Sometimes, being idle is healthy

WHEN an executive from a high-tech corporation was being shown through Microsoft’s offices in Seattle, he saw somebody with his feet up on his desk, staring dreamily out of the window. The visiting executive said that his office had no room for people who dream while working and that if the person in question had been in his office, he would have received the sack. The Microsoft manager however clarified the situation. He said, "He’s probably doing what we are paying him for…thinking." This caught the executive off-guard.

Conventional wisdom says that a full schedule with every minute accounted for and with no wasted time is the key to success in life. The question then arises – when does one think? Surely not during office meetings, or when you have a pile-up of working papers to handle or customers to see or when you have voluminous e-mail or telephone messages, letters or faxes to go through.

In one incident, a senior staff recalled how he had been embarrassed by a consultant in an unusual way. He was explaining to him how busy he was by showing his appointment calendar, which had no white (unoccupied) space left. Rather than being impressed, the consultant looked at him and asked, "When do you think?"

In his busy schedules he had been fully engrossed in the administrative work of his office without sparing any time to seriously think about how to improve the business or get an edge on the competition. He had been endlessly struggling to keep the boat afloat, not realising that he was heading for the waterfalls where his otherwise perfect boat would topple over.

Today, the majority of effective business executives keep some open and unstructured time in their normal working day. They schedule unscheduled time so as to have enough uninterrupted time to think. In this time they muse in their rooms, wander around the building to talk to workers or watch audio-visual business improvement guides on television.

Thinking constructively to contemplate issues is different from simply sitting idle in one’s office and thinking about problems or bygones. In Tanzania, one often sees workers idling or chatting away during office hours which by all means is unproductive. Spending time constructively is like what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said that an average person thinks once a year and that his own brilliance came from the fact that he did some thinking once a week.