Why “Doing Nothing” is Essential for Your Well-Being, Creativity and Productivity
Ray Williams
9-Time Author / Retired Executive Coach / Helping Others Live Better Lives
When was the last time you found doing absolutely nothing and thought, “This is fantastic, I wish I could do nothing all the time?” Doing nothing doesn’t mean you’re just doing something that isn’t work or school-related, like watching Netflix, being engaged in a sport or attending a concert; doing nothing means you’re alone with nothing but your thoughts coming and going like the clouds passing with the breeze. Or you are engaged in quiet reflection in nature or with soothing, calm music, with no other people involved. Think again now: when was the last time you were doing nothing that you didn’t think, “I should be doing something productive?”
?Before COVID-19, we were accustomed to a super busy life of doing more and more faster and faster. The media filled our lives with the hectic and frantic lifestyles of the rich, famous and successful for us to emulate FOMO. COVID forced many people to slow down and do a lot less and, in some cases, do nothing. Unfortunately, there are signs now that many have returned to their fast-past, busy lives.
?However, many people experienced tremendous value in slowing down and doing nothing during COVID. That slowing down underscored the importance of having time where we do “nothing” as a strategy not just for productivity and creativity but also for well-being is something that has been underappreciated.
?According to one scientific study, some people would rather get an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts and do nothing. Surprising, isn’t it, to think that we would rather be in pain than run the risk of having to do nothing?
?Hence, the popularity of brainless smartphone apps allows users to tap out of the wrestling match of their minds and succumb instead to the mind-numbing effect of technology. But playing a smartphone game isn’t “doing nothing.” It’s avoiding doing nothing, and that can be problematic.
?Our Hyperconnected, Fast-Paced, Overworked Life
?We have heard about workaholics, and famous people are constantly presented to us as models to follow. Here are some examples:
?Somewhere along the way, we gave up on notions such as relaxation, idleness, and living in the moment as essential parts of daily life. Having periods with little activity has always been a part of life and was assuredly accepted and enjoyed by your ancestors in a way that has been long forgotten. It is easy to be consumed by “shoulds” and “musts.” It is easy to forget some of your most basic needs and, along with them, the most basic ways of fulfilling them.
?In her book?The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,?Sociologist Juliet Schor notes that Americans are overworked, working more hours than ever since the Depression and more than in any other Western society.
?Instant and constant access have become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamouring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.”
?Our leisure time, our family time — even our consciousness — is constantly interrupted and disturbed.
?In his book,?The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times,?Simon Gottschalk describes the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies. He says the prospect of doing nothing or slowing down in this 24/7, “always on” age might sound unrealistic and unreasonable.
?In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem overwhelming and anxiety-inducing? It’s a complex question, but the force of acceleration is one way to explain this irrational state of affairs.
?According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa, author of?Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity,?technological developments have accelerated the pace of change in social institutions.
?We see this on factory floors, where “just-in-time” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to respond nimbly to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether in the grocery store or the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or worse, with one goal: speed.
?Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration has begotten more acceleration for the sake of acceleration.
?Unchecked Acceleration Has Consequences
?At the environmental level, acceleration extracts resources from nature faster than it can replenish itself and produces waste faster than it can be processed and hastens the speed of climate change.
?At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.
?For example, Diane Perrons’ edited book, Gender Divisions and Working Time in the New Economy, describes research that finds two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.
?When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before — a number that’s only expected to grow. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, perform several tasks at once, or take less time between reading and responding to emails.
?American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. However, the pay gap between productivity and pay has also increased sharply during that same period. While productivity increased by 73.7 per cent between 1973 and 2016, hourly pay increased by only 12.5 per cent. In other words, productivity has increased about six times the hourly pay rate.
?Clearly, acceleration demands more work — and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional energy expenditure reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.
?It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, worsening it. Today’s hectic, fast-paced, and overstimulated world can create a work and lifestyle of hurriedness, busyness, multitasking, and workaholism, all of which aim to increase productivity and life satisfaction. Yet, there’s compelling evidence that slowing down can improve productivity and increase happiness.
