I need more time to think, to ponder, to piddle around.
Time not hemmed in by due dates or deadlines, or by the quiet tyranny of expectations—but time that waits for me to meet it. Time in which I can do nothing, or everything, or hover somewhere in between. It is in that in-between space—between thinking and doing—that ideas are born.
When the balance between thinking and doing slips out of alignment, ideas suffer.
Ideas need thinking and doing.
Ideas need both. They need the interior life of reflection and the exterior friction of experience. The doing might be a holiday or a vacation, a looming deadline or a day’s work. It might be movement, disruption, or obligation. But the thinking—that requires a different kind of time. A place where the mind can wander, linger on a thought, and wait patiently for another to arrive.
It is that mindless staring into space that prompts people to ask, What are you doing? What are you looking at?
Internally, the answer is simple: I’m not looking at anything. I’m looking for things. Ideas. Connections. Patterns.
And when asked, What are you doing? the answer might be: waiting. Waiting for an idea to take shape. Waiting for another to appear. Or it might be: nothing. I am doing nothing so there is room for something to find its place.
The Continuum.
If we imagine thinking and doing as points on a continuum—thinking on one end, doing on the other—then the mark that matters most sits somewhere in the middle. Perhaps a third of the way in from thinking, an aggressively thoughtful mode. Or two-thirds thinking, one-third doing. But there is no scenario in which thinking alone is enough.
Thoughts that never leave the mind.
Thoughts that never leave the mind do the world no good. An idea that remains trapped in someone’s head may be the very thing another person—deep in their own thinking time—is waiting for to appear.
Another model.
I’ll propose another model: one that allows for mindless, restorative tasks—activities unrelated to deadlines or the economy, and not quite “thinking” in the traditional sense. In these moments, thinking and doing overlap. They blur. Something quiet but productive happens there, in the space between execution and reflection.
And now, I’ll leave you to enter some thinking time of your own.
Do nothing.
So that something has room.
