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

by Celeste Headlee

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.

faith declines, but the work ethic it created remains.

The more money you make, the more likely you’ll believe that you have no time to waste.

More than half of U.S. employees feel overworked or overwhelmed on a regular basis, according to a study from the Families and Work Institute.

“Polluted time,” writes Josh Fear, the deputy director of the institute, “is one of the many consequences of a labour market which has become increasingly ‘flexible’ over the past few decades. All too often the benefits of such flexibility have flowed to employers.” In this case, “flexibility” means that you won’t be fired (in most cases) for answering a call from your spouse while you’re on the job, but you’re also expected to immediately answer an email from your boss at ten a.m. on a Saturday.

Do you regularly spend time doing things unrelated to work without thinking about work or feeling the need to check your inbox? Not thinking about your job is crucial, because every time you click that envelope icon, you are “polluting your time.” With work intruding on our home life and home life encroaching on work hours, many people now never have a sense of being completely separate from their jobs.

I’m certainly not going to settle this issue in these pages, as economics is not an exact science and there may be no definitive answers. As the old joke goes, if you put ten economists into a room, you’ll end up with eleven opinions. I’m only interested in this debate because of the impact it has on our working lives.

In other words, in the battle between the office and the living room, the office has mostly won.

While CEOs and executives structured their businesses around the concept of constant growth, we began to do the same with our lives. We now believe it’s possible and even laudable to be constantly improving and tweaking and changing. Not in the long term, mind you, but on a daily basis. We make checklists for our eating and our exercise and our meditation. We create digital reminders to write in our journals or read a book.

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.

In other words, we use laptops because we think recording 80 percent of what’s said is inherently better than getting only 50 percent. We strive to achieve peak productivity but forget that it’s taking us further from our ultimate goal—learning.

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.

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.”

“We have become walking résumés. If you’re not doing something, you’re not creating and defining who you are.”

Ferriss is just one of many people who hope to suck the marrow out of every moment of their day, to never waste time that could be spent moving toward a new achievement. A shortened workweek is something I endorse; torturing every minute in order to make every moment productive is not.

Pavlus asks if life hacking is, in truth, a way to focus on small, measurable tasks instead of asking ourselves big, hard questions about what we do with our time and what our larger priorities are.

In many ways, I think we’ve lost sight of the purpose of free time. We seem to immediately equate idleness with laziness, but those two things are very different. Leisure is not a synonym for inactive. Idleness offers an opportunity for play, something people rarely indulge in these days.

The point is, we engage in busyness that is mostly goal-oriented and designed to create a public persona, rather than hobbies that are merely intended to enrich our lives. Even parenting is often centered on amassing achievements and résumé-fillers.

Child-rearing often requires a slower pace because children can’t always be forced to do what they’re told at the pace we prefer.

Speed and efficiency are, by their nature, antithetical to introspection and intimacy.

The kind of social consciousness required to get to know another person intimately and to understand the emotional landscape of a community requires time and focus, two things most people don’t think they have.

Another by-product of the “time is money” mind-set has been the dramatic increase in distraction. Psychologists say modern society often suffers from a split consciousness or “absent presence,” in which we are never fully paying attention to what we’re doing or saying.

Not only was it impossible to remember personal details about all the people we encountered on the city streets, but it was psychologically draining to try. The sense that we are overwhelmed and must protect ourselves from intimacy has been exacerbated by technology.

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.

And here’s the worst news of all: “Heavy multitaskers” have the same trouble sorting through information and organizing their thoughts even when they aren’t multitasking.

The psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford told NPR that people who multitask often “are worse at most kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.” Over time, Nass said, “their cognitive processes were impaired.”

We may think we are practicing self-care when we limit the number of social activities we engage in, but three hours spent at home answering email and scanning social media feeds is not relaxing to the brain or body. In fact, those activities are quite stressful. Going to the coffee shop and chatting with friends for a couple hours will leave you feeling refreshed and upbeat; the time you spend surfing the web will exhaust your brain and deplete your resources.

I asked a friend how her weekend was, and she replied that it was wonderful and then followed with a long list of all the stuff she had done. “There’s only one thing left on my list,” she crowed, “and I can get that done tonight. I’m almost at To-Do List Zero.”

