How to Spend Time Doing Nothing

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Doing nothing is an art as much as it is a science. If you are a student of mathematics you could say that doing nothing is the ultimate quandary because while there are limitless ways to do nothing, there is also only one way to do nothing. So if you’re up for the challenge or if you just don’t care and would rather be left alone; you’re on the right track.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

time
nothing

How to Spend Time Doing Nothing

Step1

Choose Your Venue: The first thing you need to decide, when you’ve decided to do nothing, is to determine where this will take place. It’s not always the easiest thing to consider due to the intense amount of variables. If you’re feeling bold you can choose to do nothing in your own home; the risk being that in your home turf you run the risk of doing things. Even if it’s playing video games, cleaning your home, or watching the cable news networks, that’s still doing something. So in general, when you’re looking to do nothing you should probably pick a place where there’s nothing to do. A park, beach, desert, restaurant when you don’t eat the cuisine, or mall without any money, are all good ideas.

Step2

Embrace Hanging Out: While the overarching idea to doing nothing is just that, the fact is you have to do something. Popular wisdom would indicate that the act of doing nothing may consist of a number of tasks; among them “chilling,” “relaxing,” and “kickin’ it” lead the fray. But if you’re really interested in maximizing your time spent doing nothing then perhaps the best idea would be for the embrace of the general “hanging out.” If you can do that and still do nothing, you’ve got a cult to found (when you’re done, of course).

Step3

Object of Your Inertia: Some of the best, brightest and most talented do nothings were those who were able to spot their target. If you have something to look towards, someone to pine to, or someone to complain about, all the better as you’ll truly be doing something doing nothing. This has been called bitching, complaining, and a number of other things in the past; these hurtful labels should be ignored.

Step4

Get On With It: Once you’ve decided where and decided who and decided what, then you just need to commence that action of inaction. You could cook a bunch of different strange kinds of food, play tricks on other people (or if you’re in a group of do-nothings, you could team up and play tricks on each other) you could pine for love lost, yearn for love sought, roll around on the floor, smoke a joint, pontificate, don’t lose the love drive out the hate…But then, I guess you’d have to be doing all of those things. Better, maybe, to just sit and watch those wheels go round and round.

Tips & Warnings

take it in stride
don't lose the love
drive out the hate

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Comments

Lindaperry said

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on 7/19/2008 That is so funny, a "group of do nothings". Thanks for making me smile. It has always been my policy to do something while doing nothing, basically that is taking a vacation from what one normally does on a day to day basis. And then when changing your focus, it feels like you are doing nothing but you are really doing something.

Just a note to make you smile, if you are alive, you are ALWAYS doing something even when doing nothing. You are always breathing, and living, and being, always. Ha, it takes us creative types to find something to do in doing nothing.
Smiles.

Oh, and that reader, ElleZsen, who said she would rate it but would rather do nothing --She did something! She left a comment. Wow, doing nothing is hard !

Good article. Five stars * * * * *