The Inherent Value Of Doing Nothing

I hit the wall today.
Ran out of gas. Had the biscuit. Completely stalled out.
For literally the past 8 weeks I have been actively engaged in the act of moving out and moving in. I have been riding the Queen Elizabeth Highway with carloads of stuff. I have been packing and packing and unpacking and unpacking. I have been spending vast quantities of money on new things for my new house. I have been shuffling and making decisions and screwing in screws and measuring and cutting and discussing with my wife what goes where and then trying all that out and then trying variations.
But today I hit the wall. I had just set up our new TV in my wife’s basement studio where she is now happily engaged in any number of crafty pursuits and watching another in the seemingly endless series called The Gilmore girls. Fast talking, smart-ass women who seem to constantly be each other cheerleaders.

Living In The Void

It came over me like a wave and engulfed me. For the next while, I told myself, I don’t want to look at another tool or cardboard box or room setting that’s not quite right yet or assemble-it yourself Ikea engineering masterpiece.
I just want to do nothing physical. I don’t want to lift or move or adjust or organize anything outside of my own thoughts.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy with the results of all the last eight weeks of activity. We are, for all intents and purposes, moved in. My clients are more or less not around, and the weather outside is frightfully cold and windy.
Besides all the stuff related to Jim & Heatherizing our house, we only have two more house-related trips to make to Toronto. One to clean the old house and touch up all the areas that need touching up and another to sign the house over to our buyer. Then we are done.
I was hoping to carry my energy level right to the bitter end of this process.
But what can I say? I just ran out of gas.

Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow

I have no doubt that I will wake up tomorrow morning with all the ambition I need to keep on keepin’ on. But for now, I’m taking a time out. I even made a coffee so I can call it a coffee break.
As I was contemplating all this, it occurred to me that there is a good business lesson here.
It has to do with the concept of productivity. I created this little meme you see on your right and down below to illustrate my point.

Productivity Is Too Often Confused With Slave Driving

But the lesson to be taken from it is that you can only be productive for so many hours in the day. After you reach what you honestly feel is your limit, the idea of pushing yourself beyond is kind of pointless. Because you will not be anywhere near as productive, and the time you spend pushing yourself can pretty much be filed under ‘useless and pointless pursuits’.
Not to mention, getting in the habit of doing that will eventually screw you up physically.

You see articles about Chinese workers who are basically enslaved by their overlords and they push themselves to a point of absolute exhaustion every day. Man, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to own a smartphone made by one of those poor souls on their 14th hour of work.
One of the most important things that I learned early on is the value of doing nothing.
For writers, doing nothing doesn’t actually mean doing nothing. It means doing whatever it is you need to do without the pressure of having to deliver something to meet a deadline.
I am in that state of mind right now. It doesn’t matter at all to anyone in the world, not even me, when I get this piece finished. I could stop right now if I wanted to. But I won’t, because there is a lot of therapeutic value in being able to just write without the pressure of it being something people are paying you to do.
It’s not really much different than if I had woodworking as a hobby. I finish up my deadline-focused stuff and then go down to the basement and build a Muskoka chair.
This kind of activity, as opposed to taking stuff from you, actually helps you regenerate. And after you have regenerated yourself you go back to your work with renewed vitality and purpose and all kinds of other good things.

The Psychotic Corporation

In today’s corporate world, there is a lot of pressure put on people to perform beyond their ability to do so productively. And that’s kind of sad for those people. But it’s also kind of stupid for those who are making them do that. 99% of the time it’s a lose-lose scenario.

But because corporations are, for the most part, psychotic entities, this sort of thing will continue unabated and too many people will go through life in a perpetual state of near exhaustion. And the corporations who drive these people will never really achieve optimal productivity from their employees.
The net result is that I am happy I don’t work for one of those corporations and I am sad for the people who do.
But I’m not gonna hammer too hard on that, because, as previously stated, I’m on a coffee break and that would be too much like work.
PS: After a nice dinner and a Neflix movie (Genius- highly recommended for Jude Law's amazing portrayal of American literary icon, Thomas Wolfe), I went downstairs, cleaned out and reorganized a storage closet, did the ironing and got almost as smart about my new smart TV as the TV itself is. Turns out all I needed was a little normalcy.

If this post resonated with you let me know. Feedback is always valuable. So is sharing and releventing. Thx.

If your business has reached the point where talking to a communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.

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