The NYT article starts with : “Stop being so busy, and just do nothing. Trust us.”
There’s a way out of that busyness madness: doing nothing. Or, as the Dutch call it, niksen.
It’s difficult to define what doing nothing is, because we are always doing something, even when we’re asleep.
The idea of niksen is to take conscious, considered time and energy to do activities like gazing out of a window or sitting motionless. The less-enlightened might call such activities “lazy” or “wasteful.” Again: nonsense.
It’s not as though we need to work so hard. As Alex Soojung-Kim Pan, author of REST: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, writes in Nautilus, luminaries including Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, and Charles Darwin had quite relaxed schedules, working for five hours a day or less. The truth is, work expands to fill the time it’s given and, for most of us, we could spend considerably fewer hours at the office and still get the same amount done.
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