Lazy Life

Why procrastination can be good:

the truly creative mind requires this kind of clutter, Kelly argues. The act of rumination—of wending through competing streams of thought, examining long-forgotten memories, elliptically orbiting an idea again and again—is crucial to imagination, and a militant focus on getting work done eliminates the hours we need to indulge in these processes. Procrastination is productive, in its own way. More important, it reclaims the space our culture is ceding to an unrelenting work ethic. Annabel doesn’t finish her paper by the novel’s conclusion; she ends the day with just a few scattered notes on Shakespeare’s sonnets. But the time she spent thinking about it (and about other things) isn’t wasted—and neither is the reader’s. Ambling through a novel like this one inspires connections, epiphanies, excitement. These in-between moments when nothing tangible gets done are full of internal effort; rushing through them denies us one of the major delights of being alive.

To make time, learn how to waste time...