labor per week, and people who put in those kinds of hours make only six percent more than those with more reasonable schedules. So if you make an average wage of $45,000 a year, you’ll get an extra $2,500 in exchange for working excessive hours. 

Research into neurological and emotional well-being shows definitively that you need to take breaks—real breaks. Scanning your social media feed is not a break for your brain because your mind thinks it’s still working. Same applies to sending emails or flipping through Instagram. 

So, when it’s time to relax, don’t text or shop online. Don’t direct your thoughts toward any task at all. Downtime is healthy for the mind, and it’s also an incredibly fertile neurological state. When you’re not directing your brain to do a specific task, your mind activates the default network. 

The default mode network, or DMN, becomes active when we allow our minds to wander. When the DMN is engaged, it works on our memories, putting past events into context and making moral evaluations about things that have happened. It also imagines the future, tries to understand the emotions of others, reflects on our own emotions and decisions. The default network is crucial for empathy, for self-reflection, and for Theory of Mind, the ability to imagine what others may be thinking. 

Allowing our brains to switch into default mode is crucial for our well-being. That’s the source of much of our creativity and innovation, since the brain actively reshuffles the puzzle pieces of our memories and emotions when it’s not directed to solve a problem or complete a task. 

In practice, your brain will only switch to default mode if you allow it to ramble without purpose. It’s not idleness, since you could be jogging or wiping down counters during this time. 

The psychologists Amanda Conlin and Larissa Barber warn that we often misuse our breaktime during work hours. “One key component of an effective break is psychological detachment,” they wrote in Psychology Today, “which refers to mentally disengaging from work thoughts. By shifting our focus, detachment helps us to directly reduce work demands that are causing fatigue and to naturally recover.” 

Learn to stop improving yourself from time to time and make a clean break. Take a breath and hit pause. I was amused to read a tweet from the media strategist Stu Loeser that said, “I am sitting on an Acela [train] next to someone who is sitting with her hands on her lap, quietly looking out the window. No computer out. No tablet out. No phone out. Just peacefully looking out at the world as we pass it by. Like a psychopath would.” My answer to Stu: “I am sometimes that psychopath.” 

If you schedule unproductive time, you can begin to enjoy not just time off, but true leisure. You can be completely detached from concerns about work, and you should strive to make a complete separation. Research shows employees who feel more detached from their jobs during their time at home are emotionally healthier and more satisfied with their lives. They’re less likely to feel emotionally exhausted and report getting better sleep. 

Of all the advice you've gotten on how to be a better and more productive person, this might be the easiest to achieve. I only ask that you take it easy and relax, and that you schedule time out of every day in which to do this. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz says, we learn how to enjoy leisure “by enjoying leisure.” 

Set aside a chunk of time every day to do nothing productive. Take a walk without a destination and without worrying about the number of steps you’ll take. Go outside without your phone! (It’s okay. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll miss an important call or text.)  

Ask yourself a new version of that old question: what would you do if you didn’t have to work or improve yourself? What would you do if you were happy with who you are?

Celeste Headlee is the author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, from which this article is adapted.