Both men and women need to step off the treadmill that’s taking us nowhere, but for women the urgency is even more intense. Lean out, ladies.

A lot of people will disagree with my next statement, to the point of anger and outrage: Humans don’t need to work in order to be happy.

The assumption that work is at the core of what it means to lead a useful life underlies so much of our morality that it may feel I’m questioning our need to breathe or eat or sleep.

This emphasis has become so embedded in our psyches that research shows emotional trauma caused by unemployment is actually 40 percent more severe among Protestants.

The University of Pennsylvania professor Alexandra Michel says people put in long hours not for “rewards, punishments, or obligation” but because “many feel existentially lost without the driving structure of work in their life—even

recounted something a college sophomore once told her: “I can’t have downtime. I feel like I’m doing something wrong if I’m not doing anything.”

They have spent their lives focused on their work. Their homes and very identities are tied up in what they have done for a living. So what happens to your identity when its defining characteristic disappears?

When defending the idea that work is necessary for human happiness, some point to research that shows people live longer if they have a sense of purpose. I find that argument irrelevant, since one’s purpose does not have to be tied up with one’s job.

We now live in a culture in which we are not happy being and only satisfied when we’re doing.

For one thing, it makes us less compassionate. For example, when Protestants are prompted to think about their jobs, they experience an immediate decrease in their empathy. (Remember that Protestants are among the most likely to believe hard work is its own reward.) This connection between thinking about work and empathy needs to be further investigated, I think, because now that we carry our inboxes around with us, we think about work all the time. Is it possible that the recent decline in empathy around the world is due at least in part to the fact that our phones serve as constant reminders of our jobs?

This echoes an old quote often misattributed to Bill Gates that suggests that when there’s a tough job to be done, it’s best to look for the laziest workers because they’ll find the easiest way to get it done. It appears that sentiment was first expressed by a Chrysler executive named Clarence Bleicher. He testified before a Senate committee in 1947 and said: “The lazy man will find an easy way to do it. He may not do much, but he will find an easy way to do it….That has been my experience.” That comment has rung so true that it’s survived for a half century and been attributed to a number of business executives besides Bill Gates.

“The first person who thought of putting a sail on a boat wanted to get out of rowing. Whoever hitched a plow to an ox was looking for a way to escape digging. Whoever harnessed a waterfall to grind grain hated pounding it with rocks,” wrote Fred Gratzon in his 2003 book The Lazy Way to Success. One might even say the Industrial Revolution began when a Scotsman figured out he could plug a loom into an engine and avoid driving horses in a circle all day.

existence is actually a struggle to be idle and the most successful, like lions, balance intense periods of activity with hours spent lounging in the sun of sub-Saharan Africa.

Idleness in this view is not inactivity. It’s not sitting like a lump and doing nothing. Remember that fishermen are often idle while working, as are cooks and security guards. They are inactive while at work and active in their off-work hours. That’s why it’s wrong to use idleness as a synonym for laziness.

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 st...

study showed that people who worked about fifty-five hours a week scored lower on cognitive tests than those who worked about forty. Decades of research demonstrate that we are more creative, more insightful, and generally sharper when we allow ourselves a significant amount of leisure time.

It’s true that we don’t enjoy boredom. That’s what makes it valuable, though, because when we feel bored, our brains are strongly motivated to find a meaningful occupation. Thoughts are not directed or controlled and are therefore free to travel in unexpected directions.

Focus is required for directed work, but idleness is necessary for reflection.

Perverse is a perfect word to describe our belief in work for work’s sake.

Research suggests it is our voice that humanizes us. A recent provocative study asked people to learn about others’ opinions using two forms: the written word and the spoken word. It turns out that when people read a differing opinion, whether it be online or in a newspaper, they are more likely to believe the other person disagrees because the other person is stupid and doesn’t understand the core concepts of the issue. When we hear someone explain the same opinion in their own voice, we’re more likely to think they disagree because they have different perspectives and experiences. On a subconscious level, we make assumptions about the other person’s humanity based on the method they are using to communicate.