In my twenties I was obsessed with optimization. I mean really obsessed. I read every productivity book I could get my hands on. I timed my calendar in 30-minute increments. I once tracked how I spent every hour. I tried waking up at 5am because that’s what “successful people” did.
At the time, I was trying to start a business and the hustle culture totally freaked me out. The message was everywhere: grind harder, sleep less, fill every slot in your day with something productive. If he wasn’t busy, he wasn’t serious.
So I optimized it. And optimized. And it’s optimized.
And you know what happened? I’m burnt out. Not only physically, but also creatively. The ideas have dried up. The more I tightened my schedule, the less original my thinking became. I tried switching productivity systems and thought the problem was with the method. I’ve tried Pomodoro timers, bullet journals, digital planners. None of it helped. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the problem wasn’t how I organized my lessons. The problem was that I didn’t have any unorganized hours left.
It took years, career changes, and a lot of thinking to understand what I had done to myself. Now, as a writer, I see the damage this kind of relentless scheduling does to creative work.
And as it turns out, research has been saying that for a long time.
Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, created one of the most ambitious studies ever done on creativity in the workplace. HE analyzed more than 12,000 daily log entries from employees of seven companies. What he found should make anyone who glorifies a busy schedule reconsider: On high-pressure days, people do 45% less likely to think creatively than on lower pressure days.
Not a little less creative. Almost half as creative.
And he is he posted in the Harvard Business Reviewunder great pressure, “people tended to be uncreative. . . . They were very fragmented in their days. They had to deal with a lot of things they hadn’t expected. They were running. They actually felt like they were doing a lot, and often were, but they weren’t getting anywhere.”
“Running” really hit me when I first read it. That’s exactly what I did in my twenties. Running from one task to another, from one meeting to another, from one goal to another, always moving, never stopping long enough to really think.
But here’s the thing about the brain: it needs that downtime. As I wrote in my last postour brain has a Default Mode Network or DMN that is activated when we are at rest or engaged in unstructured thinking. This is the network responsible for introspection, imagination, and connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. This is where creative breakthroughs happen. But by timing each moment for maximum efficiency, we prevent our brains from ever entering this mode.
You literally cannot schedule an epiphany. That’s not how it works.
But what really changed my perspective was learning how the most creative people in history spent their days. By the standards of today’s bustling culture, they were total slackers.
Charles Darwin did three 90 minute sessions daily. He published 19 books in his lifetime. Worked from Charles Dickens from 9 to 2; five o’clock, then it’s done. He has written more than a dozen novels. Stephen King approx 4 hours a day. Haruki Murakami gets up at 4 a.m. to write for him five or six hoursthen runs, reads and listens to music for the rest of the day.
If you take a close look at the daily lives of these creative giants, they spend several hours a day doing what we consider their most important work. The rest of the time they spent hiking in the mountains, taking naps, walking with friends, or just sitting and thinking.
This is the opposite of optimization. But the output speaks for itself.
GH Hardy, one of Britain’s leading mathematicians, said a colleague: “Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician.” Four o’clock. Not twelve. Not sixteen. Four.
It flies in the face of everything the mainstream culture tells us.
And I have experienced this countless times as a writer. The best ideas for an article rarely come while I’m staring at the screen trying to force them out. They come when I’m walking, showering, or lying on the couch doing nothing. They come when I stop trying.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell saw all this almost a century ago. In his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness” he wrote that “in the modern world, the belief in the virtue of work causes a lot of damage.” He argued that our obsession with constant activity is not only exhausting but actively harmful to human flourishing.
This was 1932. One could argue that it only got worse.
Research Silvia Bellezza and her colleagues argue that busyness and lack of free time has actually become a status symbol. This is a complete reversal from a century ago, when the rich pretended they had nothing to do. Now we show that we don’t have free time.
We’re not just busy. We pride ourselves on being busy.
I was definitely guilty of this. In my twenties, when someone asked how I was doing, my default response was always some variation of “So busy.” I said a little proudly, as if to prove that I was going somewhere. Looking back, I didn’t go anywhere meaningful. I just “ran”.
My life looks very different these days. I am writing from my home office. I work in the morning, and by afternoon I’m usually done with the heavy creative lifting. The rest of the day may include administrative work, walking, reading, or simply sitting with my thoughts. By the standards of a busy culture, I probably waste half my day.
But I dare say, my writing is better than ever. Ideas are clearer. The connections are more surprising. And I actually enjoy the process, which I never could have said when I was optimizing every hour of my life.
The bottom line is this: there are real costs involved in filling every slot in the day. When we optimize hourly, we leave no room for wandering, for daydreaming, for the seemingly unproductive moments in which our most original thinking happens. The most creative thing you can do is to leave some space on the calendar with nothing in it.
Until next time.
