Do Nothing Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Do Nothing

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Zusammenfassung von Do Nothing

Name: Do Nothing
Rating: 4.3 (218 reviews)
Author: Celeste Headlee

Celeste Headlee

How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving

4.3 (218 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

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Routines & Habits Happiness

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Do Nothing
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What’s in it for me? Learn to value leisure time over efficiency.

Whether they’re exercising twice a day, learning Italian from home, or putting in long hours at a tech startup, it can seem like people are more efficient and productive than ever.

But is this a good thing?

According to the author, our obsession with efficiency is making us unhappy, stressed out, and physically ill. For years, we’ve been pursuing ever-increasing benchmarks as though high productivity is what really matters in life. Ultimately, we’ve only succeeded in making ourselves miserable.

These blinks offer both a diagnosis and a plan of action. Combining an overview of where we’ve gone wrong in the past with simple strategies to set things right in the future, they’re an antidote to our hyper-productive world.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why we shouldn’t aim to spend “quality time” with family;
why one question can reduce your enjoyment of music; and
why the human voice is an unmatched method of communication.

Our modern fixation with productivity is rooted in the past.

Recently, you might have noticed that productivity is trending. Everyone seems to be getting busier and busier, and goals for our work and personal lives have never seemed so ambitious.

Maybe your friends have got you thinking about running a marathon. Perhaps you’re planning your next promotion. Or maybe you’re wondering if your kids should learn an instrument or take up another sport.

If you're constantly adding to your to-do lists, looking to optimize your schedule, and hoping to somehow find more hours in the day, you might have fallen victim to the “cult of efficiency.”

So, what exactly is this cult? Well, it’s an attitude that supposes that the busier we are, the better. And although it’s never been more powerful than it is right now, this phenomenon didn’t grow overnight.

The key message here is: Our modern fixation with productivity is rooted in the past.

Believe it or not, we didn’t always work as hard as we do now. Even medieval peasants worked fewer hours than the average modern worker – and they also had more vacation time!

But things changed in the days of the Industrial Revolution. Rather than paying workers per task, factory owners began to pay wages per hour. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of hours people were expected to work.

In the US, popular faith in the American Dream helped to normalize these new, grueling work regimens. Who could complain about longer workdays, when everyone knew hard work helped you to get ahead in life? This American belief that diligence and perseverance are always rewarded with wealth, helped to sow the seeds of our modern cult of efficiency.

Now the distribution of wealth is a different story. Since the 1960s, worker pay has just about outpaced inflation, but in the same period, CEOs have been taking home bigger and bigger paychecks. So, in essence, the fruit of our increased efficiency is usually reaped by our bosses and not by us.

Our push for productivity has also been influenced by consumer culture. Clever marketing has convinced us to work longer hours in order to afford products we’ve never previously wanted – and the constant barrage of new fashions and gadgets has kept us working long after we’ve taken care of our most basic needs.

The cult of efficiency makes us feel guilty about enjoying leisure time.

As we’ve just seen, the Industrial Age introduced a shift in worker compensation. Employees were paid per hour of work, not per task performed. In some ways, this seems like a trivial distinction – but its psychological effects are profound.

Why? Because when you pay workers based on the number of hours they clock up, you actually change their attitudes toward time – especially toward time off. When industrial employees learned to put a dollar value on an hour of their time, an hour of leisure began to seem increasingly indulgent.

Even in our personal lives, we strive for efficiency.

So far, things have been pretty straightforward. We’ve dealt with the origins of the cult of efficiency, and discussed some of the ways that work can “pollute” our time off and interfere with our leisure.

All we need to do is keep our work and personal lives separate, and the problem will be solved – right?

Our focus on efficiency can deprive us of meaningful human connections.

Before the Industrial Revolution drew employees to big cities, the vast majority of people lived in small, close-knit communities. These communities suited the social needs of the times; people required a small number of intimate friends, a wider group of good companions, and a larger circle of familiar acquaintances.

Unfortunately, these days many of our social needs go unmet. Having hundreds of “friends” on Facebook simply can’t replace the emotional connections of a warm, real-world community.

Social media makes it too easy to compare ourselves to others.

There’s no denying that social media has aided and abetted the cult of efficiency in its rise to power. After all, it’s the ideal place to brag about everything you’ve checked off your to-do list.

Have you just finished your tenth meeting of the day? Then tweet about how busy you are. Did you bake an elaborate cake? Well, why not share a picture on Instagram! Run a marathon for charity? Don’t forget to tell all of your Facebook friends about it.

A few simple changes can help us to slow down and improve our quality of life.

Granted, the cult of efficiency is everywhere. It dominates the workplace and is making inroads into our personal lives. It pollutes our leisure time and can deprive us of enriching human interactions. And if our lives fail to measure up when compared with those of others, the cult of efficiency can make us feel as though we’re utterly inadequate people.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. In fact, the opposite is true. Our single-minded focus on productivity is one of the very few problems we can solve by actually doing nothing. But, as easy as that sounds, doing nothing is something we need to consciously plan.

To recover our leisure time, we must learn to distinguish between means and ends.

One of the problems with extolling efficiency and productivity is that these values can cause us to lose sight of the bigger picture. A culture that stresses hard work and busyness doesn’t just persuade us to neglect leisure time; it also encourages us to focus on means instead of ends.

To be more explicit, focusing on how much we get done can lead us to overlook what we get done. Lots of us are so concerned with checking boxes that we’ve stopped asking whether the things we’re doing are truly making us any happier.

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Worum geht es in Do Nothing?

Do Nothing (2020) argues that our obsession with efficiency and productivity has led us to underestimate the power of leisure. Tracing the rise of efficiency in previous centuries, as well as the present-day consequences of stretching ourselves too thin, author Celeste Headlee claims that we need to begin to allow ourselves to experience the true joy of idleness.

Wer Do Nothing lesen sollte

Productivity junkies who need a reason to wind down
Overworked employees trying to learn how to de-stress
Working parents who never make time for themselves

Über den Autor

Celeste Headlee is an award-winning speaker, journalist, author, and radio host from Whittier, California. Her first book, We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter, based on her TED talk, was a winner of the 2017 Silver Nautilus Award in Relationships & Communication.

Kategorien mit Do Nothing

Mindfulness & Happiness Productivity

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