Here’s Why It’s Not Just All about Being Productive

It’s not hard to notice how much attention gets paid to “maximizing productivity” these days, in all sorts of different places.

If you were just going by the titles of many of the best selling self-help and personal development books out there, not to mention many of the most popular apps for Android and iOS, you’d probably come away with the impression that life was all about maximizing output and ensuring that no minute in the day was ever spent just relaxing.

Although it’s obviously good to be productive in the right times and for the right reasons, there are some very significant reasons why life shouldn’t just be all about productivity — but should actually include regular moments of fun, relaxation, and even just doing nothing at all. Seriously, you deserve to just stop, take a break, breathe in, and really take it all in. You deserve the chance to just stop, look around you, maybe even play a game of spades, and just enjoy the here and now.

Here are some of those reasons.

Because you need moments of silence and relaxation to gain perspective and find your center

If you could do a global poll on the topic, you’d probably find that almost everyone likes the idea of being centered and balanced, and in touch with their true inner self.

The thing is, you don’t find your center or develop those deeper insights by always trying to maximize productivity by another few percentage points.

Instead, you achieve these things through regular moments of silence and relaxation, where your mind can wander and then go a bit more still for a time.

In his book, “Silence in the Age of Noise,” the famous Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge states that he feels moments of silence are essential for living a balanced, deep, rich and exciting life. And he’d probably know since he was the first man to walk solo to the South Pole.

Because if you’re only thinking about productivity, you’ll miss out on a lot of the most meaningful things in life

“Productivity” can take you a pretty long way, with regards to things like your career success, and your ability to improve various aspects of your life via pursuing meaningful goals.

What an emphasis on productivity can’t do, though, is to forge deep interpersonal connections between you and your loved ones, or give your life a sense of meaning.

While it’s all very well to take analytical steps when saving up for a traxxas rustler xl-5, for example, it’s vitally important to also spend time not thinking about productivity at all, so that you can nurture those more meaningful parts of your life.

Because inspiration and insight often come when you’re not looking for them

Even if we’re talking in terms of your ability to succeed a your career, or to really put your best foot forward when working on a particular personal project, it’s important to keep in mind that inspiration and insight — those things that so often make all the difference — often come about most powerfully when we aren’t looking for them at all.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, for example, attributed some of his greatest insights to the fact that the university that employed him allowed him to play around as he liked, instead of checking that he was always doing “serious work.”

Taking a step back can often reveal a lot that’s of real value.