On Importance of Wasting Time

“If your days are long and years are short - my friend, you are in the wrong place” - a friend had remarked this to me while we were walking towards our car after finishing the work for the day. Curious, I asked him to explain what he meant.

He said, "If we're constantly checking the clock for end time during the day, it means we are not enjoying our work. It also means we are not accomplishing anything or having new experiences. This droll existence becomes a loop. Before we know it, the calendar changes without us having any growth.”

The comment shook me to the core. This was exactly my situation at the job. The first year was great. I learnt a lot and built many products. But now, at the three-year mark, I could not point to any learning after that first year. It was not that I was whiling away the time. I was going through the motions to keep myself busy. Lying to myself that what I am doing is important, filling up time. But I was not moving the needle.

I quit within the next few months and started up on my own.

There are many times when I get stuck in this loop. I keep going through the motions, maintaining the appearance of doing important things. But there is a decreasing marginal utility every time the motion is repeated.

It usually happens when I am not learning anything new. The funny thing is, after school and college, learning does not happen through a defined syllabus. It occurs via curiosity. The thing about being curious is - a lot of times, it feels like wasting time. It entails exploring things that do not have any immediate meaningful impact. It means a lot of experimentation, a lot of failing, and a lot of times being humbled, before one starts getting good at the thing that made us curious in the first place.

But from a young age, I have been conditioned to believe that having fun means wasting time. The real benefit comes from dragging myself through things that do not give me joy, like reading biology. My interests or hobbies are the things I do when I have earned a reward for going through things that don't bring me joy.

But such things do not spark my curiosity. The things that do and on which I eventually get good at - fill me with guilt. While indulging in them, I always find myself thinking about when I should start being more productive. It means I neither enjoy exploring my curiosity nor get to work on things I consider productive.

The way I am trying to change now is by allocating time slots. The same trick we used in school, like time tables. For every activity, I define a time slot. In that time slot, once I'm committed, I don't think about anything else. If I am “wasting time”, well, it has been slotted and hence has been guilt-free. If I am going through the drudgery of reading a legal statement, well, nothing else to do till the end of this slot, so better get on with it.

Alleviating guilt has made me calmer and happier. Who knew - the timetable from school was so important after all.