"All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while." Pico Iyer's article on CNN talks about the benefits of doing nothing. Literally nothing. It focuses on the benefits of taking short breaks, even just for 10 seconds, every set of time. The time that you do "nothing" is so short, that, put together, it could make up only 1% of the time you spend at work (or home or class). During our Socratic seminars, many of us thought of doing nothing as simply switching to a different task or maybe even watching an episode of our favorite series. We thought it meant not accomplishing anything. But this is now that Iyer meant by doing nothing. He meant absolute nothing; letting your mind wander to its deepest depths. You might think this has many downsides, mainly "but I'm losing time, how is this a good thing?". Well, first of all, you lose only a very small percentage of time and this loss could lead to better work. Also, when time is crunched, we tend to get things done quicker. I'm pretty sure you, sometime in your life, have procrastinated and left something to the very last minute but were still able to get things done, surprisingly. I know I have. Why is this? "We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive." When we take breaks, we are letting our mind clear out for a couple of seconds in order to be able to attack our work with full force. Also, with crunched time, we learn to prioritize our tasks better and organize our time better, using it to its best potential. "... the best way of completing a task, often, is to look away from it; it's the pause in a piece of music that gives the piece its beauty and its shape." In reality, when we're doing nothing, we're actually doing more than we could ever imagine.
1 Comment
Corey Topf
11/25/2014 07:41:02 pm
This was my favorite line from the article too: "the best way of completing a task, often, is to look away from it; it's the pause in a piece of music that gives the piece its beauty and its shape."
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Author"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." Archives
June 2015
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