Why I Have an Intentional Practice of Wasting Time

The counterintuitive practice of wasting time can help you overcome time-related anxiety.

For many years of my life, I was in thrall of the doctrine of wise time usage. My major daily goal was to account for the majority of my minutes and hours with productive activities that showed results. Anything I did for enjoyment had to either have a dual usefulness quotient, like reading a book that also taught me something new, or it had to be confined to extra spaces of time after I’d finished the more important productive work of the day. And I was really good at using my time well. I was scarily productive. People admired me for it. I never procrastinated or let things fall to the wayside. I was on top of it all. 

But I wasn’t particularly fulfilled. And I was usually stressed out. When I sat down to write, it was with the goal of being able to say that I got that part of my day done. To check it off the list. Even my allotted times for enjoyment were tinged with a kind of aggressive determination to enjoy things, dammit. In retrospect, I have to laugh at myself. But also, when I look at my shelves and see all the books I read just to say I read them, I feel sad.

Talk about wasting time. That’s the irony. That in my obsession with not wasting time, I ended up doing just that.

I don’t blame myself for this obsession. Most of us have it to some degree. We can’t help it, growing up in a socioeconomic culture committed to efficiency, productivity, and bigger better faster. The problem is that our attempts to use our time wisely often have the opposite effect: we end up dispersing our energy on checklist tasks. Some may be important, some may just be busywork, but they’re all done in service of using time the “right” way. If this has always felt unfulfilling to you, or outright depressing, here’s why: it’s imposing a schedule and restrictions on your life from the outside in, as opposed to letting your life take the shape it needs to – i.e. living your life from the inside out. The former controls and constrains your life, and in so doing you are only ever skimming the surface of your true potential. The latter immerses you into the heart of your life’s independent energy, the source of your potential.

Using your time “wisely” will only ever serve to keep you in line. The problem with productivity models that train you to work better and faster is that they put you into a stress cycle. There’s always more you can fit in, more that needs to be done, a better way to do it. We live under a constant coercive anxiety: what do I need to do next so I’m not wasting time? Some people like this feeling. It energizes them. If you are a gentle soul like me, though – introverted, sensitive, intuitive – it can actually be a painful sensation. As counterintuitive as it seems, learning how to waste time intentionally is the antidote to the anxiety associated with wasting time.

It’s easy to start this intentional practice of wasting time. It just requires a bit of dedicated practice – but honestly not even that much. The next time you start to feel that anxiety of having too much to do, or conversely, needing to fill some empty moments with activity so they aren’t wasted, sit down. The feeling I’m talking about here isn’t the discomfort you may feel when you have a specific task you want to get done but aren’t looking forward to doing. Rather, I mean that diffuse and pervasive anxiety of having an overloaded schedule or needing to productively use your time. Sit down. Not at your desk or other place of work, but somewhere you’d usually only sit when you are resting, or where you would never sit at all. A sofa, that odd chair you keep in the corner for junk to go on, even the floor. This signals to your brain that regardless of all the things you feel you need to do, you’re not going to do them right now. Because they can wait. Because they aren’t emergencies. Because they might not actually be as important as you think they are. Maybe there are some you don’t have to do at all.

Sit with this and breathe. You don’t have to try to clear your mind, just make sure it knows that right now you are wasting time intentionally because you don’t like feeling stressed out about all the things it’s saying you have to do. Wait until your mind settles on something you actually want to do – it could be getting back to work (often it is, you’d be surprised), or watching some TV, or more sitting, maybe out in the sun. Then do that thing. Most of the time it’s not the activities themselves that create anxiety in our lives, but the pressure we put on ourselves to get them done. If you keep up this practice, gradually your life will not only feel more in your control, and thus less stressful, but you’ll find more value in what you’re doing because you’ll be doing more of what you want to do. And you’ll probably find that many of the things you thought you had to get done…well, you don’t have to do them at all. This practice has genuinely changed my life to the point that I rarely feel task-related stress anymore, which is incredible, when you think about it. When I do start to feel that stress, I just sit down and start to waste time.