Passage Four

      Alan Lakein, a time management expert, thinks that nothing is a total waste of time, including doing nothing at times. If you arrange things so that you find time to relax and “do nothing”, you will get more done and have more fun doing it.

      One of his clients, a space engineer, didn’t know how to “do nothing”. Every minute of his leisure time was scheduled with intense activities. He had an outdoor-activities schedule in which he switched from skiing to tennis. His girlfriend kept up with him in these activities, although she would be doing something all the time, for doing nothing seemed a waste of time. His “relaxing by the fire” consisted of paying chess, reading magazines, or checking emails.

       For an experiment, Alan asked him to “waste” his time for five minutes during one of their sessions together. What the engineer ended up doing was relaxing, sitting quietly and daydreaming. When he was finally able to admit that emotional reasons caused him to reject relaxing as a waste of time, he began to look more critically at that way of thinking. Once he knew that relaxing was a good use of time, he became less serious about being busy and started enjoying each activity more. Previously he had been so busy doing that he had no time to have fun at anything. He began to do less and have more fun. When Alan saw the client about three years later, he still had as busy a schedule as ever, but he was able to balance his activity with relaxing so that he came back to work Monday morning not feeling tired out from a busy weekend but refreshed.