That’s right, I said it, and I’ll say it again: doing nothing is just as important as being productive. Productivity gurus, stifle your gasps. The art of doing nothing, or rather the art of letting yourself just exist, is long proven to have benefits across the board.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing.
For some, this may seem counterintuitive. How can you be productive while doing “nothing”? Well, I’ll tell ya.
Our Brains Like to Breathe
When we structure our lives with rigid expectations and constant activity from minute to minute and hour to hour, we deprive our minds of the chance to wander. The truth is, when we let our minds wander, they make connections and form ideas we never could have forced out of them with any number of calendar-blocked brainstorm sessions or strategy meetings.
We have to let our brains breathe, explore, relax—to take in information and play with it like a child with a new bin of blocks. We don’t tell it to build something; we wait and see what it does with the pieces.
For me, I have all of my best ideas when I release the tension of having to “be creative,” and instead allow myself to drift from thought to thought while doing menial things like dishes, laundry, and walking. But the thing is, I cannot, under any circumstances, look the fact that I’m trying to “be inspired” directly in the eye.
It’s a game I play with myself, and not always well. It is harder than it sounds. It takes time. Time to get into the headspace that releases bills and car maintenance and meal planning and instead float through concepts as if drifting down a river.
The Magic of Being Bored
Creativity does not thrive in constant stimuli. Having a near-endless stream of content fed directly into our minds does not do creation any favors.
We have to let our mental world rest and rebuild; we can only take in so much information at once. It happens to me often when I’m online, I’ll save videos and tips and tricks and inspiration, but do I ever go back and look at them again? Rarely do I even remember what it was I saved.
At that point, I might as well be staring at a blank wall for all the good it does me in the end.
And yet doom scrolling is infinitely more draining than staring at a blank wall. The internet offers a smorgasbord of dopamine, emotion, and stimulus in rapid succession. I can go from enraged to enthralled to overwhelmed by cuteness in the span of 10 seconds.
Whereas the wall offers nothing but itself and the space to wander, mentally.
I’m not saying you need to stare at a wall to be creative. But staring at a wall certainly makes it more enticing to explore ideas mentally. Because almost anything is more interesting than staring at a wall. Do you see what I’m getting at?
Like Neil Gaiman said, “You sit down at the keyboard and you put your hands on the keyboard and you say, ‘Okay, you are allowed to write. You are also allowed to do nothing. But you are not allowed to do anything else.’And eventually, the boredom becomes so great that you start writing.”
It’s Science, I Swear!
Some may feel that the art of doing nothing is an excuse to procrastinate. But au contraire! It is scientifically proven that letting your mind wander is good for creativity and, as a result, can be a positive thing for productivity.
Thus, letting ourselves relax, drift, and release the expectation of creating/being productive/etc, we can achieve more impactful outcomes. The ones that lead to the flow state of creation.
Sure, to a point, I have learned to “be creative” on command for work at times, but it is simply not the same as organic creativity born out of being bored.
Of course, everyone is different. What sparks one person’s creativity may not spark someone else. But the fact remains that when we let our minds wander without pressure, we can find ideas and concepts we may not have found otherwise.
There are so many different, fascinating aspects of the human brain, and this topic alone could be a whole series of blogs. But the truth remains that our brains were not designed to be 100% locked in on hardcore focused tasks all day, every day.
We need time to mentally frolic, dammit! For the good of mankind!
I challenge you to let yourself be bored this week and see what happens. I have solved so many problems just by letting myself…be. Truly.
Thank you for reading, and happy 2026!