?I’m sure many of you share my experience of going on vacation for relaxation. Our pace slows down, we usually feel more calm and relaxed, and we take a much-needed respite from the fast pace of life and its responsibilities. Time slows down. Yet when we return from work, that calm, slower pace disappears, and we’re back on the hamster wheel.
?Myths About “More and Faster”
?Myth 1: More hours of work make you more productive.
?We now equate busyness and overwork with productivity, but the two are different. In the same way, we’ve equated “seat time” –that is, workers spend at their desks or in meetings–as equivalent to productive work. It may be the reverse. In a?New York Times ?article, “Let’s Be Less Productive, ” author Tim Jackson defines productivity as “the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy.” Jackson’s view underscores the perception that productivity in all its forms is measured in terms of money and time. Jackson goes on to say, “Time is money…We’ve become conditioned by the language of efficiency.”
?In her insightful article in?Salon?magazine, Sara Robinson argues the issue of overwork: “Bring Back the 40-hour Work Week,” adding, “150 years of research proves that long hours at work will kill profits, productivity and employees.” Yet, for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was “stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management.”
?A Business Roundtable study found that productivity falls so markedly after just eight 60-hour weeks. The average team would have gotten as much done and been better off if they’d stuck to a 40-hour week. The fall-off happens even faster at 70- or 80-hour weeks; at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.
?According to a study of 85,000 people in the?European Heart Journal, long working days can increase the odds of having a stroke.
?Research?by the US military? has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse, most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up.
?It’s not as though we need to work so hard. As Alex Soojung-Kim Pan, author of?REST: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, ? writes?in Nautilus , luminaries including Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, and Charles Darwin had quite relaxed schedules, working for five hours a day or less. The truth is that work expands to fill the time it’s given, and for most of us, we could spend considerably fewer hours at the office and still get the same amount done.
?“There’s an idea we must always be available, work all the time,” says Michael Guttridge, a psychologist who focuses on workplace behavior. “It’s hard to break out of that and go to the park.” But the downsides are obvious: We end up zoning out while at the computer — looking for distraction on social media, telling ourselves?we’re “multitasking” ?while really spending far longer than necessary on the most basic tasks.
?Plus, says Guttridge, we’re missing out on the mental and physical benefits of time focused on ourselves. “People eat at the desk and get food on the computer — it’s disgusting. They should go for a walk, to the coffee shop, get away,” he says. “Even Victorian factories had some kind of rest breaks.”
?Myth 2: Being busy improves productivity and happiness.
?“If you live in America in the 21st century, you’ve probably had to listen to many people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing,” contends Tim Kreider in his article, “The Busy Trap,” in the?New York Times. He says this is often told as a boast, “disguised as a complaint,” but usually, these people complain about being dead tired and exhausted.
?Kreider argues that overly busy people are busy because “of their ambition or drive or anxiety because they’re addicted to busyness and read what they might have to face in its absence ….They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.” He says that busyness serves as a kind of “existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.” For busy people’s lives cannot possibly be “silly or trivial or meaningless” if they are completely booked with activities, and “in demand every hour of the day.”
?Krieder contends that our culture has assumed a value position that idleness or doing nothing is a bad thing. But “idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice,” he says, “it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.
?U.S.A. Today ?published a multi-year poll? to determine how people perceived time and their busyness. It found that in each consecutive year since 1987, people reported that they are busier than the year before, with 69 % responding that they were either “busy,” or “very busy,” with only 8 % responding that they were “not very busy.”
?I have been an executive coach, leadership trainer and advisor to many senior executives and professionals for 30 years. Almost without exception, they either complain or observe that they can “barely keep up” or “have no time for vacations” and no time to do things for fun and that their families often suffer. They are often overstressed and overworked but tell me there is no choice — the job requires it. Telling people you are busy has become some badge of courage, and people who are not so busy are looked down upon.
