Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

I’ve pushed myself to accomplish incredible amounts of work both at home and in my career. But at some point, drive became inextricably intertwined with dread: dread that all my work and effort would never be enough.

The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.

the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something.

We work best when we allow for flexibility in our habits. Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing your body and mind to work punishing hours and “lean in” until you reach your goals, the counterintuitive solution might be to walk away. Pushing harder isn’t helping us anymore.

We can and must stop treating ourselves like machines that can be driven and pumped and amped and hacked. Instead of limiting and constraining our essential natures, we can celebrate our humanness at work and in idleness. We can better understand our own natures and abilities. We can lean in not to our work but to our inherent gifts.

What I learned is that if you don’t consciously choose a slower path, you will likely default to the pedal-to-the-metal speeds of modern life.

The fight over working hours has, from the start, been about returning to the kind of life we had for millennia.

This belief in hard work as a virtue and a life philosophy started on the door of a church in Germany. Over the course of a couple hundred years, the religious notion that working long and hard makes you deserving while taking time off makes you lazy was adopted as an economic policy, a way to motivate employees and get the most out of them.

When time is money, idle hours are a waste of money. This is the philosophical underpinning of all our modern stress: that time is too valuable to waste. We don’t pass time, we spend it. It’s no wonder that we don’t really have pastimes anymore.

Consider this: When productivity rises, companies can choose to produce more or work fewer hours.

Technology has advanced so quickly that at this point most of us could have the same standard of living as our grandparents while working only half the year.

“When people are paid more, they work longer hours because work is so much more profitable than leisure.”

Improvement is healthy, but not every moment of your day should be leveraged in an attempt to make you a better person. If you’re searching for the fastest way to learn guitar because you also have to squeeze in yoga and keto cooking recipes and homemade charcoal facial peels, you have left no time to simply be the person you are. You are leaving no space for rest and contentment.

This, essentially, is the danger of making efficiency a goal in and of itself. We can become so focused on doing things more quickly that we lose sight of what’s actually being accomplished.

There is a wealth of historical data that suggests we prefer a balance of leisure and toil. But we have been convinced through more than two hundred years of propaganda that inactivity is the same as laziness, and that leisure is a shameful waste of time.

we’ve lost sight of the fact that productivity is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself.

the American Psychological Association recommends that we “choose strategies that boost [our brain’s] efficiency—above all, by avoiding multitasking, especially with complex tasks.”

Research shows that people who think of themselves as “heavy multitaskers” are worse at distinguishing between useful information and irrelevant details. We also tend to be less organized mentally (it’s chaos up there) and have more trouble switching from one task to another, not less. Practice at multitasking makes us less perfect.

The research clearly shows stress rises as women walk through their doors, knowing they must not only continue to respond to work emails but also handle personal administrative duties in the place that is supposed to be a haven. They may be mentally running through a list of tasks that need to be accomplished before they can really relax.

It’s not the emphasis on hard work that’s toxic, but the obsession with it. We now live in a culture in which we are not happy being and only satisfied when we’re doing.

Idleness is really time in which one is not actively pursuing a profitable goal. It means you are at leisure. There is considerable scientific research demonstrating that idleness is good for you. There is even a good deal of clinical study that suggests idleness is associated with high intelligence.

It’s possible that too much work can separate us from our own humanity. When our minds are idle, we allow ourselves to reconnect with our creativity and reengage with reflective thought—two activities that are esssential to progress.

These are the essential qualities of a human being: social skills and language, a need to belong that fosters empathy, rule-making, music, and play. We excel at these things, and we need them in order to be healthy.

Stop trading time for money. The simple act of placing a value on an hour has made us loath to waste even a minute, and the more money you have, the more expensive your time is and the more you feel you don’t have enough time to spare. Our perception of time is now horribly warped.