I overheard a conversation where a man was regaling his friends about how he spent his weekend “optimising his downtime”. I wondered what he did with his uptime. He told anyone who’d listen, and many that didn’t care, He had listened to a podcast on high-performance sleep while jogging through a forest, recorded his heart-rate variability on a wrist-mounted computer, and consumed a nutritionally complete sludge from a pouch.
I listened to this tale with the quiet horror usually reserved for the football results on a Saturday evening.
We are all too obsessed with the concept of productivity and rushing around doing who knows what. Half the time, we don’t even know what it is we are rushing about doing.
That’s in direct contrast with being at work for those of us that work in technology. We sit all week behind a combination of screens and shiny computational devices. I remember to get up and walk around. But that doesn’t stop the aches and pains of being rooted to the spot for hour after hour.
After that, the rushing around starts. Plans to do this that and the other. What ever happened to sitting in an armchair and staring out of the window until your tea gets cold?
It might be that I’m getting old. I’ll accept that. But having a brew and a proper thinking session is underrated as a way to spend time.
Somewhere along the line, we were persuaded that idle time is a failing. Every hour must be monetised or logged in a habit-tracking app. If you go for a stroll around the village pond, you are supposed to wear specialised footwear and record the elevation gain on Strava or some other app. To wander along with your hands in your pockets, pondering whether the pub is open yet, is now treated as an act of misplaced time management.
I vote for a return to the unquantified life.
Go for a walk without a smartwatch bleeping at you. Sit on a bench until you get cold. Read a book that has no practical application to your career whatsoever. If someone asks you on Monday morning what you did over the weekend, look them dead in the eye and say: “Nothing.” Watch the confusion cross their eyes. They will suspect you are either a genius or a lunatic, and in truth, there is very little difference between the two.