Member-only story
The Benefits of Doing Absolutely Nothing for Exactly 6 Minutes
Give yourself a microbreak
For many of us new at working from home, there’s a peripheral, palpable energy about our days that didn’t exist when we were going into an office pre-pandemic. For me, it starts right when I wake up, and it doesn’t end until my kids are in bed. It’s 14 hours of buzzzzz. It doesn’t feel draining exactly, but it complicates a workday that’s already complicated.
Forge’s resident time-management expert Laura Vanderkam recently wrote a popular story on how to feel calm despite that buzz. She endorsed taking three short breaks each day—one physical, one spiritual, one social. It’s the kind of advice we love at Forge: easy to implement yet potentially transformative.
But there’s another kind of break I’ve been experimenting with — one with no purpose at all. It’s an impromptu, emergency break that allows me to unburden myself of whatever pressures I’m experiencing and my brain to perform the kind of mental processing that comes more naturally to the brains of humans. It’s six minutes of nothing, starting right now.
“Nothing” is subjective, of course. For you, it might mean a kind of rest or meditation with your eyes closed. Or maybe with your eyes open. (Note: Either of these moves will creep people out.) The point is that…