?Even children today are over-scheduled. Today’s adolescents and teens are overtaxed and overburdened and stressed to a degree that was once seen only in child psychiatric patients, according to an analysis of research spanning five decades by Jean Twenge, PhD, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.
?Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., a child psychiatrist and author of?The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, ?“Overscheduling our children is not only a widespread phenomenon, it’s how we parent today,” he says. “Parents feel remiss that they’re not being good parents if their kids aren’t in all kinds of activities. Children are under pressure to achieve and to be competitive. I know sixth graders already working on their resumes, so they’ll have an edge when they apply for college.”
?Increasingly, management in organizations is concerned about productivity and regularly assesses employee engagement levels. However, the problem with this approach is that engagement is associated with “seat time.” A study by Julian Birkinshaw at the London Business School and author of?Becoming A Better Boss? shows in his research that many employees are engaged in tasks to keep busy rather than focusing on priority work, and managers measure busyness levels rather than results.
?Several researchers have argued that “busyness can become a manic defence. Typically, people who use this defensive strategy spend all of their time rushing from one task to the next, unable to tolerate even short periods of inactivity. Even their leisure time is a series of “should” and “have to,” things to be checked off an actual or mental list. These people distract their conscious mind with either a flurry of activity or feelings of euphoria, purposefulness and the illusion of control.
?Many people fear the consequences of silencing the noises that bombard them. Distraction-inducing behaviours, like constantly checking email, stimulate the brain to shoot dopamine into the bloodstream, giving us a rush that can make stopping so much harder. But if we don’t allow ourselves periods of uninterrupted, freely associative thought, personal growth, insight and creativity are less likely to emerge.
?Myth 3: Multi-tasking increases productivity.
?This is another workplace and lifestyle myth perpetuated despite evidence to the contrary. First, let’s define multitasking. It can mean performing two or more tasks simultaneously, switching back and forth between them, or performing several tasks in rapid succession.
?To determine the impact of multitasking, psychologists asked study participants to switch tasks and then measured how much time was lost by switching. According to Robert Rogers and Stephen Monsell, participants were slower when switching tasks than when they repeated the same task.?Another study? conducted by Joshua Rubinstein, Jeffrey Evans and David Meyer found that participants lost significant amounts of time as they switched between multiple tasks and lost even more time as the tasks became increasingly complex.
?“The neuroscience is clear: We are wired to be mono-taskers,”?writes? Cynthia Kubu, PhD, and Andre Machado, MD. “One study found that just 2.5 percent of people can multitask effectively. And when the rest of us attempt to do two complex activities simultaneously, it is simply an illusion.”
?Mental executive functions manage multitasking in the brain. These functions control and manage other cognitive processes and determine how, when, and in what order certain tasks are performed.
?According to researchers Meyer, Evans, and Rubinstein, the executive control process has two stages. The first stage is known as “goal shifting” (deciding to do one thing instead of another), and the second is known as “role activation” (changing from the rules for the previous task to the rules for the new task).
?Switching between these may only add a time cost of just a few tenths of a second, but this can increase when people switch back and forth repeatedly. This is not a big deal in some cases, such as folding laundry and watching television simultaneously. However, even small amounts of time can prove critical if you are in a situation where safety or productivity are important, such as when driving a car in heavy traffic. Meyer suggests that productivity can be reduced by 40 percent by the mental blocks created when people switch tasks.
?Don’t try to multitask. It ruins productivity, causes mistakes, and impedes creative thought, says?Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT? . “You are probably thinking, ‘But I’m good at it!” Sadly, that’s an illusion,” Miller says, “as humans, we have a limited capacity for simultaneous thought — we can only hold a little information in the mind at any moment.”
?Myth 4: Time is fixed and the same for everyone.
