Doing Nothing

What I read: Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee. Published June 1, 2021.

One of the few mindsets passed on to me by my father that I wish didn’t stick with me so steadfastly is the belief that our time spent on Earth should always be productive. I was raised to believe busyness is a badge of honor. If the activity generates money or might in the future, it ranks even higher in the echelon of productive busyness.

Today I’m still plagued by the strong, persistent urge to always be productive. Sitting by a pool I always feel the need to be reading a book. Having dinner with friends I check my email and social media at least once (yes, this is rude) rather than fully focus on the social interaction. My to do lists have historically always gone unfinished while I’m quite aware to do lists themselves can be problematic when seeking a happier life.

Consciously I know this is not good for me. I’ve read the research. I know multi-tasking is a myth even as I attempt to do it. I know that gnawing feeling to always be doing something. Not enjoying idle downtime isn’t good. To my credit, at least at this phase of my life, I’ve learned enough to realize that continuing a pervasive, ongoing productivity mindset is not the best way to proceed going forward.

As I’ve begun to ponder my future retirement from corporate life (not sure exactly when that will be yet), I’ve caught myself trying to figure out “productive” things I can do once my Monday through Friday days aren’t dedicated to my technology job. Habits are difficult to break. Habits that have an entrenched value judgment attached them are even more difficult to break.

It’s not healthy to be so productivity focused, and I know this. Thus, when Celeste Headlee’s book crossed my eyeballs it was an easy decision to buy and read it. I’m glad I did. It’s helping.

In the book’s description on Headlee’s website she introduces the book this way.

We work feverishly to make ourselves happy. So why are we so miserable? This manifesto helps us break free of our unhealthy devotion to efficiency and shows us how to reclaim our time and humanity with a little more leisure.

As someone who has read other books and articles addressing the same topic, many of the solutions she offers are not entirely new to me. They’re practical. Based in science and research. The solutions make sense and that’s why other writers have suggested some versions of them before. But that said, Headlee positions her suggestions far better than many because she sets up her argument deftly in the first half of the book.

The front portion of the book is dedicated to laying out clearly the history behind why our culture is so obsessed with productivity, efficiency, and craving the mantle of busyness for ourselves as a type of virtue signaling that we’re doing what’s expected of us. For me, the first half of the book is what I needed to read. It’s one thing to tell me I need to enjoy idle time, relax more, enjoy life more. It’s another to show me how we’ve been manipulated into lemming submission to believe that there is honor and righteousness in remaining perpetually busy and productive and increasingly efficient in our activities.

In the first chapter, Headlee introduces her readers to why she felt it necessary to explore the roots of our obsession with productivity and efficiency.

If I wanted to find the source of my addiction to efficiency, I’d have to hit the history books. I began reading about labor practices in the 1950s, the 1920s, the turn of the twentieth century, going further and further back to find the original culprit. Eventually, I began to read about daily life in the 1600s and stretched back to ancient Greece. I realized that work habits were almost wholly different up to about 250 years ago. I had an epiphany: Everything we think we know about work and efficiency and leisure is relatively recent and very possibly wrong.

Indeed Headlee does lay out rather clearly that historically humans have not been as focused on productivity and efficiency as we are today. From the introduction of the first steam engine to the modern-day gadgets and technologies, Headlee lays out that our collective dedication to remaining busy and efficient are constructs intentionally created by the powerful to bolster their wealth or help them maintain power over others. Trends such as urbanization and the industrial age assisted in the solidification of our productivity mindset.

During the development of industrialization in the 1800s, people were pushed toward an entirely different way of life than experienced prior. I describe it as we went from a quality way of thinking to a quantity way of thinking with our labor becoming aligned with a monetary value. Time became money.

All of these changes were significant, but something else shifted at this time, something truly momentous: Time began to equal money. Employees worked with machines that put out a relatively stable number of products per hour. So the longer the machine was running, the more product a factory would produce and the more money the owner could make. More hours meant more money.

This is when things began to go terribly awry. We began to attach our waking hours to having monetary value and if we weren’t being productive we were losing money. With the advent of the eight-hour workday and a few other progressive labor trends, life for workers got a bit better. But people are still too often mired in the socially-messaged nudge to remain economically productive. So we work too hard, too long, and sometimes for the wrong reasons.

Religions, Protestantism in particular, leveraged the trend of busyness and elevated it to a spiritual goodness that delivered the message to its flocks that hard work was the pathway to salvation.

Just as there were many economic and technological ideas brewing for centuries before they helped give birth to the industrial age, there were philosophies as well—most important, the Protestant work ethic.

While data tells us that we are not working as many hours as we did decades ago, we often feel more overwhelmed and stressed because of the pressure to make productive use of our time, that time now typically having a dollar value associated with it. Waste time and you are leaving money on the table.

Over time this has morphed into the classic contemporary workaholic, the person who takes pride in working long hours with a laser-like dedication to filling one’s days with work and shunning idleness and relaxation. We virtue signal to others that we’re “busy” so therefore we must be doing it right. Corporate culture has contributed to this significantly.

We have internalized these values to the point where many of us are willing and devoted believers. We have converted to the religion of long hours and have faith that working without cease is not just the best way to get a promotion, but the best way to live. Everywhere you look you’ll find advice on how to “hack” your habits in order to achieve better results. The internet is filled with articles and advice about how to use every possible waking moment in order to get ahead in your career.

Headlee suggests perhaps our obsession with productivity and efficiency at the cost of the rest of our lives isn’t worth it.

