Do Nothing

"Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving" by Celeste Headlee is a compelling exploration of the societal obsession with productivity and the detrimental effects it has on our well-being. Headlee advocates for the importance of rest, reflection, and leisure in a world that often equates worth with busyness. Here are ten key lessons and insights from the book: 1. The Myth of Productivity: Headlee challenges the prevailing notion that constant productivity equates to success and fulfillment. She argues that this mindset often leads to burnout, stress, and a lack of genuine happiness. Recognizing that not every moment needs to be filled with activity is essential for a balanced life. 2. The Value of Doing Nothing: The author emphasizes that doing nothing is not a waste of time but a necessary component of creativity and mental health. Headlee highlights research that shows how idleness can lead to greater innovation, insight, and problem-solving capabilities, allowing the mind to rest and rejuvenate. 3. Understanding the Importance of Rest: Headlee discusses the critical role of rest in maintaining physical and mental health. She explains that adequate downtime is essential for cognitive function, emotional regulation, and overall well-being, advocating for the integration of rest into daily routines. 4. Redefining Success: The book encourages readers to redefine their understanding of success. Rather than measuring success solely by achievements or productivity, Headlee suggests valuing personal fulfillment, relationships, and well-being as essential indicators of a meaningful life. 5. The Dangers of Multitasking: Headlee addresses the myth of multitasking and its negative impact on efficiency and focus. She explains that attempting to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously often leads to decreased productivity and increased stress, advocating for a more focused and mindful approach to tasks. 6. The Power of Mindfulness: The author highlights the benefits of mindfulness and being present in the moment. Practicing mindfulness can enhance awareness, promote relaxation, and reduce anxiety, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling and less hectic life. 7. Creating Boundaries: Headlee underscores the importance of setting boundaries between work and personal life. She encourages readers to establish clear limits on work hours, technology use, and commitments to allow for more leisure time and to protect mental health. 8. The Importance of Leisure Activities: The book emphasizes the value of leisure activities that bring joy and relaxation. Engaging in hobbies, spending time with loved ones, and enjoying nature are essential for cultivating happiness and well-being. 9. Cultivating Gratitude and Reflection: Headlee suggests incorporating practices of gratitude and reflection into daily life. Taking time to appreciate what one has and reflecting on experiences can foster a deeper sense of fulfillment and counteract the tendency to focus solely on productivity. 10. Embracing the Art of Doing Nothing: Ultimately, Headlee encourages readers to embrace the art of doing nothing and to view it as a vital part of life rather than a guilty pleasure. By allowing ourselves the freedom to pause, reflect, and simply be, we can cultivate a deeper connection to ourselves, our loved ones, and the world around us. "Do Nothing" by Celeste Headlee offers a profound critique of the modern obsession with productivity and provides practical insights on the importance of rest and leisure. Through lessons on redefining success, setting boundaries, and embracing the value of idleness, the book serves as a guide for individuals seeking to live more balanced, fulfilling lives while breaking free from the constraints of overworking and underliving.

Despite our constant search for new ways to 'hack' our bodies and minds for peak performance, human beings are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious. We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally. Why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning? Why can't we just take a break? In Do Nothing, award-winning journalist Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path ahead, seeking to institute a global shift in our thinking so we can stop sabotaging our well-being, put work aside and start living instead of doing. The key lies in embracing what makes us human: our creativity, our social connections (Instagram doesn't count), our ability for reflective thought, and our capacity for joy. Celeste's strategies will allow you to regain control over your life and break your addiction to false efficiency, including: -Increase your time perception and determine how your hours are being spent. -Stop comparing yourself to others. -Invest in quality idle time. Take a hot bath and listen to music. -Spend face-to-face time with friends and family It's time to recover our leisure time and reverse the trend that's making us all sadder, sicker, and less productive.

Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee is surprisingly good. It is a well-researched investigation on our obsession with work and efficiency. She provided the historical context on how work evolved to what it is today and the ever increasing emphasis on productivity. The author searches for the motives that drive people to work more. The book discusses how evolution made us so that we work only for certain hours. We should be intentional about protecting our downtime. She asserts the importance of leisure time and connecting with people. According to research, simply having our smartphones next to us can be mentally taxing for a human being (we are not yet evolved for this). We need to trust our human instincts and not depend upon external things to take care of us. There should be clear boundaries between work and leisure. We just need to learn how to take time for ourselves, without any motive, and redefine what is truly worthwhile for ourselves.

