The Importance of Doing Nothing
By giving the brain ‘downtime’ we can improve mental health and allow ideas to incubate.
“Learning
without reflection is a waste, reflection without learning is
dangerous” - Confucius
In
today’s networked society we are at risk of becoming victims of
information overload. Introspection and reflection have become lost
arts as the temptation to ‘just finish this’ or ‘find out that’
is often too great to resist. But working harder is not necessarily
working smarter. In fact slacking off 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.
Busyness
vs productive occupation
Our
lives have become defined by busyness. Look around you at the train
station, in cafes, out on the street, people are glued to their
mobile handset or tablet.
I
recently asked an executive I once coached how many emails she
received a day. “Five hundred,” she told me. “But I don’t
read any of them. If I did, I wouldn’t be doing my job.”
The challenge, she said wasn’t attaining information but “pushing it away so I don’t suffer from information overload. I need time to think.”
Helen,
as I’ll call her, has an assistant who goes through all her emails
and she spends a few hours every week discussing problematic ones
with him. “I’m not paid to do that kind of work,” she explained
“if I’m so busy doing what people expect me to do there will be
no time left for what I ought to do. You can’t do creative work at
a cyber-pace.”
Helen
has a point and I have learnt from experience that many people would
be better off if they did less and reflected more.
But
doing nothing has never really been acceptable. We associate it with
irresponsibility, wasting our life. Most of us feel guilty if we
don’t have something to do. On the other hand we get a buzz when we
feel really busy. 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.
The
danger is we may lose our connections, not just with one another but
with ourselves. If we don’t allow ourselves periods of
uninterrupted, freely associated thought then personal growth,
insight and creativity are less likely to emerge.
The
benefits of boredom
Doing
nothing and boredom are closely intertwined, as noted in my recent
paper Doing
Nothing and Nothing To Do: The Hidden value of Empty Time and
Boredom.
While most of us find it hard to tolerate in many instances boredom
can be a prelude to something. It can trigger our imagination and
creativity. In a sense, boredom can be seen as a liminal space, a
critical resource that pushes us to seek the unfamiliar.
But
in the cyber age, where we have an almost limitless selection of
entertainment and distraction to hand, it’s easier to find
ourselves in a state of constant busyness than it is to do nothing.
Our frenetic activities in cyberspace – a world of multitasking and
hyperactivity – help us to delude ourselves that we are productive.
The reality is that social media is very reactive but not very
original. It contracts creativity and can impact mental health. If we
don’t know how to calibrate the balance between action and
reflection we may become a casualty of psychological burnout.
Workplace
Unfortunately
in contemporary organisations work addicts are highly encouraged,
supported and even rewarded. The insidious development of the manic
defence is difficult to counter because such behaviour is useful to
organisations. And there is an element of control. There’s the
attitude, “I’m paying that person a good wage, why aren’t they
at their desk working?”
But
there isn’t necessarily a relationship between working hard and
working smart. In fact a workaholic environment may contribute to
serious personal and mental health problems including low morale,
depression, substance abuse, workplace harassment, relationship
breakdown and above average absenteeism.
The
most effective executives are those who can both act and reflect,
which means unplugging themselves from the compulsion to keep busy.
Incubating ideas through subconscious thought
Doing
nothing or having nothing to do, are valuable opportunities for
stimulating unconscious thought processes. Unconscious thought excels
at integrating and associating information, by subconsciously
carrying out associative searches across our broad database of
knowledge. In this region of the mind we are less constrained by
conventional associations and more likely to generate novel ideas
than when we consciously focus on problem solving.
The
outcome of these processes might not always enter our consciousness
immediately. They may need time to incubate. The suggestion here is
that as well as being the best thing for our mental health, doing
nothing – or slacking off – may turn out to be the best way to
resolve complex issues.
A
good problem solver continues to work unconsciously on a problem
after abandoning the conscious work. Creative solutions can be found
by working intermittently on the problem while attending to mundane
activities, such as taking a walk, driving, reading or playing with
children.
The
benefits of tuning out and focusing on the present is gaining in
popularity in the corporate world with many executives now turning to
mindfulness meditation to assist their decision making and problem
solving. This can be a band-aid solution if an executive works
manically for nine hours then attends a mindfulness session at the
end. Ideally time should be taken during the day. A walk around
outside or time spent with your feet on the desk, can be more
productive than working through a lunch-break.
Italian
painter Giorgio Vasari summed it up well when he said “Men of
genius sometimes accomplish most when they work least”.
There
are many well-known examples of brilliant ideas that came to people
“out of nowhere”, from Archimedes in his bath, to Newton in his
Lincolnshire garden and Paul McCartney who woke one morning having
composed the tune for “Yesterday” in his sleep.
Incubation
time can be introduced in many ways. Companies such as 3M, Pixar,
Google, Twitter and Facebook have made ‘disconnected time’ key
aspects of their workplace.
Recognising
the need to work smarter
Often
the give-away that we are working too hard (and not smart enough) is
when we find ourselves in a place where there’s always more to do.
We fool ourselves into thinking that if we do just one more thing we
will be able to relax. This thinking is delusional; either our to-do
list will continue to lengthen or we feel we could do things a little
bit better. If we get stuck in this mindset it’s time to get off
the treadmill and take a break. And surprisingly, often after a
period of disconnection the problem will look quite different and we
might find the answer was right there all along, staring us in the
face.
Three ways to make time for doing nothing
1.
Maintain relationships
We
need meaningful contact with people to feel fully alive. Maintaining
our relationships needs interaction, engagement and time out.
2.
Saying No
Being
able to say no is one of the most useful skills we can develop.
Saying no is not necessarily selfish and saying yes to every request
is not healthy. Saying no to unimportant requests can free up time
for more important things.
3.
Managing sleep habits
In
a perfect world we should all sleep eight hours a night. Sleep is
essential for personal growth and creativity. Poor sleeping habits
are proof we haven’t stepped off the treadmill of busyness.
Manfred Kets De Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change | June 23, 2014
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