Reading multiple choice

There is a particular kind of panic that arrives when your calendar looks too empty. It’s not dramatic, not the sort that sends you running, but it hums under the skin: a suspicion that you are forgetting something, or worse, that you are becoming irrelevant. I used to treat free time like an administrative error. If a meeting was cancelled, I would immediately fill the gap with a phone call, a task, a list—anything that could be described as ‘useful’. Sitting still felt like a moral failure, as if idleness were a character flaw rather than a condition of being human.

The irony was that I wasn’t actually producing more. I was producing evidence. Evidence that I was committed, that I was ‘on it’, that I had the sort of energy that organisations claim to admire. My days became a performance of competence: email replies within minutes, a constant stream of small updates, a habit of saying yes even when I meant ‘please don’t’. I told myself I was building a career; in truth, I was building a cage made of tiny obligations. If you had asked me at the time, I would have insisted I was choosing it. Looking back, I’m not sure choice is the right word when the alternative is to feel anxious and exposed.

The shift began, absurdly, with a broken laptop. It died on a Tuesday morning, taking with it a half-finished report and my ability to ‘just quickly’ do anything. The repair shop promised forty-eight hours, which sounded less like a timetable and more like a sentence. I considered borrowing a colleague’s device, then realised what I was really trying to avoid: two days in which I might have to think without immediately turning those thoughts into outputs. With no screen to hide behind, I did the unthinkable and went for a walk in the middle of the day, telling myself it was research, because that made it acceptable.

I wandered through a park I had passed hundreds of times without entering. It was late autumn, the kind of afternoon when the light seems to be deciding whether to stay. At first I did what I always do: I narrated the walk in my head, turning it into a story about efficiency. But after a while the narration faded. I noticed details that were not, strictly speaking, actionable: the uneven rhythm of a jogger’s breath, the way a child negotiated with a stubborn kite, the precise indignation of a squirrel being watched. None of this could be emailed or measured, and yet it felt strangely nourishing. It was as if my attention, usually treated like a resource to be exploited, had been returned to its rightful owner.

The next day, something even more unsettling happened: I had an idea. Not a ‘we should schedule a meeting’ idea, but a clear, simple solution to a problem my team had been circling for weeks. It arrived while I was making tea, not while I was ‘deep in work’. I remember standing there, holding the mug, slightly offended on behalf of my hardworking self. The implication was uncomfortable. If my best thinking appeared when I stopped forcing it, what did that say about my devotion to constant effort? I wanted to dismiss it as coincidence, but the pattern repeated. The moments I had labelled unproductive were quietly doing the heavy lifting.

Of course, the modern workplace is not designed to reward this. We praise ‘hustle’ because it is visible, and visibility is easy to manage. A person who is always busy can be trusted, or so the logic goes; a person who takes a long lunch might be plotting an escape. Even the language is suspicious: we ‘spend’ time, ‘save’ time, ‘waste’ time, as if it were money and we were always at risk of bankruptcy. I began to notice how often people apologised for pauses—‘Sorry, I just need a minute’—as though reflection required permission. Meanwhile, we rarely apologise for rushing, even when it leads us to decisions that need to be undone later.

I tried an experiment. For two weeks, I built empty space into my day the way I used to build in meetings. Fifteen minutes after finishing a task, I didn’t immediately start another; I stared out of the window, wrote in a notebook, or simply did nothing at all. I expected to feel guilty, and I did, at first. But I also noticed how quickly my mind began to tidy itself. Problems that had seemed complicated became smaller when I gave them room. Conversations at work improved because I was less impatient to reach a conclusion. I didn’t become a different person; I became a less frantic version of the same one. Interestingly, my output didn’t collapse. If anything, it became more coherent, as though the work had been allowed to take shape before being pushed into the world.

I’m not arguing for laziness dressed up as philosophy, nor pretending that everyone has the luxury of unstructured time. Some jobs are relentless, some lives are crowded, and telling people to ‘slow down’ can sound like advice from someone who has never worried about rent. But I do think we have accepted a narrow definition of productivity that suits systems more than it suits humans. The older I get, the more I suspect that a good life—and even a good career—is not built solely from effort, but from judgment: knowing when to act and when to wait. The empty spaces are not gaps to be ashamed of. They are where your mind catches up with your life, and where, if you’re lucky, you remember why you started running in the first place.