This book might be useful for a small group of people: ones who work in an office environment (excluding medical offices and such), who are workaholics and also work hard and not smart. MAYBE they can get something out of this book. The first part of the book is basically history of labor, which was quite interesting (probably the reason why I gave it 2 stars instead of one), I enjoyed that part for a while, but that it became repetitive and it felt like I was reading a history book. The author talks about how important it is to relax and have leisure time, which is different from laziness. And of course, not to bring your work home with you. She talks about answering emails (or, NOT answering them) SO MUCH, I wish I could count how many times the word “email” appears in this book. As someone who doesn’t use email outside of work, this didn’t interest me much. She mentiones Gary Vee and other entrepreneurs and says how they tell you to work hard, but they are wrong. I knew I was done with this when she did the same for Elon Musk, but I kept reading because I didn’t think it would be fair writing a review without finishing the book. It just gave me a feeling of someone who dislikes certain person because that person is successful. AND THEN, she praised Thomas Edison TWICE, a man who stole ideas from Tesla and presented them as his own. Ok, she definitely doesn’t like the same people I do and doesn’t like their point of view, I get it. But then I rolled my eyes again when she said how important it is to actually take notes with your pen instead of typing them on your laptop or whatever, BUT because “she loves trees” she uses app on her iPad that allows her to use a pen for iPad or whatever that thing is called, instead of using paper. Ok, you’re better than us. Also, I think the point of the actual writing when taking notes is also NOT to use screen that much and not only using your hand to hold the pen. She tells us about the way she transformed her life, but a lot of people can’t really apply that or do what she did, not even close. As I said at the beginning - it would only work for a specific group of people. There’s also part about social media and why it is all fake - everything that you’ve probably heard by now, but if you haven’t, that part might also be useful or interesting. Obviously, this is only my opinion, someone whose reviews I follow on Instagram recommended this book and liked it, but unfortunately, it didn’t work for me and I got very little from it.

Do Nothing is an excellent, well-researched interrogation on our culture’s obsession with overwork and efficiency, and the ways it stifles creativity and actual productivity and leads to a lower quality of life. Headlee gives a great historical foundation and context for how American culture came to be so obsessed work and busyness. She also cites study after study on how working longer hours actually leads to decreased productivity. More importantly, and perhaps more surprising, she cites loads of research that shows how harmful this can be to our physical and mental health. It’s not just about not having enough time to go to the gym after work — it’s also about simply perceiving that you don’t have enough time to go for a fifteen minute coffee break without your phone. She also gives concrete solutions that are more comprehensive than just taking a technology break, but acknowledges that the real solution is in a cultural shift. It’s kind of depressing, but also she gives us historical precedent: Einstein and many other people we hail as geniuses only worked like four hours a day. Overall an excellent read for 2020.

