Content Ideas | Productivity
The Most Productive Thing I Did This Year Was Nothing
How I stopped procrastinating and let boredom take over
When was the last time you did absolutely nothing?
Was it the cloudy Sunday afternoon on the bus while you were eyeing the breathtaking views nature has to offer?
Or maybe you spent a minute alone with your thoughts, waiting in a bank for the receptionist to call your name?
You can’t remember, can you? Neither can I.
Because we’ve become so accustomed to “multitasking” that we can’t do a single thing without dipping our toes into another.
You’ll never catch me doing the dishes or crocheting my room decorations without an audiobook blasting through my AirPods.
Nor will you ever find that inspiring gym bro getting his 10k steps in without his favorite business or political podcast buzzing in his ears (I wouldn’t be able to achieve that even if my life depended on it).
No matter what we’re doing, the FOMO is so real it doesn’t let us simply be in the moment.
There’s always something that needs to cross the finish line — be it our Goodreads goal or a new learning path we’ve taken — we always need to have something going on.
Our days have become completely void of silence; as if the world will get ten steps ahead in the time we let ourselves be bored.
Boredom Leads to Ideas
I consider myself to be a fairly grounded person, but I do have a secret toxic trait: my brain only functions creatively on the porcelain throne or in the shower.
The bathroom seems to be the only place where my brain truly shuts off and I’m able to truly process my thoughts. Even the opening line for this piece came to me in the shower.
I wish I could put a philosophical twist on this and tell you that the shampoo I was so vigorously lathering into my hair was akin to rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, conjuring ideas out of thin air.
But I can’t because then I’d be lying.
It really is as simple as the claustrophobic space boring me out and forcing me to talk to myself. It started with memes and offensive songs but ended with an epiphany of a complete fiction premise and the opening line of this very piece.
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My grand intellectual breakthrough required nothing more than fighting the urge to fill in the silence. And that taught me:
Preparation is Counterproductive
The irony of spending hours on YouTube learning “10 steps to productivity” when it’s the very thing keeping you from getting anything done is laughable.
Before my Eureka moment in the shower, I was inside the same rabbit-hole, chasing the perfect situation and the perfect routine.
Minutes turned into hours with me scrutinizing articles, books, and thought pieces as if they were frogs on my dissecting tray. Was any of it actually helping?
Absotively and posilutely NOT!
It only ended up as self-inflicted punishment — every unabsorbed sentence demanding three more readings, further sabotaging my productivity.
Let the Silence Get Things Done
If I had simply started, the agonizing hours I wasted wouldn’t have haunted my dreams. Nor would the dozen “How to become a better writer” videos I watched have mocked my ability to write.
The restless energy I mistook for motivation instantly settled down when I let my boredom take over. It was an onslaught of ideas that seemed to be arriving with every drop of water that hit my head.
Where I was feeling stuck before stepping inside the shower, the fog had lifted.
So much so that the first thing I did was write everything down in my Notes app so I don’t forget anything when it’s time to actually write.
Now that I think about it, those ideas were already there, stuck inside some vault, unable to get past the distractions I was drowning myself in.
Maybe that’s what we all need to do instead of letting doomscrolling change our emotions at the speed of light, laughing then sad then wanting to conquer the world. Rather than consuming content disguised as “advice”, perhaps we just need to let our thoughts in and act on them.
Because somewhere along the way, we decided an empty moment is a waste of time. That if we aren’t doing three things simultaneously, we’re lazy and incompetent.
I was a victim of this myself until I tripped over all that “productivity” and landed face-first in the fruitless dirt. I spent so much time preparing to think that I forgot to actually think.
So, I’ve decided to put my preparation instinct to sleep and awaken my boredom.
It won’t be easy because if I’m being honest, that blank “Chapter 1” screen is terrifying. More intimidating than opening a programming assignment for someone who has a degree in computer science but still hates it.
Except, accomplishing something difficult is always more gratifying than the easy alternative and I’ve made my peace with that.
Have you?