?You must move beyond time management to time mastery to be most effective. Time managers rely on clocks and calendars; time masters develop an intuitive sense of timing. Time managers see time as a fixed, rigid constant; time masters view it as relative and malleable. Time masters have what?John Clemens and Scott Dalrymple , call the critical skill of “temporal intelligence.”
?Based on more than four years of research, “Time Mastery” includes dozens of examples of leaders whose temporal intelligence has helped them achieve business breakthroughs at organizations such as GE, 3M, Staples, and Dell. Readers will learn to develop six time-mastery behaviors, including how to treat time as a continuous “flow” of peak experience, set the rhythm of their organization, look beyond the moment and encourage long-term, strategic thinking, and use time as an energizing principle that drives improvement. With intriguing examples from sports, science, history, the performing arts, and business, “Time Mastery” takes a fascinating, in-depth look at a surprising new leadership skill.
?According to neuroscientific research, how the brain perceives time passing determines whether our days feel luxuriously long or short and harried. We have a certain level of control over this. We can slow time down by paying attention and actively noticing new things.
?The 2011 New Yorker profile of?David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who studies time perception and calls time a “rubbery thing” that changes based on mental engagement. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said, “why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re ‘dozing.’ The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”
?British journalist Claudia Hammond echoed that the amount of input our brain receives at any given moment can create a “time warp.” An Elle review of her new book,?Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception , explained: “Humans seem to process the world in three-second increments (the duration of a handshake, the length of the annoying sound computers make when they start up, and the periodic rhythm of speech), and we develop a sense for how those increments sync with clock time.
?Time can warp when our brain receives much more or less input than usual in three seconds. (For example, time slows down when you are about to crash your car, but you can quickly lose a whole day watching things on YouTube.)”
?One study from the?Journal of Consumer Psychology ? suggests that the more attention we pay to an event, the longer the time interval feels.?Another study? from the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science had similar findings.
?Myth 5: Quick decisions are better than slow decisions.
?How many leaders need help with decision-making? They know it’s a key measure of their effectiveness — in fact, many of the leaders I work with say the best bosses they ever had were “decisive.”
?What exactly do they mean? One dictionary says “decisive” people make decisions “quickly and effectively.” Another says, “quickly and surely.” Still, another says, “quickly and confidently.” Notice what they have in common. Decisive people, the dictionaries say, make decisions quickly.
?In their book,?Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work ,?brothers and academics Chip (of Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Dan Heath (of Duke) explore how to eliminate biases and improve the quality of our decisions. One of the most significant decision-making mistakes they tackle is our tendency not to waffle but to decide too quickly. Stanford’s ReThink newsletter explains that the authors devote a considerable portion of the book to widening your options, advice that may seem at odds with the definition of decision-making.
?If decision-making is the process of zeroing in on the best choice, why would you widen your array of choices? [Chip] Heath explains that our tendency to lock into one alternative quickly is the reason. We ask ourselves, for example, whether we should fire an underperforming worker–as if to do or not to do is our only choice. But when you think of other options–one of the authors’ many tips is to imagine that your current options are vanishing–you’ll often discover an answer better than you had been pondering.
?Could you move your employee to a role he’s better suited for or give him a mentor to improve his performance? Heath cites research showing that people who had considered even one additional alternative performed six times better than those who had considered only a single option.
?In other words, the goal isn’t to go fast and eliminate options. It’s to slow down and add them. So, how do you accomplish this? The key, the authors say, is taking the time to gather information and alternatives. Using devil’s advocates, asking people who have solved similar problems, gathering relevant statistics, and soliciting the advice of friends and family members can all help.
?The Heath brothers aren’t the only people warning leaders not to be seduced by quick decision-making. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman wrote a best-selling book on the limitations of quick thinking called appropriately,?Thinking, Fast and Slow .?If you haven’t picked it up yet, it’s well worth a read in full and is packed with examples of how our knee-jerk decision-making machinery can lead us astray and techniques to short-circuit bias.
?However, for the quick-and-dirty summary, look to Harvard Business Review, which offers an article on one technique, the premortem, and another article by Kahneman outlining the basics of why quick decision-making is often bad.
