Opinion | You Are Doing Something Important When You Aren’t Doing Anything - The New York Times

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more

The thing is, we all know that work isn’t everything, but the way we spend our attention suggests otherwise. The constant accessibility of work creates the culture of busyness, not just with our time but also with our mind. Not only are our calendars filled with colorful event reminders, but even the spaces in between them are occupied by scattered... See more

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more