In Defense of Doing Nothing

This writing was born out of those moments when I felt guilty over doing nothing productive - that nagging sense that I've wasted time or failed to maximize my abilities, even on days when meaningful work was accomplished; Or I constantly felt like I needed a break, but when I did get it, I suddenly felt unsure of how to spend that free time, leading to guilt.

Nothing

Not a thing? Well, it depends on how you look at it. I often spend hours doing something entirely different than what I intended to do initially. Why though? Why do we get so easily distracted and move onto other tasks or procrastinate, even after that morning caffeine kick and commitment to staying focused?

The notion of productivity itself is a bit tricky, especially for knowledge workers like myself. How do you actually quantify the productivity of grappling with an abstract problem or exploring a new concept? Because even if you're just chilling in bed, not actively working on anything, simply going over different ideas and thought experiments in your head is still productive in its own way.

Oftentimes, what feels like an unproductive day to me, may actually involve valuable productivity that is difficult to quantify. Those days when I set aside my planned work to explore something new - like a new technology or framework - end up paying unexpected dividends later on. So while the day, may have lacked obvious checkboxes ticked, I'm actually investing in my intellectual capital.

There are a couple of key reasons why I have a hard time getting started directly into work:

• It feels overwhelming with all the things on my to-do list
• The urge to jump straight into the fun parts is strong

Work on whatever

As a tech startup owner, my brain has to juggle an abundance of thoughts - things to build, design, communicate, and market. Most of the time, I get overwhelmed wanting to accomplish everything at once. My ambitious goals end up feeling paralyzing instead of motivating. Rather than trying to tackle it all at once, I often just work on whatever captures my interest in the moment. If coding my side-projects or corporate work burns me out, I find a way to entertain myself with these quick-reward coding puzzles, if documentations or coding at all exhausts me I duck into illustrations. I do whatever I feel like, play video games, eat good food, go to the gym, and pretty much everything else besides work.

Concurrently, I try to avoid self-deception, because as rewarding as it feels to work on whatever you want, the mundane administrative work can't be ignored. It must be addressed by you eventually, or no one else will do it for you.

When I'm struggling to make progress, I find it helpful to identify that one task or aspect of a project that gets me excited and engaged. If I can lock into that motivating core, the momentum builds from there. Before long, I'm able to chip away at the more tedious items as well.