HIGHLIGHTS: 1. HISTORY: - We used to temper long hours with equal amounts of leisure and social gatherings. - Everything we think we know about work, efficiency, and leisure is relatively recent and very possibly wrong. - Leisure began to feel stressful. In the back of their minds, people worried about the money they were not making. 2. POLLUTED TIME: - This is a phenomenon caused by having to handle work duties during off-hours, being on call, or even having to think carefully about work issues or problem-solving while technically not on the job. - The most common task carried out during off-hours is reading and answering emails. - Unrelated work: many people now never have a sense of being completely separate from their jobs. They may feel they never truly punch out of work. - Policies that are not explicitly laid out and in employee handbooks are often enforced through shaming. - Long hours are counterproductive and have diminishing returns over time. - Workaholic should not be a compliment or a humblebrag, it should be a cry for help. - Open office plans: having a possibility of privacy causes stress and therefore discourages his creative thoughts. - Having no free time isn’t an indication of how hard you’re working, and hard work garners nearly immediate respect. - Americans have long valued earned status, which is a side effect of the math of the self-made man. 3. CONSUMPTION: - The glorification of consumption of consumerism creates a vicious cycle. We work longer and longer hours to buy products that we think will make our lives better, we stop enjoying them fairly quickly, the products themselves require time and maintenance that cut into our free time, this makes us unhappy, so we decide to relieve our feelings of sadness with the new products. - Time is money and we feel guilty when we waste it doing unproductive and unprofitable things. - Overwork: We skip on our personal lives to have more time for our careers, but we don’t get the return on our investment that we expect. - ACTION: take up a hobby that requires a lot of time. - We have sacrificed quite a bit at the altar of hard work and long hours. We have traded our privacy, our communities, our hobbies, and our peace of mind for habits that are more commercially profitable. - What was the joy sometimes feels like drudgery because I’ve turned pleasure into work. - We’ve lost sight of the fact that productivity is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself. - Obsession of Life-Hacking: Not only should we fill our office hours with the photo of our pursuits but those pursuits should be awe-inspiring if we can’t get our friends to like our hobbies then what’s the point? 4. IDLENESS: - To understand and empathize with other people, we must be capable of introspection. - We seem to immediately equate idleness with laziness, but those two things are very different. - Leisure is not a synonym for active. - Don’t miss out on offers for play. - We are looking for faster and faster ways to reach our goals, and so the skills that require time and patience, social skills, are eroding. - Idleness is a time in which one is not actively pursuing a profitable goal. It means you were at leisure. - Home is no refuge for women. 5. WORK: - Work is an inherent human need. - Hard work is good because it is the only way to improve your life and the lives of those around you. - Jobs confirm status. It can be devastating to feel unwanted and useless. - We now live in a culture in which we are not happy “being” and only satisfied when we’re “doing”. - Pursuing higher salaries can bring less happiness, not more. 6. FOCUS: - Focus is required for directed work, but idleness is necessary for reflection. - Death of boredom: Boredom is an inherent fertile state of mind. - We are wasting our time at work and putting in long unnecessary hours is that we are neglecting to use our voices. - Humans need regular breaks. We don’t persist, we pause. When we have fewer hours available to you, you will automatically focus on the task at hand and ignore what’s relevant. The quality of your work goes up as the allotted hours go down, so you can often accomplish more in four hours than five. - Downtime is healthy for the mind, and it’s also an incredibly fertile neurological state. Email kills productivity. 7. COMMUNITY: - Community is a fundamental need. - replacing phone calls with email and text we’re not taking advantage of our evolutionary inheritance. - Hearing someone’s voice helps us recognize them as human and therefore humanely treat them. - Humans communicate through voice, so cutting back on emails and texts will help you reduce stress. - Lack of belonging in social isolation is quite devastating to the human mind and body. - Seeking out isolation may be at the heart of our rising stress. It is certainly not doing us any good. - Quality social interaction is essential. - Empathy is a crucial component of human life. Empathy in service of belonging may be the underpinning of a basic moral code. - Empathy strengthens social bonds and helps to foster social inclusion, which makes it crucial in helping us fulfill our need to belong. - Empathy is not stirred by emails and text messages as strongly as it is by hearing another voice. - Humans have a primal love for rules. We like structure and habit and routine. - Play helps us develop socially, physically, and cognitively. It helps us create trust and manage stress. 8. TECH: - Our phones are deeply distracting to our brains. - The mere presence of a smartphone is so agitating to her gray matter that it interferes with her ability to perform basic cognitive tasks. - Access to the Internet makes us think we know more than we do. - Tech gives us an illusion of effective communication. It makes us think we’re connecting substantially, so we missed the warning signs. - Having hundreds of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter is not the same as having true friendships with real people. We are overwhelmed by superficial connections. - When we properly and proactively use social media we can be happier. - Tech is a tool that should be used for specific tasks and then set aside. - Loneliness is caused by a lack of intimate contacts, contacts that are rarely found online. - Digital interaction is simply not the same as talking to someone or spending time with a real person, in the flesh. - The loss of friendships that develop over time and are by definition efficient is probably the most damaging. Work places are not families, and coworkers are often not intimate friends. - ACTION: Start redrawing the boundary lines between office and home. 9. COMPARISON: - Perfectionism is a byproduct of a society that is out really focused and constantly making comparisons. The therapist will tell you that you cannot both strive to be perfect and enjoy good mental health. They are not mutually exclusive. - Unhealthy comparisons: when we measure ourselves against unrealistic or distorted ideals, we can do real psychological damage in trying to match them. - ACTION: track your hours and look around instead of up. Compare yourself to the actual people in your life who are where you’re at. - ACTION: It’s time to work the hours you’re required to work, and no more. Stop choosing to stay at your desk. - If your goal is to be more productive, then your hairy schedule is counterproductive. - Perhaps the reason long hours are unhelpful is that human brains do not decide to put in excessive hours of uninterrupted work. 10. SOCIAL INTERACTIONS: - Small talk: Those conversations make you healthier happier and more relaxed. The benefit of authentic social interaction is immediate and primal. - Groups of 3 to 5 students repeatedly outperformed even the smartest individuals, and they were less prone to mistakes. - Brainstorm alone and evaluate or analyze as a group. - Doing one small selfless act every day could reduce your stress significantly and increase your well-being. - Collaboration is our superpower. Perhaps we can create a culture in which relationships are prioritized instead of productivity. - Human beings have a great capacity for joy. - Celebration of what it means to be human: it is a reflective thought in social connections that make us unique and strong. - ACTION: Check in frequently to make sure your habits truly are helping you make progress. - Your vision has been narrowly focused far too long on your work and your marketability, but your intrinsic value as a human is more related to your position in your community than to your earning power as a laborer. - Economic growth is not connected to human happiness or even increased health.

I have to give this book credit, in that it did change my thinking about my work. The concept of the shift from product-based work (I made this thing now pay me for it) to time-based work (I worked 8 hours now pay me for it) caused me to re-frame how I approach my job as an information worker. Rather than thinking about my hours (though I'm still working full-time), I now think about my tasks as individual products, and it makes a huuuuge difference. Something may take me more time or less than I planned, and there's no guilt or frustration around that. I focus on a single task, work on it until I'm done, and then I take a real break. Simple and wonderful. However, that re-framing of my work (within my full-time information worker parameters) is not advice that Headlee gives. Her recommendations instead apply only to those that are able to set their "ideal" schedule and still make sufficient income to exceed the threshold to which money does bring happiness. Furthermore, the balance of the book is actually on defining the problem (70% of the total length) and is light on solutions, and for all that length, the summary of the modern research seems mostly cherry-picked or anecdotal and is unconvincingly complete, though the history is though-provoking. Finally, the solutions Headlee does present largely boil down to advice I had definitely seen before (avoid comparing your life to those you see on social media, make connections with strangers, and volunteer, to name a few). So overall, this felt more like a history lesson than a guide for how to "Do Nothing."