One hour a day, doing only "useless" things

Last year I made a strange rule for myself: set aside one hour a day for useless things only.

It came out of a question my counselor asked. At the time my efficiency anxiety was at its peak. My schedule was accurate to the half hour and everything on it had to be useful. I listened to courses on the commute, scrolled industry news while eating, and even walked with headphones on, listening to audiobooks. She asked me, "When was the last time you did something purely because you liked it, not for any kind of growth?"

I thought about it seriously, for a long time. I couldn't remember.

I set three criteria for useless. No income, no growth, no posting. It only had to meet one condition: while I was doing it, something in my chest loosened.

My useless hour eventually grew a list. Building Lego, then taking it apart, no photos, no finished object. Copying out poems in the cheapest notebook, bad handwriting be damned. Squatting in the courtyard watching ants move house, twenty minutes at a stretch. Learning to whistle, badly. Brewing a pot of tea that wasn't for my health, just to watch the leaves turn in the water. And spacing out. Spacing out is my favorite item. Zero barrier to entry.

For the first month my efficiency personality mutinied every day. In this hour I could memorize fifty vocabulary words. I could draft an article. I could meet one more client. Once I couldn't hold back and used the hour to fix a slide deck, and afterward I realized it had been the worst day of the week: I was performing for other people even while resting.

Once I got past that month, the changes came quietly. The hour stopped feeling like a hole in the schedule that I kept wanting to fill. On my way to work I started noticing that this year's osmanthus smelled stronger than last year's. I started having genuinely good ideas in meetings, and every one of them was born after the useless hour. I slept better, because I finally admitted a fact: people are not machines. A machine runs once you fill the tank. A person needs blank space.

The value of the useless is precisely that it cashes out into nothing. It's pure profit for yourself. No tax, no report, no requirement to become a better version of you.

What surprised me is that the useless hour reintroduced me to my own family. My daughter is the household's efficiency black hole. She can watch ants for an hour, arrange the leaves she collects into neat arrays, and abandon a drawing halfway through to go look at clouds. I used to hurry her along. Now I understand: she was born knowing what useless is worth, and we adults are the ones who looped the shackles of useful around her, one turn at a time. Sunday afternoons are now our family's useless time. Everyone does their own useless thing and nobody is allowed to ask what it's for.

My husband is the most enthusiastic participant. His useless project is tidying his fishing rods, even though he catches fewer than two fish a year. He says he finally understands that the fishing was never the point. "When I'm wiping down those rods," he says, "I'm king of the world."

At a gathering last year someone asked how I keep myself in good shape. I gave them the counterintuitive answer: I have one hour a day that I spend deliberately wasting. The table laughed, then went quiet, and then someone said, quietly, "I haven't done anything useless in years."