I will occasionally come across someone who I consider to be extraordinarily productive, and yet when I ask what they did on a particular day they will respond, “Oh I basically did nothing.” This is particularly frustrating. If they did nothing, then what was all that work that I saw!
I think this comes down to what we mean by doing nothing. There’s a literal meaning to doing nothing. It could mean sitting in a chair, staring blankly at a wall, without moving a muscle.
More practically, what people mean by doing nothing is that they are doing something unrelated to their stated task, such as checking Facebook, chatting with friends, browsing Reddit etc.
When productive people say that they are “doing nothing” it could just be that they are modest, and don’t want to signal how productive they really are. On the other hand, I think that there is a real sense in which these productive people truly believe that they are doing nothing. Even if their “doing nothing” was your “doing work”, to them it’s still a “doing nothing” because they weren’t doing the thing they explicitly set out to do.
I think, therefore, there is something of a “do nothing” differential, which helps explain why some people are more productive than others. For some people who are less productive than me, their “doing nothing” might just be playing video games. For me, my “doing nothing” is watching people debate the headline of a Reddit news article (and I’m not proud of this).
For those more productive than me, perhaps their “doing nothing” is reading blog posts that are tangentially related to what they are working on. For people more productive still, it might be obsessively re-reading articles directly applicable to their work. And for Terence Tao, his “doing nothing” might be reading math papers in fields other than the one he is supposed to be currently working in.
Related to: The Lottery of Fascinations, other posts probably
Professor Quirrell in HPMOR Ch. 73
I will occasionally come across someone who I consider to be extraordinarily productive, and yet when I ask what they did on a particular day they will respond, “Oh I basically did nothing.” This is particularly frustrating. If they did nothing, then what was all that work that I saw!
I think this comes down to what we mean by doing nothing. There’s a literal meaning to doing nothing. It could mean sitting in a chair, staring blankly at a wall, without moving a muscle.
More practically, what people mean by doing nothing is that they are doing something unrelated to their stated task, such as checking Facebook, chatting with friends, browsing Reddit etc.
When productive people say that they are “doing nothing” it could just be that they are modest, and don’t want to signal how productive they really are. On the other hand, I think that there is a real sense in which these productive people truly believe that they are doing nothing. Even if their “doing nothing” was your “doing work”, to them it’s still a “doing nothing” because they weren’t doing the thing they explicitly set out to do.
I think, therefore, there is something of a “do nothing” differential, which helps explain why some people are more productive than others. For some people who are less productive than me, their “doing nothing” might just be playing video games. For me, my “doing nothing” is watching people debate the headline of a Reddit news article (and I’m not proud of this).
For those more productive than me, perhaps their “doing nothing” is reading blog posts that are tangentially related to what they are working on. For people more productive still, it might be obsessively re-reading articles directly applicable to their work. And for Terence Tao, his “doing nothing” might be reading math papers in fields other than the one he is supposed to be currently working in.