?Can You Be Alone with Your Thoughts?
?Can you sit for an extended period just being with your thoughts, and do nothing? A recent study shows this is extremely difficult for some, particularly men.
?The study, published in the July issue of the journal?Science, outlined a series of 11 studies in which volunteers were asked to sit alone with their thoughts for between 6 and 15 minutes, and the results were fascinating. The early experiments showed that people aged 18 to 77, from various demographics, found it uncomfortable and hard to concentrate when sitting in a bare room alone with their thoughts. The results increased when the volunteers were asked to sit in their homes and think, though they could focus more quickly when allowed to read or listen to music. Finally, when seated in a room with nothing to do but press a button that they knew would produce an electric shock, 12 out of 18 men and six out of 24 women chose to shock themselves rather than weather the tumultuous terrain of their own minds. Many administered the shock more than one time over 15 minutes.
?In another experiment,?subjects were wired up and allowed to shock themselves during the thinking period if desired. They’d all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two-thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts. (One outlier pressed the button 190 times in the 15 minutes.)
?Wilson commented on the sudden appeal of electricity coursing through one’s body, “I’m still just puzzled by that.” According to one of the researchers who conducted the study, Timothy Wilson, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, the answer, to some extent, concerns the nature of the human brain. “The mind is designed to engage with the world. Even when we are by ourselves, our focus usually is on the outside world,” he says, “Without training in thought-control techniques, which still are difficult, most people would prefer to engage in external activities.”
?Controlling our thoughts and learning to be without our thoughts is difficult, whereas indulging in distraction is easy and automatic. But just because our minds tend to gravitate to the external—the e-mails, music, entertainment, and social interactions that fill our days—does not mean we should let these factors dictate how we live. In addition to mitigating our ability to sit with our thoughts, a life of distraction takes a toll, potentially affecting our cognitive abilities, relationships, and sense of self. Hyper-connectivity can also affect our capacity for patience and need for immediate gratification. Carving out time for quiet—a precious commodity—can often get bumped down our to-do list but is highly worthwhile.
?There are numerous ways to quiet the mind, learn to focus, and find stillness, and there are just as many reasons to do so. One way is to take regular silent and quiet breaks in our daily routine. Meditation is a powerful practice that harnesses self-awareness, teaches stillness, and helps us be okay with the thoughts that come into our heads. Thoughts are just thoughts, nothing more, and they will pass without our need to engage with them.
In the article published in?Perspectives in Psychological Science,a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. and her colleagues surveyed the existing scientific literature from neuroscience and psychological science, exploring what it means when our brains are at rest.
?In recent years, researchers have explored the idea of rest by looking at the so-called “default mode” network of the brain, which is noticeably active when resting and focused inward. Findings from these studies suggest that individual differences in brain activity during rest correlate with socio-emotional functioning components, such as self-awareness and moral judgment, as well as different aspects of learning and memory. Immordino-Yang and her colleagues believe that research on the brain at rest can yield important insights into the importance of reflection and quiet time for learning.
?"We focus on the outside world in education and don't look much at inwardly focused reflective skills and attentions, but inward focus impacts the way we build memories, make meaning and transfer that learning into new contexts," says Immordino-Yang, "What are we doing in schools to support kids turning inward?"
?Accumulated research suggests that the networks that underlie a focus inward versus outward likely are interdependent, and our ability to regulate and move between them probably improves with maturity and practice. While outward attention is essential for carrying out tasks and learning from classroom lessons, for example, the reflection and consolidation that may accompany mind wandering is equally important, fostering healthy development and learning in the longer term.
?"Balance is needed between outward and inward attention, since time spent mind wandering, reflecting and imagining may also improve the quality of outward attention that kids can sustain," says Immordino-Yang.
?She and her colleagues argue that mindful introspection can become an effective part of the classroom curriculum, providing students with the skills they need to engage in constructive internal processing and productive reflection. Research indicates that when children are given the time and skills necessary for reflecting, they often become more motivated, less anxious, perform better on tests, and plan more effectively for the future.
