What To Do When You Have Nothing To Do

Guess what I did last Monday?

Absolutely nothing.

OK, that’s a lie. I woke up at 7 a.m. and was out the door with a grocery list by 8 a.m. I took my sweet ass time in Whole Foods, inspecting bags of clementines like the feds. Once I got home, I diiiid send a few emails and answer a calendar invite. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I had nothing to do.

Winter is a slow season for many of us, especially people with small businesses like mine that primarily work with other solo entrepreneurs. Winter is a hibernation season, a time where, as the brilliant Kate Northrup put it at this year’s Business By Design Live, “the Earth dedicates an entire season to rest.”

Maybe you’re like me at the moment, in-between big clients and restructuring the way you do business. Maybe you own or operate a brick-and-mortar location and know the chillier weather keeps customers bundled up at home. Maybe you work in an office or agency and are feeling the end-of-Q4 blues.

Or maybe you’re bug-eyed right now, wondering Who TF are these people with free time?! because you’re in retail or e-commerce and still recovering from Black Friday, Cyber Monday AND Small Business Saturday. (I see y’all. Save this blog for February.)

Whatever the reason for your slow season, it’s nerve-wracking to feel like you have no idea what to do next. I know for me — an anxious 25-year-old with student loans — I sometimes feel like if I don’t make money every day, something is surely about to go terribly wrong.

So before you make up tasks just to feel productive or resign yourself to Netflix and rewatching your own Instagram story, take a look at a few practices I’ve learned to implement when I want to intentionally do nothing.

Take a moment to be grateful.

How many days this year did you spend daydreaming about an empty calendar or a skimpy to-do list? How many times in the next few months do you imagine you’ll be absolutely swamped with deadlines and chores?

It seems obvious, but in a slow period it’s important to reframe your anxious thoughts. Practice gratitude — no, really, say it out loud! — for this moment of peace.

Practice real self-care.

Clean your room, re-do your budget, plan out the next few months — whatever that big task is you’ve been avoiding, now is the time to break it up into small pieces and create a space to get it done joyfully.

What do I mean by that? How can budgeting be joyful? Easy: By turning it into a treat.

Maybe you put on your favorite record while you take down a big scary spreadsheet or log into a portal you’d rather avoid. Maybe you get stoned and watch your favorite Disney movie while you finally fold that big pile of laundry.

Whatever you do, give yourself permission to do it at whatever pace and in whatever order you want. If an inner voice starts critiquing you about taking soooo long to get around to this task or how you must be soooo irresponsible to let it get to this point, politely ask the voice to be quiet and stop messing up the vibes.

Remember: Self care is not all bubble baths and shopping sprees, but it should always be a ritual, not a chore. If you feel like you’re forcing yourself to do something, do nothing instead. Just make one small commitment: If you’re avoiding a task because it’s making you miserable, promise yourself that you will actually doing nothing instead — not scroll through Instagram instead.

Do the thing you do.

The deeper into my career I get, the more I’ve grown to accept that writing is just what I do. Whatever form it takes (journaling, blogging, scripting), and whatever job title I craft around it (copywriter, eLearning developer, editor-in-chief), at the end of the day, I sit down and write. That is what I do. This is my deep work.

I’ve tried all kinds of routines, but I’m a Sagittarius and an enneagram 7, so no rigid ritual ever sticks for long. And that’s fine. Because even if it’s been two weeks or two months, when I come back to a blank page, I make magic happen.

Had I been in meetings all day on Monday, or had a to-do list the length of a CVS receipt, I might not have found the 4:36 p.m. urge to start churning out this blog post on the legal pad my roommate stole from work for me. And that would have been a shame, because so far this blog rules.

The next section will give you an approach to structuring your time, but I can’t share a “best practice” without also encouraging you to be flexible and self-compassionate with yourself. The secret to getting things done is not the method, it’s your mindset. Don’t let a rigid routine get in the way of that.

Brainstorm a task list, then block out your time.

Obviously there is never actually nothing to do. A free-ish week is a great time to practice calendar blocking, the process of reserving blocks of time to focus on specific tasks.

You may find, while doing the thing you do, that doing so puts you in a flow state, which in turn opens up a floodgate of good ideas and sparks a list other things to do. Instead of letting this overwhelm you, write these ideas down in whatever form they appear. Here’s what came up for me while I was writing this article:

• Make an Instagram slide post on working from home with depression
• Create an ideal week worksheet PDF
• Write a blog: Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Online
• Come back to this blog posts and update it as I do each of these things ^

Once you have all of your shiny new ideas in a tangible place, you’ll be able to take a critical step back from them and re-evaluate their importance. You’ll notice that some are wider passes — ”Start a YouTube channel” is a heavier task than “Send that Thank You note.”

Group like tasks into 30-minute — 2 hour chunks, then add 30 extra minutes to each task. We tend to overestimate our attention span and bandwidth, and you’ll appreciate feeling like you’re crushing it when you finish early, rather than feeling like a giant pile of trash when you’re scrambling to get through your list.

Next, bring these tasks to your calendar and plot out at least a week’s worth of doing. Here’s my week this week (I planned on Tuesday):

You’ll notice that I still left some chunks of time open — these are the windows of availability I’d like to leave open for client calls, which I schedule through Calendly. Another benefit of calendar blocking: You’ll automatically mark yourself as unavailable during certain periods of time, ensuring you don’t get interrupted during a period of deep work.

Of course, you don’t have to stick to what you plan here. I mean, the only person who’s watching every minute of your time is yourself (and God, s/o to God). But try it out and see how it feels to play with your time.

Even if you ignore every calendar reminder, this exercise in time management will sharpen your understanding of your task list and calendar. It’ll also fuel a self-compassion practice by painting a realistic picture of how much you can actually get done in a week.

When in doubt: Stretch, rest or dance.

There are a lot of methods, hacks and “best practices” I could research and recommend you do with your free time. You could…

• read
• exercise
• take up a side hustle
• attend a goal-setting workshop
• learn a new skill
• go to a networking event
• spend 12 hours straight watching Gilmore Girls on the couch
• call your parents
• do a Sudoku puzzle
• write a 2,000 word Reddit post analyzing your least favorite YouTuber
• online shop
• grocery shop
• go for a walk, or even…
• …download Issue One of Pretty Decent for free!

But! I know from experience that no amount of advice can make me actually do anything. It’s all in my head, and at the end of the day I’m the only one who decides to get out of bed and make it happen.

Therefore, I won’t say outright that you should fill your free time by reading Pretty Decent, even though I think that’s a pretty decent idea.

Instead, just give yourself the freaking permission to do whatever you want. Then do it.

If you really feel paralyzed in indecision, revisit the stretch, rest or dance idea. You really can’t mess up those three.