ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

Benefits of Doing

In 1910, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about a boy who was tasked with opening a valve every so often on a water pump powered by a steam engine to release the built-up pressure. His whole job consisted of staring at these whirring pieces of metal all day. Needless to say, the kid got incredibly bored. One day, the supervisor walked in and the boy was nowhere to be found. Yet the pump ran just as it should. The ‘lazy’ boy had contrived a mechanised release for the pump and won his freedom from monotony. The first iteration of the automatic steam engine was born.

Now, this story may be apocryphal, but the boy’s behaviour reflects a deeper truth. When we are feeling lazy and disinclined to do something, we often search for an easier way to do the undesirable task at hand. We try to streamline the process and save time and effort. In other words, laziness can drive innovation.

In recent years, some psychologists and business leaders have wised up to this insight, shifting our perspective of what laziness really means. Strategic idleness may actually be a powerful tool. Both Bill Gates and Walter Chrysler have been credited (probably erroneously) with an apt quote: “I always choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Research shows that our brains are wired for laziness. For our ancestors, energy was a precious resource. People had to conserve energy to compete for food, flee from predators and fight. Learning to calculate the caloric costs and benefits of our actions was critical to survival, and expending energy on anything other than short-term gains was risky. So we learnt to play it safe.

Now that day-to-day survival is less of an issue, it seems natural that we would opt for indolence, or inactivity, but the opposite has occurred. Sleep patterns have changed in the past 100 years. Then the average person got nine hours sleep. Today the average sleep time is 6.8 hours a night.

Our culture teaches by example that our worth depends on how industrious we are, so we work even harder to produce even more. Until ten years ago, many psychological studies emphasised high executive functioning – skills such as focus, memory and problem-solving – and achieving goals as essential traits for success and happiness. Meanwhile, daydreaming and mind-wandering were associated with unhappiness. This judgment has an almost ancient

STRATEGIC IDLENESS MAY ACTUALLY BE A POWERFUL TOOL

history. Long ago, many Christian theologians derided sloth as a sin – one of the seven deadly ones, in fact. Idleness was declared a moral failing, and its cure lay in hard work.

But there’s one big paradox: the harder we work, the less productive we are. “When demand in our lives intensifies, we tend to hunker down and push harder,” says Tony Schwartz, head of the Energy Project, a productivity consulting firm. “The trouble is that, without any downtime to refresh and recharge, we are less efficient, make more mistakes, and get less engaged with what we’re doing.”

This forced sustained focus leads to selective attention, which can hinder our ability to generate fresh solutions and ideas. Even worse: too caught up in the end result, we overlook the quality of our experience while working and living and thus deprive our lives of meaning.

Amid this epidemic of overwork, how can we make our labour more meaningful and our lives more fulfilling? Perhaps we could do with a healthy dose of deliberate daydreaming. Current research in psychology and neuroscience points to a new understanding of the value of the wandering mind. Studies show that taking breaks and allowing your thoughts to drift can help your brain retain information, refocus, gain fresh perspective, and make new connections between ideas. Just think of the ‘eureka moments’ that occur when we’re engaged in the most mundane tasks, such as showering or doing the dishes.

One Canadian study shows that mind wandering increases activity in the brain’s default mode network, or DMN, a system of connected brain areas that deals with problem solving and shows increased activity when a person is not focused on the outside world.

Here’s the core problem: when the time finally comes to put our feet up, we often don’t know how. We have little training in how to be idle. Take away a kid’s toys or a teen’s smartphone and then tell them to entertain themselves. They’ll likely be at a loss. But would you fare much better? So maybe this week, notice when you have some downtime in your day, some white space in your calendar. Instead of filling the space with more work or more digital distractions, step back, recline and be, in the words of poet Mary Oliver, “idle and blessed”.

WE COULD DO WITH A HEALTHY DOSE OF DELIBERATE DAYDREAMING