It’s vitally important to do nothing important at all, once in a while.

This weekend I took an afternoon in which I just relaxed and did something fun for a few hours. It was hard — I wanted to multitask, to do more than just relax. It surprised me how hard that was, as I hadn’t realized how much I’ve been pushing myself. I’d developed a habit again of not sitting still. So on realizing this, I set aside the other things that could wait until the next day, and just did nothing productive in particular for a while.

Luckily I’ve had this quote by my desk to help me fight my feeling that I was somehow wasting the afternoon –

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
– Lin Yutang

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