?Mindful reflection is not only important in an academic context; it's also essential to our ability to make meaning of the world around us. Inward attention contributes to the development of moral thinking and reasoning and is linked to overall socio-emotional well-being.
?Immordino-Yang and her colleagues worry that the high attention demands of fast-paced urban and digital environments may be systematically undermining opportunities for young people to look inward and reflect, which could negatively affect their psychological development. This is especially true in an age when social media seems to be a constant presence in teens' daily lives.
?"Consistently imposing overly high-attention demands on children, either in school, through entertainment, or through living conditions, may rob them of opportunities to advance from thinking about 'what happened' or 'how to do this' to constructing knowledge about 'what this means for the world and for the way I live my life,' " Immordino-Yang writes.
?According to the authors, perhaps the most important conclusion from research on the brain at rest is that all rest is not idleness. While some might be inclined to view rest as a wasted opportunity for productivity, the authors suggest that constructive internal reflection is critical for learning from past experiences and appreciating their value for future choices. This allows us to understand and manage ourselves in the social world.
?Although modern Western society tends to emphasize the importance of willpower and striving, some central human goals- happiness, relaxation, charisma- appear to come only to those who are not trying to achieve them. The importance of “not trying” was recognized by early Chinese thinkers, who understood how relaxed spontaneity could lead to both personal and social success. The early Chinese ideal of effortless action is also looking increasingly plausible from modern psychology's perspective, as we understand better the pervasive role of embodied, tacit knowledge in human behavior.
?Although early Chinese thinkers certainly advocated rationality and self-control, the mainstream thinkers—the Confucians and Daoists who set the tone for the subsequent 2000 years of East Asian intellectual history—believed that true moral perfection and spiritual fulfilment required attaining a state where striving is transcended.
?The ideal of “effortless action”, or?wu-wei, refers to an optimally active and effective person's dynamic, unselfconscious state of mind. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order.?
?On the other hand, the distinctive feature of wu-wei is a sense of immersion in a greater, shared, and valued whole. Although wu-wei can be attained in challenging situations requiring skill or training, it is more commonly encountered in less adrenaline-inducing activities, like a quiet walk in a unique landscape, a simple meal with family and friends, or just sitting on a beach watching the ocean roll in. Wu-wei is fundamentally about belonging and meaning, not skill or challenge per se.
?That said, these days we do seem to live in a society dead-set against spontaneity. We’ve got three-year-olds attending drill sessions to get an edge on admission to the best preschool and then growing into hyper-competitive high school students popping Ritalin to enhance their test results and keep up with a brutal schedule of after-school activities. As adults, our personal and professional lives increasingly revolve around a relentless quest for greater efficiency and higher productivity, crowding out leisure time and simple, unstructured pleasures. The result is that too many of us spend our days stumbling around tethered “umbilically” to our smartphones, immersed in an endless stream of competitive games, e-mails, texts, tweets, dings, pings and pokes, getting up too early, staying up too late, never far from the bright glow of tiny LCD screens.
?It doesn’t need to be this way, though. This incessant effort and striving are often profoundly counterproductive. Many of our most desired goals—happiness, attractiveness, spontaneity—are best pursued indirectly, and conscious thought and effortful striving interfere with their attainment.
?This fact is slowly being appreciated more. Recent studies have suggested that nonstop exam prep and a dearth of unstructured playtime negatively impact children’s emotional and cognitive development. In business management, there’s a growing recognition that pushing harder too often leads to producing less and that people who put themselves last, generously helping others, actually end up ahead in the long run.?
??We seem to have forgotten a long history of belief and practice that doing nothing is a valuable opportunity to stimulate unconscious creative and innovative thinking. We need time to incubate our thoughts, and doing nothing can be one of the best ways to deal with complex issues.
