You Are Not Obliged to Optimise Yourself.
In Defence of Wasting Time Properly.
The House, Painted By Hand
There is an old anecdote from Neil Gaiman’s blog (from 2009, I hasten to add, well before the allegations made against him came to light) that has lodged itself somewhere in the moral compost heap of my brain.
Gaiman remembers hearing a comics editor complain about an artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor’s objection was not that the house looked bad, or that the artist had climbed a ladder in a high wind while wearing novelty slippers, or that he had accidentally chosen a shade called Tuscan Persimmon and condemned the neighbours to live beside it. The objection was financial. For the money the artist could have earned during those weeks, he could have hired somebody else to paint the house and still come out ahead.
Gaiman’s unspoken reply was wonderfully simple: “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”
This is one of those lines that feels almost too small to contain the thing it contains. It is not a grand manifesto. It does not come with a twelve-point programme, a subscription model, or a downloadable worksheet called Reclaiming Your Paint-Based Agency. It is merely the thought that a person might do something because he wanted to do it.
How quaint. How inefficient. How magnificently suspicious.
The point, of course, is not that everyone should paint their own house. I am not proposing a moral hierarchy in which the righteous scrape skirting boards while the damned outsource the glossing. If you hate painting, are bad at painting, cannot safely paint, or simply have better things to do, then by all means pay someone who knows which end of the brush to hold. There is no dignity in making yourself miserable for the sake of pretending that the middle classes have been corrupted by tradespeople.
The point is smaller and larger than that. Smaller, because it is just about a man painting his house. Larger, because it exposes one of the stranger habits of modern life: the assumption that every choice must be defended as an efficiency calculation.
Under this logic, the question is never simply, did you enjoy it? The question is, did it make sense? Did it maximise your hourly value? Did it support your long-term goals? Did it contribute to your physical health, mental resilience, professional development, personal brand, side-hustle potential, creative practice, networking capacity, domestic optimisation strategy, or at least your ability to return refreshed to the sacred inbox?
To which the only civilised answer is sometimes: no. I just fancied it.
The Case for Getting Things Done
There is, annoyingly, a serious concession to make here.
Efficiency is not wicked. Planning is not a moral failure. It is good to get things done. Some tasks genuinely do need doing; some deadlines matter; some responsibilities become worse if left to fester in the dark like potatoes at the back of a cupboard. A person who refuses all structure in the name of authenticity will, quite quickly, discover that the gas bill has not been moved by their commitment to spiritual freedom.
Nor is self-improvement obviously bad. There are habits worth building, skills worth learning, bodies worth looking after, finances worth managing, relationships worth repairing, and homes worth making less actively hostile to human life. There is nothing noble about avoidable chaos. There is no romance in missing every deadline, losing every document, eating cereal from a mug because all the bowls have achieved archaeological significance in the sink, and calling the whole arrangement a resistance practice.
The serious version of productivity culture appeals because life is genuinely difficult to manage. Work expands. Administration multiplies. Notifications breed in captivity. Every institution, from the bank to the GP surgery to the local council website, appears to have entered into a secret pact to make ordinary life slightly more like filing taxes in a haunted airport.
So yes, we need systems. We need calendars, reminders, routines, lists, limits and the occasional grim afternoon in which we sort out the thing we have been avoiding for six months and discover that it took seventeen minutes. A good productivity method can be an act of mercy. It can reduce friction. It can help us keep promises. It can create enough order that life becomes less exhausting.
The problem is not doing things well.
The problem is when doing things well becomes indistinguishable from optimising the self.
That distinction matters because one is practical and the other is metaphysical. It is one thing to say, I need a better way of managing my time. It is another to say, I am a badly designed human product whose every feature requires upgrading. The first can help you answer emails. The second can turn existence into a permanent performance review.
When Everything Becomes a Metric
The most exhausting thing about productivity culture is not even the advice itself. Much of the advice is fine. Sleep more. Move about. Write things down. Do the difficult task first. Do the easy task first. Batch similar tasks. Do not batch similar tasks. Use your phone. Throw your phone into the sea. Wake at five. Respect your chronotype. Drink water. Do deep work. Touch grass. Put the grass into Notion.
The advice contradicts itself, but that is not the deepest problem. Human beings are contradictory, and any advice that survives contact with actual life will need exceptions, caveats and a certain amount of shrugging.
The deeper problem is the moral atmosphere. The language of optimisation smuggles in a whole theory of the person. You are no longer someone with finite time, strange moods, bodily needs, obligations, pleasures, griefs, friendships, distractions, appetites and occasional inexplicable desires to reorganise a drawer. You are a project. Your attention is capital. Your leisure is recovery. Your recovery is performance maintenance. Your hobbies are skill stacks. Your books are inputs. Your walks are steps. Your meals are fuel. Your friendships are networks. Your personality is content. Your sadness is friction. Your body is an asset. Your life is a portfolio of under-exploited efficiencies.
