Yesterday I ended the day exhausted. I’d been going nonstop since morning with endless emails and back-to-back meetings. It felt like a productive day, but when I sat down and asked myself what actually moved forward, I couldn’t point to a single thing that mattered.
That gap between effort and impact points to a deeply rooted psychological tendency: we don’t like being idle.
A well-known study on idleness aversion captured this very elegantly. Participants had to wait 15 minutes between two parts of an experiment. They could either sit and wait, or walk to a farther location and back.
When both options offered the same reward, most people chose to sit still. But when the farther option meant they could choose a slightly different flavor of candy as a reward (a difference nobody actually cared about) most chose to walk.
This shows we’d rather stay busy than sit with ourselves – but we need even the flimsiest reason to justify it.
That’s because busyness is reassuring. It’s a numbing strategy, a way to avoid difficult thoughts by making sure there’s always something next on the list. It shields you from questions such as whether your work actually matters and whether your time reflects what you value.
And it doesn’t help that our culture celebrates it. When you say you’re “crazy busy,” people assume you must be doing important work.
The trouble is you can spend hours answering emails, jumping between tasks, and putting out fires, and over time you lose space for reflection and creative thinking. You feel productive, but you’re just busy.
So how do you break free from mindless busyness? Here are four strategies you can start experimenting with:
• Track how you spend your time. Write down what you do for a full week, including the small tasks. When you see it laid out, you’ll notice how much of your day goes to things that feel busy but don’t move anything forward.
• Cut the dead weight. Find the activities that neither advance your work nor feel meaningful – meetings without clear outcomes, status updates nobody reads, or tasks you do out of habit, and try experimenting with NOT doing these for a week. What happens? Does anyone notice?
• Reflect on your progress. At the end of each week, complete a quick Plus Minus Next review to ask what actually moved forward. This will help shift your focus from how busy you felt to what you actually accomplished, and what you can tweak the following week.
• Get comfortable with stillness. Experiment with blocking out ten minutes a day to sit, reflect, or walk without a podcast playing. It will feel uncomfortable at first but that discomfort is exactly what you want to reconnect with.
Most importantly, remember that a full calendar is not proof of a full life. It might just be proof that you never stopped long enough to ask what you’re filling it with. So if you’ve been feeling “crazy busy” lately, try those four strategies to make space for the discomfort of stillness.
Tiny Experiment of the Week
Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to make room for idleness:
I will [sit idle for 5 minutes everyday] for [5 days].
You can set a timer and keep your phone in another room so you’re not tempted to reach for it. This experiment helps build awareness of how quickly the urge to “do something” shows up, and teaches your brain that nothing bad happens when you don’t act on it. Over time, this creates space for clearer thinking. Want to dig deeper? Get your copy of Tiny Experiments.