?In the scientific journal?Nature, author Kerri Smith reviews the brain research regarding the importance of downtime and doing nothing. In a resting “do nothing” state, the brain is not doing nothing. It is completing the unconscious tasks of integrating and process conscious experiences.
?Other studies suggest that not giving yourself time to reflect impairs one’s ability to empathize with others. The more in touch we are with our feelings and inner experiences, the more accurate and compassionate we become about what others are experiencing.
?Doing nothing — or just being — is as important to human well-being as doing something.
?The key is to balance the two. Take your foot off the pedal.
?Since going cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing will be difficult, one first step consists of decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet — at least for a while — and assess what happens to us when we do.
?Danish researchers found that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. In another experiment, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.
?Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The Slow Food movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming.
?As we race along, it seems we’re not taking the time to examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives seriously — and mistakenly assume that those who are very busy must be involved in important projects.
?Touted by the mass media and corporate culture, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define the good life” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness.
?French philosopher Albert Camus put it best when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
?Reconceptualizing How We Structure Work
?University of California, Davis professors?Kimberly Elsbach and Andrew Hargadon? have suggested that we balance our workday activities with a mix of “mindful” (cognitively demanding) and “mindless” (cognitively facile) activities. Resting the mind from high-stakes responsibilities and strategically performing simple (but necessary) administrative or hands-on tasks gives us the freedom to take control of our schedules and maintain momentum with less cognitive strain.
?More broadly, the “slow work” philosophy challenges the unsustainable practice of doing everything as fast as possible and offers an alternative workplace framework for energizing people and helping people better align their personal and professional priorities. It urges us to punctuate our routines in ways that might initially appear to compromise productivity but actually enhance long-term creativity.
?Stephanie Brown, author of?Speed: Facing Our Addiction To Fast and Faster — And Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down, ? argues we are addicted to busyness and accept it as a norm: “There’s this widespread belief that thinking and feeling will only slow you down and get in your way, but it’s the opposite.” She argues, and most psychotherapists would contend, that suppressing negative feelings only gives them more power, leading to intrusive thoughts, which can prompt people to be even busier to avoid them.
?Manfred Ket De Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change, writing in INSEAD Knowledge, argues, “In today’s networked society, we are at risk of becoming victims of interaction overload. Introspection and reflection have become lost arts as the temptation to ‘just finish this’ or ‘find out that’ is often too great to risk.”
?De Vries argues that working harder is not working smarter, and setting aside regular periods of “doing nothing” may be “the best thing we can do to induce states of mind that nurture our imagination and improve our mental health.”
?De Vries contends that “doing nothing” has become unacceptable. People associate it with irresponsibility and wasting valuable time. It doesn’t provide the stimulation that busyness and distraction-inducing behaviors like constantly checking emails, Facebook and texting do. The biggest danger, he says, is not so much that we lose connection with each other but with ourselves.
?De Vries, in several publications, has argued the following:
?De Vries vigorously argues that the time may have come for more organizations to recognize the power of doing nothing and the positive value of boredom. To be more effective, we need to allow others and ourselves regular disconnection from the busyness and schedule times when we are completely free to reflect and think.
?Any activity that takes our mind off the problem at hand allows our thoughts to roam freely or helps us focus on an entirely different activity might do the trick. Incubation time isn’t just for the specially gifted. It’s for all of us. Only by “unthinking” can we arrive at new, creative ideas.
?Incubation time can be introduced in many ways. For example, several companies have turned to mindfulness and meditation practices to help employees tap into their creative potential. Companies like 3M, Pixar, Google, and Twitter have made disconnected time, or contemplative practices, critical aspects of their work. The objective is to increase their employees’ self-awareness, self-management and creativity. They want them to work smarter.
?Modern life is built around social contact, and in that way, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit us hard. Yet, it would be short-sighted to think that our entire lives 247 should revolve around social interaction in some form. None of us wants to disappoint other people; on some level, we all want approval.
