Doing nothing at work

I have a naive confidence that there’s a much better way for us to “do work”.

My hope is to define a kind of work utopia that we can navigated to on demand. I believe that “work utopia” and “super-productivity” live in the rarefied space of doing nothing. That is, doing nothing but attending to a spontaneous bubbling up of ideas and inspirations. This model leaves us solely responsible for engineering a state that leads to a consistent bubbling up of these inspirations. “Solely responsible” in that only we are responsible, but also that this is our only responsibility.

Getting this right feels like the difference between letting my dog off the lead to chase a hare (effective motivation) and endless clicker training (ineffective motivation). It means aligning our productivity goals with a natural motivation.

This rests on the assumption that we are naturally driven to do things. From my observation, the strength of our natural drive is both contingent on, and indicative of, the health of our overall system. A weak drive (or a weak “spontaneous bubbling up of ideas and inspirations”) means that something is not right, while a strong drives means the system is in good order.

It’s like Mihaly’s flow state injected with profound detachment. It’s recognising that our spontaneous motivations are more effective than imposed ones, and that being detached from the outcome of our work is a precursor to super-productivity. For me, extreme productivity lives in the paradoxical space of doing nothing.

Maybe effort is like friction, and represents inefficiency in a system - and so our ability to produce value is inversely related to effort.

To be more useful we need to engineer an internal state that leads to a consistent bubbling up inspiration, and then align our productivity goals with our natural motivations. Let’s build a set of constrains within which we can thrive.