The Case for Doing Nothing

I'm writing this from New Orleans JazzFest. One of my favorite places on earth.

Yesterday, between sets, I just sat. No phone. No podcast. No plan. Just the hum of the crowd thinning out and the distant sound of someone's soundcheck bleeding across the fairgrounds. And somewhere in that quiet, my brain did something it rarely gets to do anymore: it wandered.

Thoughts I hadn't made time for started surfacing. Nothing particularly urgent—just loose, unfinished ideas I'd been carrying around without realizing it. It felt like the mental equivalent of a good stretch.

We don't do this enough. Most of us (me certainly included) have filled every available gap with something—a podcast, TikTok, a playlist, a meeting we didn't need to attend. We've made boredom nearly extinct, and I think we're paying for it.

Dov Frohman, in Leadership the Hard Way, argued that leaders should keep up to 50 percent of their time unscheduled. He called it "slop time." Not vacation. Not team offsites. Just open, unstructured time to think, reflect, and let the brain make connections it can't make when it's buried in the next task.

Kevin Kelly put it more bluntly: "Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic."

He's right. And we know he's right. We just don't act like it.

The irony is that the moments we're most likely to skip—the walk without earbuds, the Saturday morning with no agenda, the twenty minutes sitting in a festival field between bands—are exactly the moments where some of the clearest thinking happens. Your brain doesn't need more input. We have soooo much input. It needs space to process the input it already has.

I'm not suggesting you book a trip to Jazz Fest (though I'd highly recommend it). I'm just saying let yourself be bored sometimes. Go on a walk and leave the phone at home. Sit in the backyard and stare at the trees. Give your brain a little room to breathe.

You might be surprised what it comes up with.