We have sacrificed quite a bit at the altar of hard work and long hours. We have traded our privacy, our communities, our hobbies, and our peace of mind for habits that are more commercially profitable. The overriding question is this: Is it worth it? For the past few decades, our answer has been yes, but it may be time to think again.

Throughout the rest of the book’s first chapters Headlee outlines rather deftly how historical trends, cultural shifts, and business leaders blended into a perfect storm stew to create the malady of overwork and underliving that so many of us today suffer from, including the constant messaging we receive about self-improvement.

It’s not just that we should all be working hard all the time. We are also burdened with the constant directives to improve. Exercise to look like this airbrushed body. Have this kind of expensive home your saw on social media. Never stop upskilling because you never want to step off the career or salary escalator. Self-improvement is of course a good thing, but a 24/7 obsession with it is not.

Improvement is healthy, but not every moment of your day should be leveraged in an attempt to make you a better person.

One of the things I think about a lot lately is our cultural obsession with measuring things, yardsticks by which we decide if we’re doing something right. Metrics can be useful but when applied to every aspect of our lives they can be detrimental. Headlee quotes one of my favorite writers, the incredibly brilliant Mario Popova, who writes one of my favorite blogs, The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings).

The writer Maria Popova told the BBC: “The most pernicious thing [is] this tendency we have to apply productivity to realms of life that should, by their very nature, be devoid of that criterion.”

I do this. I measure my weight. I count steps walked. I clock my writing time. I chunk my day into measurable time units of activity. I’m aware of how much I do or do not post on social media and feel oddly negligent if I step away from it for extended periods. Throughout my life is evidence that I measure and quantity just about everything I do and it’s not useful. It’s frankly harmful. Again, another reason I’m glad I read this book because I clearly need it hammered into my brain that much of this is folly and the opposite of living a good life.

Technology is often blamed for stealing our time, and it can. Headlee acknowledges that, but thankfully she does not outright blame technology as so many others have elsewhere. Technologies are tools. They can be used well or badly. Often we use them badly and they can in those instances steal our time. But we can correct those behaviors and make the best of technology while avoiding some of its worst influences.

Headlee offers solutions to overworking, overdoing, and underliving.

Developing a more aware perception of how we spend out time, perhaps by tracking it carefully for a while, will help us create a sense that you indeed do have “more time to take care of both your needs and your desires…”

Stopping the comparison game will benefit us all. The highly curated lives of people you see on social media don’t reflect their true selves and experiences. Striving to have the wealth success of the super rich is unrealistic and counterproductive. Baking the perfect cake to resemble a culinary masterpiece you saw in a video online might not be the best use of your time. Perfectionism and comparing ourselves and our lives to others is a no win game.

Step away from your desk. Enjoy life. If you’re financially able, pay people to do the things in life you don’t want to do. Rather than trade time for money trade money for time. Buying time promotes happiness. For years I had a housecleaner but haven’t for a long time. That was a bad decision on my part that I need to correct because my home is a wreck and I hate housecleaning so much that my repeated attempts at cleaning ultimately always fail. You’d think I’d have learned this by now.

Invest in your leisure time. Idleness is not laziness, but the two are often improperly conflated. Idleness is a necessary component of a balanced life and we need to foster more of it, not less. Our brain needs idleness to process memories, think in the background, and regenerate our mental energies so we can truly focus when we need to for important tasks. One of the ways I try to encourage myself to take some leisure time is to go for a long walk every day. It recharges me mentally and it has the side benefit of being good for me physically. My daily walks are my superpower and I cherish them.

Humans are wired for connecting with other humans. We are social animals. If we do not engage in some relaxed socialization it ends up harming us in numerous ways. Our society is increasingly set up to distance us from each other. We isolate in our homes. We consider online chats equal to face-to-face engagements. We drive place to place in cars, sometimes barely mixing with other people as we do. None of this is good for us. We need to socialize and meaningfully connect with others. Casual interactions. Deep interactions. They’re all necessary to keep us functioning optimally. Most of us benefit from joining clubs, playing cards with friends, having a meal out with a confidant, and so on. Rather than being wasted time, these social engagements are necessary and beneficial.

Extend kindness to others. Acts of kindness toward others, even simple random acts like paying for the coffee of someone behind you in line, can do so much to bolster our happiness and sense of being as part of the whole of humanity.

I’ve written in the past about eschewing our goal obsessed culture and focusing more on the general directions we want to move toward in life. Headlee describes this as being focused on means goals, goals that are a means to an end, but not the end goals that should be our targets. This is a huge thing for me. I have stressed myself out far too often attempting to mark as done the checkbox of a to do list task with barely any thought to whether it’s actually getting me closer to the end goal its purporting to ultimately manifest. I’m getting better at this. My life today is much more about big picture end goals (I frame them as directions, not goals) while allowing my day-to-day life to unfold in a more organic manner. Going with the flow is my mantra and my goal attainment mechanisms aren’t nearly as regimented as they once were.

Headlee offers both solid background information and useful advice that will help you escape the shackles of nonstop productivity and efficiency. If you follow her advice, I think you’ll end up happier and at the same time likely more productive because too much of a focus on productivity and efficiency ends up having the opposite effect. You can do less to do more.

I encourage you to read Headlee’s book. I think everyone will get something useful from it. Headlee offers some practical strategies for overcoming our misguided allegiance to constant productivity and efficiency. The book covers so much more than this relatively brief post can encompass. Its message is one I think everyone needs to read. Let’s all get off the treadmill and start living the life we really want to live.

Have a great day, and make sure to add some idle time and leisure into the mix.

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