how to be busy

How to Be Busy: Unhurried Living for Chaotic Lifestyles shows how to find calm during seasons when you simply can’t be busy. Clear some space that goes beyond decluttering. Sometimes you have to be busy if you have those to care for or jobs to work.

Learn how to be busy but slowly. Learn how to eliminate digital distractions and find tough-love tips for unhurrying your busy days, with end-of-chapter tips on how to be busy well.

Core Principles of Slow Living

  • Mindfulness: Being present in each moment reduces stress and increases awareness.
  • Sustainability: Choosing to consume and live in ways that are environmentally conscious.
  • Intentionality: Making deliberate choices that focus on quality, not quantity.

Dutch People Are Masters of ‘Doing Nothing!’

nothing is instant Kartika Paramita

Kartika Paramita

Niksen is the Dutch concept of ‘doing nothing’. This is a very interesting concept, because we learn that Dutch children (the happiest in the world) don’t do homework!

They also are pretty much given their own freedom, with parents not thinking there’s a child attacker on every street. Families don’t use smartphones or tablets when in a room together, there’s a lot we can learn from them.

So many people these days exhaust themselves, by doing something. Obviously doing something is good when you should be doing something (paramedics and even growing vegetables). But don’t do something, when you should be doing nothing!

This way of living is an antidote to the modern world, filled with what the late anarchist lecturer called Bullshit Jobs (a book for anyone whose heart sinks at the sight of a whiteboard, or believes that ‘workshops’ should only be for making things). You know these type of jobs – ones that endure simply because they help powerful people – lobbyists, telemarketers, bailiffs etc.

A Man Who Does Nothing – for a Living!

rental person who does nothing

Rental Person Who Does Nothing is a fascinating book. The true story of a man in Japan who literally rents himself out to ‘do nothing’ for most of the time.

Services he offers are for things that actually matter: he goes to restaurants with people who don’t want to eat alone, is the other player in a board game or keeps a space in the park for someone to come view the cherry blossom.

Shoji (a Japanese earthquake expert) started his own ‘job’ to offer services for the lonely and socially anxious, after a boss told him that he contributed nothing, and it made no difference whether he showed up to work or not.

So he wondered if a person who ‘does nothing’ could still have a place in the world. With one tweet, his Rental Person service was born.

He now rents himself out for useful services, to help others. This can be listening to a secret that someone needs to reveal, ‘testing’ how it would be to have someone live with you, or even wave goodbye if you leave a train station for a long journey.

The rest of the time – he does nothing!

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