I, like many of us, need more time to think, to ponder, to piddle around, as my mother ysed to say.
Time not hemmed in by due dates or deadlines, or by the quiet urging 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 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?”
For some of us, the answer is “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 the answer might be: “Nothing. I am doing nothing so there is room for SOMETHING to find its place.”
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 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 to appear.
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- ideas enter the space with ease and clarity.
So, this holiday season, remember that rest, energizing conversations, time spent with family and friends, time spent doing things that you enjoy or simply doing nothing in particular, are necessities.
This downtime fuels creativity by activating your brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), this is where your mind wanders, works behind the scenes, and weaves connections between ideas that don’t look related at first. When you step back—distractions out of reach—stress drops, focus refills, and inspiration gets the breathing room it needs.
And now, I’ll leave you to begin some “piddling around” time of my own,