At that point, even rest becomes suspicious unless it can produce evidence of usefulness. You may nap, but ideally only because sleep improves cognitive performance. You may walk, but ideally while listening to a podcast about leadership. You may cook, but it should support gut health, reduce delivery costs, increase domestic competence, photograph well, and produce enough leftovers to make Thursday less pathetic. You may read a novel, but only if it expands empathy, sharpens prose style, deepens cultural literacy or provides a useful analogy for a future essay. I am not saying I have never done this. I am saying I object to being seen.
This is why the phrase self-care so often has a faintly managerial smell. In its better form, self-care is a humane recognition that people have needs and limits. In its worse form, it means servicing the machine so it can return to work on Monday without making a noise.
There is something bleakly comic about a culture that has learned to defend rest on the grounds that it improves output. It is like defending friendship because it lowers blood pressure, or defending beauty because it may improve regional footfall. The defence is not false, exactly. It is just spiritually deranged.
Rest may well make us more productive. Exercise may well sharpen concentration. A holiday may well prevent burnout. A lunch break may well improve afternoon performance. These are useful arguments in workplaces and policy documents because institutions often require a business case before they will allow human beings to behave like mammals.
But it should worry us if the only acceptable defence of rest is that it eventually pays productivity rent.
Rest Is Not Performance Maintenance
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is useful here because it attacks one of the great fantasies beneath modern productivity advice: the idea that, with the right system, we might one day get everything done. Burkeman frames much productivity advice as encouraging a limit-denying dream in which we become fully optimised masters of our time; his alternative is to accept finitude, choose what to neglect, and organise life around what matters rather than what can be endlessly processed.
This is not a glamorous thought. Nobody wants to buy a productivity book called Some Things Will Remain Unanswered and Eventually You Will Die. It lacks airport appeal. But it has the advantage of being true.
A great deal of productivity culture depends on denying limits while pretending to manage them. It tells us that the problem is not the impossible volume of demands, but our inadequate system. We have not found the correct app. We have not blocked our calendar with sufficient aggression. We have not learned to say no in a tone of voice that suggests both emotional maturity and excellent core strength.
Yet the truth is that a finite life cannot be made infinite by better sorting. There will always be unread books, unanswered messages, unvisited places, unmastered skills, unwritten essays, unstarted projects and people with whom we should probably have been more patient. The human problem is not how to clear the decks. The human problem is how to live on a deck that will never be clear.
That sounds miserable, but it is also a relief. If the fantasy of total completion is false, then the failure to complete everything is not a personal defect. It is a condition of being alive. You are not behind because you have failed to catch up with the universe. The universe was never offering inbox zero.
This changes the moral status of rest. Rest is not a tactic by which you trick yourself into becoming a more efficient worker. Rest is part of life. It is not justified only by what it repairs, improves or enables. Sometimes you are tired because you are tired. Sometimes you should stop because continuing would make you unpleasant, inaccurate, brittle or weirdly emotional about printer settings. Sometimes the correct response to being a person with a body is to lie down.
This should not be radical. It should barely be an argument. Yet here we are, bravely asserting that human beings may sit quietly without first producing a theory of impact.
The Proper Uses of Pointlessness
Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing helps because it refuses the lazy caricature of anti-productivity as mere passivity. Odell is not arguing for sloth, ignorance or a permanent state of decorative collapse. Her argument is about refusing the attention economy’s terms: reclaiming attention, listening, observing, remaining in the world while declining to treat every moment as raw material for extraction. The LSE Review of Books summarises the book as a case for refusing productivity and redirecting attention towards active listening and contemplation, rather than simply doing less.
That is an important distinction. Doing nothing properly is not the same as doing nothing badly.
Doing nothing badly is the grey mush of semi-conscious scrolling; the kind where you look up after forty minutes with the spiritual texture of wet cardboard and a working knowledge of three controversies involving people you do not know. Doing nothing badly is not leisure so much as leakage. Time has passed, but it has not been inhabited.
Doing nothing properly is different. It may look inefficient from the outside because it does not always produce a visible object. But it is not empty. It is the walk where nothing happens except that you notice the angle of the light on a brick wall. It is the conversation that does not advance the plot. It is cooking something slightly too elaborate because the chopping is pleasant. It is reading about a topic you have no intention of monetising. It is sitting in a garden and slowly becoming aware that at least three birds are conducting complicated personal business in the hedge.
These things are not valuable because they secretly make you better at email. They may, incidentally, make you a calmer or more attentive person. Good. Lovely. Put that on the leaflet if necessary. But their first defence is that they are part of being alive.
