How I Learned to Be Unproductive

Some personalities thrive on busy: time deadlines, packed schedules, multitasking, and to-do lists. You know the type – they’re always just so…well, busy. These are the people who live on the periphery of your life, because you rarely get to see them. They may complain about having so much they need to accomplish every day, but ultimately they have a life like that because they’ve invited that kind of busy into it. Many of the things they “need” to do could be postponed, delegated, or outright left undone.

I do not have a personality that thrives on busy. Most creatives don’t, because art requires a lot of space around it in order to emerge into being. It’s not that creatives can’t learn to survive a busy life – we can grow adept at fitting creative work into small bits of time – but for many of us our natural preference is toward a slow life. A life that’s more open than closed, loose rather than tight. A life in which our meditative space (mine is long walks) isn’t spoiled by anxious thoughts of the next thing that needs to be done. A spacious life.

If there is a silver lining to having a severe anxiety disorder, it’s that I become so easily overwhelmed by a packed schedule that I have no choice but to say no to things that “need” to get done. I began creating a spacious life out of necessity, because I was burned out to the point of being unable to do my primary creative and life-giving practice, writing. I whittled my life down to only what was absolutely required. I became a person who accomplished the bare minimum.

At first this felt horrible. My tiny daily accomplishments seemed worthless (I washed the dishes! I shopped for groceries! I paid a bill!). I was socialized to believe that only productive time has value. Think about it: is there any way to say that you did nothing all day that doesn’t sound negative? How do you communicate the value of your time to someone without listing all the things you did during it? It’s harder than you’d think. In the beginning this project of opening up my life caused its own brand of anxiety. I won’t lie – it could be miserable at times. But I felt in my gut that I was doing something important, and that it would eventually pay off.

Here’s what happened. Over time, all those bare minimum tasks began to expand to fill the space I had opened in my life. My little life-sustaining activities began to feel like sacred tasks, part of a daily generative act of living. And I became okay with long stretches of doing…nothing. Wasting time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do more with my time, it’s that during my recovery from burnout, I honestly wasn’t capable of much more. I had to be okay with that before I could move through that part of my healing.

In creating a more spacious life, there are significant sacrifices I’ve had to make along the way. I’ve had to reevaluate my feelings about money, for example, as I began to spend less time trying to chase it down. I learned that my best life is a slow life. The rhythm of a simplified, opened-up way of living allowed space for my creativity to reemerge.

Eventually I was able start writing again. And through the process of creating a spacious life I realized something important. In order to be creative on a large scale I need to be able to experience the generative creativity of even the small, everyday tasks of my life. If I am only doing things to get them done, check them off a list, and prove my productivity, then I will bring that approach to my writing as well. If I keep focused on opening more space in my life, rather than filling it up with yet more busyness, I will prosper in my writing. Learning to live with slowness is more difficult than you’d think, as it goes against everything our culture outwardly values. It requires a willingness to live with the discomfort that comes from going against what our society explicitly condones as “right” choices. But for creatives like myself, it is essential to our well-being.