In Praise of Idleness

I haven’t written in awhile, and since I never really promised that I would write with any frequency I don’t really need to provide any sort of explanation. I’m not one of those bloggers who starts off by promising to post at least once a week, or any other sort of schedule. But at the same time I do want to write to day about what I have been doing this summer and more importantly about what I have been doing for the last couple of weeks.

I lead a busy life. I work hard at my career and frankly I often give far more at the office than I get in return, on top of that I occupy myself with a lot of hobbies, that are all enjoyable but take up a lot of time. This summer, I took on a few too many hobbies and was burning the candle at both ends a bit. By the end of the summer I was ready for a serious bout of idleness. Which brings me to what I wanted to write about today; Idleness. (Now I admit that neither the title nor the concept for this blog is entirely my own, a much more brilliant essay on this topic was written by Bertrand Russell, you can read it here)

In spite of Russell’s entreaties to society to learn to appreciate the value of idleness in 1932, we have become a culture that is more and more obsessed with work, and filling our lives with endless stimulation and activity. This is both in the way we manage our lives and in the way that we evaluate ourselves and our evaluated in the workplace. We often admire the person who never gets up from their desk, and taking multiple coffee breaks in the day is considered a waste of time, but, and I’ve learned to hide this habit, I find I am my most creative, efficient and do my best work either during or after periods when I am idle. And there are enough studies out there demonstrating that most creative thinking is done in periods of unstructured idleness.

3M is a company that instituted something like this, everyone in the company was given one day a week to just play around and come up with free flowing ideas, there was undoubtedly a lot of idleness going around, but in the end one of the inventions that came out of it was post it notes, how many billions did 3M make on those, so for all the “wasted” time, they got a pretty decent return.

But we are uncomfortable with this unproductive time, people are supposed to work 9 to 5 or more likely 8 - 6 and be occupied with work the entire time, when we see people being idle, goofing off, taking too many smoke breaks, we ask what value they bring, why they don’t have more work. We deride people who seem to be able to leave work at five and take vacations regularly and we wear our own fifty hour work weeks like badges of honour. Yet the evidence remains that idleness might actually help to solve our problems, it may be time to give a quick rewrite to the Grasshopper and the Ant and see if there might not be some wisdom in the Grasshopper spending, if not all of his summer, singing at least a part of it.

It is time, as it was in 1932, to re-examine our Calvinist work ethic, there is much ink spilled these days on work life balance, but yet we fear the consequences of not appearing to be overworked and underpaid. The greatest threat to work life balance is generally perception more than it is actual workload, as I talked about in my last post, it is the enormous amount of non-work or busy work that is being done. I remember a woman I worked with who was always working late and complaining about how much work she had, I never knew what she did until she got let go and I had to clean out her desk, and there all, printed, filed and annotated was every email she had received since she started.

I read an article about a company that recently implemented unlimited vacation time. Now most people think about that and say well everyone would just stop working and get paid. But my suspicion is that most people would actually work very hard and when take the time they needed and that most people end up taking between six and eight weeks of vacation. i would also hazard to guess that they are as productive as companies that limit their employees to two to three weeks of vacation. The funny thing about productivity in a creative economy is that is disconnected from hours worked, but we still haven’t really adjusted to that kind of economy and expect that an hour more of work leads to an hour more of productivity. Some enforced idleness might actually be the remedy that our economy is looking for, (don’t tell the neo-cons or the Gig will be up)

Anyway So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks, after a very busy summer both with work and fun, I’ve been idle, I can’t actually tell you what I accomplished most days, not much, I read a Russian Novel, (more on that in the next week) or so, hiked a bit, golfed a bit, sat around in the sun, plucked my guitar strings and generally was bored, and it was for the most part delicious and I am returned both with a new zeal for my occupations but a determination to build more idleness into my life.