Opinion | You’re Too Busy. You Need a ‘Shultz Hour.’ (Published 2017)

Psychologist Amos Tversky once said “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

There’s never going to be an Adamson Act for knowledge workers who need time to think. It’s up to you to figure it out. The first step is realizing that taking time in the middle of your day to do stuff that doesn’t look like work is the most important part of your work day.

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” – Amos Tversky

In a fast-paced world full of intense economic/scientific/intellectual competition and decreasing opportunities for solitude, it is harder than ever before to justify spending significant time on intangible work that may or may not pay off. You can’t put on your resume—“I spend a lot of time thinking about ideas and scribbling notes that I don’t sh... See more

"To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.

No matter how busy you think you are, you can carve time and space to think out of your workday. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, schedules up to two... See more

Personal freedom allows us sufficient time to think. Making good decisions requires quiet time alone in our heads to think through a problem from multiple points of view. Uninterrupted personal time is life’s most valuable limited resource. Several notable creators, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, regularly take “think weeks” to invigorat

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Amos Tversky, the late collaborator of Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, once said “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”