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

by Celeste Headlee

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. —BERTRAND RUSSELL, “In Praise of Idleness,” 1932

Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward. We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.

What is the cult of efficiency? It’s a group whose members believe fervently in the virtue of constant activity, in finding the most efficient way to accomplish just about anything and everything. They are busy all the time and they take it on faith that all their effort is saving time and making their lives better. But they’re wrong. The efficiency is an illusion. They believe they’re being efficient when they’re actually wasting time.

Henry George wrote, a human is “the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.”

In the way that those with body dysmorphia see something other than the truth in the mirror, the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something.

Petrini was a well-established food critic, and when McDonald’s opened its doors, he distributed bowls of penne to the crowds of protesters and founded a group called Slow Food. The organization’s manifesto declares, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.” The group encourages people to enjoy the process of preparing food, of tasting every bite, of enjoying conversation with others at the table.

The idea is not that everything should be slower, but that not everything needs to be fast.

The most significant reason that I resigned from my full-time position and started my own company was a desire to gain control of my time. I was so busy that I felt my work was controlling my life and dictating all of my decisions, and I knew that it wasn’t making me happier. I thought a relaxed schedule would happen automatically when I became my own boss, but it didn’t. Once I stopped spending forty to fifty hours at the radio station every week, I simply added forty hours’ worth (or more) of other events and tasks to my calendar to fill the gap.

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 transformation this idea caused in the world at large cannot be overestimated. 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. When work is what makes someone worthwhile and deserving, those who don’t work as much as possible are seen as undeserving and worthless. To many in Henry Ford’s time, it was more shameful to miss a day at work than to stay home from church. I would argue that work began to replace religion.

Keynes predicted that by 2030, people would work only fifteen hours a week and that would be enough to keep everyone fed, clothed, and housed. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes wrote, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won.”

How is it that we produce so much wealth with our labor and yet most of us feel we are barely hanging on to our standard of living, let alone creating a situation in which our children will do better than we’ve done? Why do I have more to do than my grandmother, despite owning a dishwasher, microwave, and portable computer?

This is partly why so many people feel they are working an incredible number of hours without making progress financially: The benefits of their hard work are accruing in someone else’s account.

Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

While it’s true in theory that employers appreciate getting things done quickly, they often do not in practice. Keep in mind the “time is money” principle. It’s incredibly difficult to evaluate a worker based on subjective measures like quality, innovation, or creative problem-solving. But it’s simple and easy to record how many hours a worker spends on the job and whether tasks are completed on time. Quality of work is rarely measurable, but hours of work are.

Essentially, bragging about how busy you are gives the impression that you are valuable and in high demand, like my young train friend. Instead of wearing expensive products and demonstrating that one’s clothing has high value, a person who’s very busy is implicitly bragging about their intrinsic worth, their own intelligence. They might talk about all the appointments and tasks on their calendar or they may respond to most invitations by saying, “I’ll have to check my schedule.” When you ask how they are, instead of saying, “Fine,” they might say, “Busy!”

In the book Revisiting Keynes, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga argue that our excitement over buying a new thing is intense but short-lived. “The average consumer,” they said, “grows accustomed to what he has purchased and…rapidly aspires to own the next product in line.” So while Keynes predicted that we’d all be working very little by now, the rise in unnecessary consumption was part of what made him wrong.

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.

Our attention is now nearly always divided, because we seem to be always working on something. Our hobbies have become goals. Our homes have become offices and our free time is not free.

The purpose of leisure is not to make you better at your job, but to let you enjoy the life you work so hard to achieve. However much time you spend in focused work, when it’s time to get up and take a break, make sure you’re really resting your brain. Don’t text or do online shopping. 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.

If you take away nothing else from this book, I hope you understand that human beings are at their best when they are social, and human minds work best in connection with other human minds. It may not be the most efficient way to live, but it’s the most likely to foster well-being. Join a club, go to a book talk at your library or bookstore, sign up for a group hike at a local park. It may sound old-fashioned to become a member of a bowling league or a Rotary club, but those kinds of social networks can quite literally save your life.

The truth is, going without dessert is a means goal, as is making your bed every day, getting up at five a.m., or answering email before bed. All of these activities are means to an end. They are meant to be stepping-stones toward a more significant aim, like achieving life satisfaction or improving the world. Means goals are specific objectives, like a certain income or job title, that lead to a bigger, greater goal. They are tools used to reach a more fulfilling intention. Perhaps you think a bigger salary will help you achieve stability, and that will bring happiness. Maybe you think a promotion will bring you more power in the office, allowing you to create better products and feel useful to society. In those cases, your end goals are happiness and being of use to the wider world, not more money and more power. It’s important to ensure your choices are really helping you progress as you want them to.

Many of us become obsessed with means goals and completely lose sight of the more important end goal that should motivate all our efforts: living a good life.