Kieran Setiya’s distinction between telic and atelic activities gives a useful philosophical backbone to this without requiring us to say the word Aristotle too loudly in a light essay. Telic activities are directed towards completion: finish the article, buy the house, get the promotion, run the race. Atelic activities are valuable in the doing: listening to music, spending time with a friend, walking, thinking, living well. Setiya’s point is not that achievement is worthless, but that achievements are not all that matter; atelic activities locate value in the present rather than postponing fulfilment until the goal has been reached.
This is exactly what optimisation culture struggles to understand. It can cope with painting the house if the goal is a painted house. It struggles with painting the house because painting the house is how you wanted to spend the afternoon. It can cope with running if you are training for a marathon, lowering your resting heart rate or constructing a personal narrative of discipline. It struggles with running because the weather was good and your legs felt like being used. It can cope with reading if the book is improving you. It struggles with reading because the book is there, and you are there, and for once nobody needs to be improved.
The optimised life is embarrassed by activities that do not terminate in a result. It wants everything to point beyond itself. But much of what makes life bearable, and sometimes beautiful, does not point beyond itself. It is not a corridor to something else. It is a room.
Wasting Time Properly
This is where the phrase wasting time needs rescuing.
There is such a thing as wasting time badly. We all know this. There are forms of waste that leave you diminished, not restored; numbed, not rested; irritated, not amused. There are evenings that vanish into the algorithmic sinkhole and leave behind only the faint impression that everyone is angry, everything is discourse, and you have somehow developed an opinion about a minor American podcast host.
But there is also such a thing as wasting time properly.
To waste time properly is to spend it without demanding that it become something else. It is to accept that not every activity needs to justify itself before the tribunal of future usefulness. It is to do something absorbing, pleasurable, restful, social, strange or beautiful without immediately converting it into a lesson, asset or productivity hack.
This is harder than it sounds, because optimisation culture follows us even into our escape routes. The hobby becomes a side hustle. The walk becomes a streak. The book becomes a content plan. The meal becomes a macro balance. The notebook becomes a system. The system becomes a lifestyle. The lifestyle becomes a brand. The brand becomes a tiny exhausting god that must be fed every morning before breakfast.
Even our pleasures are asked to professionalise. A person cannot merely enjoy coffee; they must develop a coffee practice. They cannot merely go to the gym; they must enter a transformative arc. They cannot merely take up pottery; they must open an online shop selling small irregular bowls to people who describe objects as intentional. They cannot merely enjoy a video game; they must be building transferable strategic capacities, unless they are writing an essay about how difficulty functions as atmosphere and world design, in which case apparently it is fine and intellectually important.
Again: I object to being seen.
The point is not that seriousness ruins pleasure. Hobbies can deepen. Skills can improve. Amateur interests can become crafts, and crafts can become vocations. There is nothing wrong with caring about doing something well. In fact, doing something well is often one of the great pleasures of life.
But doing something well is not the same as optimising yourself.
A person who bakes bread because they love baking bread is not the same as a person who has folded bread into a comprehensive programme of disciplined domestic excellence. A person who learns guitar because it is satisfying to make noise in a room is not the same as a person who treats every chord as an investment in personal complexity. A person who paints their house because they want to paint their house is not making a claim about efficiency. They are painting the house.
There is a kind of freedom in allowing an action to remain itself.
Conclusion: A Life Is Not a Workflow
The real objection to optimisation culture is not that it makes us work too hard, although it often does. Nor is it that it makes us feel guilty, although it certainly has a talent for that. The deeper objection is that it narrows the imagination of what a life is for.
It teaches us to see ourselves as bundles of capacity awaiting better management. It turns moral language into managerial language. It makes every limit look like a flaw, every pleasure look like an indulgence, every pause look like a failure to prepare. It tells us that the good life is the streamlined life: frictionless, measurable, disciplined, upgraded, efficient.
But a life is not a workflow.
A life contains work, and work matters. It contains duties, and duties matter. It contains goals, and goals matter too. There are things we owe to other people, things we owe to ourselves, and things that will not be done unless we do them. Nobody sensible is against calendars. Nobody humane is against trying.
But there must be room for forms of value that do not arrive wearing a lanyard.
There must be room for the pointless walk, the unmonetised hobby, the nap that is not a cognitive enhancement strategy, the conversation that solves nothing, the meal cooked slowly for no audience, the book read badly and happily, the afternoon lost to weather, the song played again, the garden stared at, the house painted by hand.
Not because these things make us better products.
Because they are among the reasons being a person is preferable to being a product.
So by all means improve yourself where improvement would help. Learn the skill. Keep the promise. Write the list. Answer the email. Fix the shelf. Make the plan. Paint the house efficiently if efficiency is what the moment requires.
But do not let anyone convince you that every hour must submit a business case.
Some things are worth doing because they are useful. Some things are worth doing because they are good. Some things are worth doing because they are yours. And occasionally, with a brush in one hand and paint on a sleeve you quite liked, you may discover that the correct answer to why are you doing this yourself? is simply:
Because I wanted to.