On Being Productively Unproductive

A busy mind is a good mind

Modern world’s mad obsession with productivity has reached crazy new heights with the advent of AI.

What is ChatGPT if not a productivity tool?

And I welcome it.

Being blissfully idle and daydreaming to the point of catastrophic dystopia to suddenly getting jolted back to the mundanities of reality is what I’ve specialized in since my tumultuous teenage years.

So, bring it on!

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ChatGPT or not, we all want to be productive. We want to get more done and want to optimize the hell out of our time on earth.

And I’ve been a productivity nerd for, like, forever. I absolutely love optimizing every tiny aspect of my life to save that tiny sliver of time and that tiny inconvenience that would’ve resulted from not optimizing that tiny aspect.

The problem is that all this optimization leads me to spending more time in that “blissfully idle and daydreaming to the point of …” zone more frequently than I’d like.

I love philosophising and for that an idle mind is a privilege like no other.

But an idle mind’s also a beast that can prove to be difficult to handle. If you ask me, it’s the root cause of most human anxieties.

So how do I stop being productively unproductive?

What is the point of all this productivity if I can’t productively use the extra time I get? (you see what I did there)

After all time is the most important asset they say. You can’t ever get back lost time.

And I don’t want to lose it. Not one bit.

But I feel like I am drowning in this ocean of extra time that I end up with.

I gotta swim out and get my legs dirty in the beach sand again. Maybe make that sand castle which I didn’t earlier because I thought what’s the point.

Gotta stop thinking.

Gotta get busy.

A busy mind is a good mind. A busy life is a good life.

Vipassana can wait. And so can the idling.