I was walking down the hospital hall to do some “important” work, and all I kept thinking about was how I wanted to paint a picture. I had dabbled in painting on a few occasions in my life, but never put any serious effort into it. Nonetheless, the desire followed me through the day.
“I have had the weirdest impulse all day to paint a picture,” I told why wife when I got home.
“Like, you mean, make a painting?” she clarified.
“Ya, a landscape painting.”
She thought about that for a second and said, “Ok, go ahead.”
“What, no,” I replied, “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It would be silly.”
After all, I was an important doctor doing important work. Do you know how I knew that was true? Because I was busy. Back then, I worked long days, many nights, and nearly every weekend. When you are that busy, you have to be important. And important people don’t just do frivolous things like paint landscapes.
“Ok,” was her noncommittal reply.
“I have other things I need to do” is how I had closed the discussion.
She gave me a shrug that said, “If you aren’t going to do anything about this, why are you bothering me?” Then she went back to what she had been doing.
I moved on to doing something “important” and deserving of my momentous attention. Something that seemed critical at the time, but I have no memory of today. And there is the irony. If I had sat down and painted a picture, then I would have a painting to show from that evening.
Busyness is a hedge against emptiness.
The fact is I felt anxious if I wasn’t “busy” doing something “important.” That wasn’t because I had so much vital work to do. Instead, it was because I couldn’t stand to be idle. I couldn’t stand to be alone with myself. I was proving the physicist, mathematician, and Catholic theologian, Blaise Pascal correct when he said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
My real problem was that I could not stand to be alone with my thoughts. I was using busyness as a kind of reassurance and distraction to convince myself that my life was meaningful. After all, if I was so busy, my life could not be trivial or frivolous. Busyness was a reassurance that my life was not empty. But was that true?
Keep in mind that I am a general surgeon, and my work improves and saves lives. But that fact alone does not automatically mean that I felt satisfaction in my career. Doing a useful job is one thing, have a purpose in doing the work is a higher-level experience. By focusing on being busy, I missed out on the opportunity to experience meaning in my work.
Busyness limits our ability to focus on what is essential.
In psychology, there is a phenomenon know as Tunneling. This principle states that as time becomes scarce, our brains put up blinders to keep us focused on the task at hand. Those blinders limit our ability to see the whole picture. Tunneling often tricks us into concentrating on the low-value urgent task rather than the higher-value important work that can make a real difference.
That was the trap I had fallen into. I was focusing on the number of patients seen in the office and the number of surgeries performed. That focus had cut me off from the bigger picture. I was no longer seeing my patients as people and could no longer appreciate the good I was doing. To turn my career around, I needed to take off the blinders and look at the big picture.
To step back and see the big picture, I had to do the one thing that scared me most; I needed to give up busy. I needed to make a place for idleness in my life.
Idleness is not laziness.
Let me clarify that idleness is not the same as laziness. I have come to see idleness as an essential part of a healthy life. It is like vitamin C; if you don’t get enough, you become physically weak and develop scurvy. Without adequate idle time, we become mentally weak in the same way. That is what had happened to me; I was suffering from “scurvy of the soul,” otherwise known as burnout.
So how did I turn it around? It started with making time in my life for me. I started by literally scheduling time for myself. First, it was twenty minutes at the gym to exercise. I realize that is still doing something, but it was the start I needed to let me know it was ok to spend time on myself.
I also scheduled time for myself by getting up a half-hour earlier in the morning to write in a journal. I know that sounds crazy, giving up 30-minutes of valuable sleep when you are so tired from being busy, but what I found was that I felt more charged going into my day after half an hour of writing than I would have felt with another thirty-minute of sleep.
Next, I made up a list of my top priorities. As I said earlier, the problem with Tunneling is that it gets us focused on the low-value urgent task and keeps us from doing the high-value important work. If I was going to get back on track, I needed to figure out which track I wanted. I set aside time to make up a list of all the things that were important to me in my life. A week later, I set aside an hour to review the list and narrow it down to my five top priorities. Knowing what made the list was informative, but seeing what did not make the top five was where the real insight lay.
Parkinson’s Law applied to Idleness
I learned to make more time to read, exercise, go outdoors, play with my children, photography, and work to repair my relationship with my spouse. What I learned is a variation of Parkinson’s Law. That axiom states that work expands to fill the available time. So if you have two weeks to complete a project, you tend to spend the whole two weeks working on it. The other way to look at it is to reduce the amount of time you have to work on a project to accelerate results.
My variation of Parkinson’s Law says that if you make time for yourself and what is important to you, you will still find enough time to get all the work done. My experience was that once I started exercising, looking after my health, and improving my mind, I got more work done in less time.
I also became someone people wanted to work with, which helped me get through my workday more efficiently. Having hospital staff agree to stay late to help me do an add-on surgery because they enjoyed working with me got me home in time to see my children before bedtime.
Idleness is not wasting time.
I’m sure you think that making time for yourself is impossible because your boss will consider you lazy. I worried about that too. I was afraid that if other doctors found out I was taking time for myself, they would shun me. The reality was the complete opposite. No one seemed to notice the time I took away from work, but everyone saw the improvements in myself and my work. People noticed I was a more fit, energetic, and calm version of me. They wanted to know what I was doing, not to ostracize me, but so they could emulate me. Rather than being fired by management, I was asked to speak to the hospital staff and explain how I had achieved my results so others could follow my example.
Deliberate idleness.
Deliberate idleness proved a key to my success. The critical world is deliberate. This is not just time away from work and busy. All too often, that time gets filled with other busyness or with time wasters like television. As I said above, I deliberately scheduled time for myself with specific goals. I planned time to exercise, write in a journal, play with my children, and date nights with my wife. These activities improved my life because I did them with intention. I set aside the time for my “idle activities” as items on my calendar with a set agenda and no compromise on time. When possible, I silence my phone during these times. Better yet, I leave my phone in a different room, so it is out of easy reach.
Having some serious issues to contemplate in my life, I made a hammock date last week. I set aside time one Saturday afternoon to spend twenty minutes just laying in a hammock and letting my mind wander. I ended up spending closer to an hour lounging idly on a warm afternoon and just becoming reacquainted with my thoughts. It was the best spent time of my week. I felt much better about my decisions and my life after that time.
Conclusion
So schedule some idle time into your busy agenda. Do it deliberately. Set aside a specific time to do—or better yet, not do—a particular activity. Breaking the busy cycle from time to time is how we reconnect with what is most important to us. It is how we find meaning in the busy. Once we identify what gives us meaning, we can recognize what parts of the busy we can discard for better results. When you are deep in the busy, the tunnel vision kicks in, keeping you from separating what is essential from what is not. Making idle time allows you to step back and see the big picture. That change in perspective will improve your results in life and work. Rather than ostracize you for taking a break from busy, people will want to emulate you.
PS; I did, eventually, paint that landscape. It currently hanging on the wall in parents living room. I get to see it every time I visit home.
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