?Practical Slowing Down and Doing Nothing Strategies and Habits
1.????Protect your focus time.?Block chunks of time on your work calendar for focusing on tasks that require intense concentration and make it clear to others not to interrupt you. Doing so signals to others that you are serious about accomplishing specific goals and are, therefore, prioritizing the tasks needed to achieve them.
2.????Seriously reduce or eliminate multitasking from your work routine. Multitasking seriously reduced productivity. This includes the discipline of not being “on” all the time by checking your email and social media platforms.
3.????Vary the location of your work. Taking your work offsite to give yourself a radically different experience that could spark some inspiration. If you work in a large city, take advantage of public spaces such as parks, coffee shops and plazas that accommodate workers with plentiful seating and free Wi-Fi. A public setting can change your perspective and help you put things in broader context.
4.????Block in reflection time in your calendar.?Rather than always focusing on the immediate tasks of doing what is required or expected, block in a regular block of time each day or once a week to reflect without actually doing anything. Focus on your feelings, long-range goals or vision for the future, which uses a different creative part of your brain that benefits satisfaction and stability.
5.?????Eat mindfully. Eating more mindfully can be a meditative practice. Chew every bite slowly, analyze tastes like you’re a foodie, and generally savor the experience. Don’t view eating as interrupting your activity-filled life and something you need to finish quickly so you can get on with more important things.
6.?????Do nothing when you wake up.?Rather than immediately jumping out of bed to shower and rush to work or hurriedly checking your messages on your computer or phone, taking 10 or 15 minutes to lie there and notice your thoughts without engaging with them helps you ease into the day calmly.
7.????Stop overscheduling your family life.?More activities without quality slow time do not make for a better life for you or your family. Having unscheduled, spontaneous and unplanned time for yourself and your family is critical to work-life balance.
8.????Learn how to say no.?Saying yes can open you up to new possibilities challenges, but saying yes all the time makes you needy and can reinforce an external source for your self-esteem. Saying no can give you a chance for me-time, an hour when you don’t have to keep any commitments or please anyone else, or a half-hour when you can just kick back and do absolutely nothing.
9.????Walk more and drive less.?Park the car and try walking to different places. Walking is not a waste of time and actually helps you improve your focus. Deliberately taking walks may reduce your time, but they force you to slow down your thinking so you can focus when you need to.
Final Thoughts
?“Niksen” is a Dutch wellness trend that means “doing nothing.” It has caught the attention of people around the world as a way to manage stress and recover from burnout. If you were to travel around the Netherlands, you would see many people walking, sunbathing, riding their bikes, or just sitting down on the many benches available, doing nothing. Niksen is similar to Danish hygge or Japanese ikigai in its intent.
?Olga Mecking’s book?Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing?explains that whereas mindfulness is about being present in the moment, Eriksen is more about carving out time just to be and letting your mind wander wherever it wants to go.
?Thijs Launspach, a psychologist and author of?Crazy Busy: Staying Sane in a Stressful World, says Eriksen means “doing nothing or occupying yourself with something trivial to enjoy your own time. Not doing nothing entirely but doing as little as possible.”
?Paradoxically, Eriksen can also?make us more productive. Breaks allow our brains to rest and return with better focus and sustained attention. This is probably why the Dutch don’t work long hours but tend to be very efficient at work. Working overtime is not encouraged due to the “just be normal, that’s already crazy enough” attitude prevalent in the Netherlands—a nod to?the country’s honest and egalitarian culture .
?We can all take a lesson from the Dutch and embrace the concept and practice of doing nothing to enhance our lives.
Final Note: You can read more about the value and process of slowing down and doing nothing in my books, I Know Myself and Neither Do You, and The Journey to Self-Mastery, both available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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Coaching and Mentoring Executives, Professionals and Aspiring Leaders | Experienced Senior NED | OD Expert | FCIPD & Professional Member of EMCC |
3 周Great article. Myth busting and practical tips on realising the benefits. Thanks for posting Ray Williams