The Great Work of Doing Nothing: When Compulsion Meets Inspiration
"What the f@$*k am I supposed to do?"
John (I'm calling my client John to protect his identity) was staring at his calendar—vast expanses of white space where chaos used to live. For months, he'd been grinding through the operational setup of his business. Every minute accounted for. Every day a sprint through endless to-do lists. And now? Nothing. Well, not nothing. But space. Open, unstructured, terrifying space.
He'd reached the place every builder dreams of: the business running without him constantly putting out fires. But instead of relief, he felt panic. Because when you've defined yourself by how busy you are, what happens when the busyness stops?
The Addiction of Compulsion
Most of us know this feeling. That restless energy that scans for the next task, the next problem to solve, the next email to answer. It's what we call compulsion—that insatiable hunger that no amount of productivity can ever satisfy.
John described it perfectly: "I have this thing where I will constantly go through all of my emails... almost within every waking moment that I'm sitting at my computer, my inbox is zero."
Sound familiar? It's the modern addiction—not to substances, but to the constant feeling of forward motion. We've become so accustomed to the dopamine hit of crossing things off lists that we've forgotten what it feels like to simply be.
But here's the thing: compulsion isn't productivity. It's actually the enemy of our best work.
As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes in Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, "You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it."
The Other Voice
But there's another way ideas come to us. John knew this too—he could feel the difference. There are those moments when inspiration strikes, not from forcing or scanning or checking, but from the opposite. From openness. From space.
"I was driving the other day," John shared, "and then an idea just came to me... and I basically reinvented my whole approach to estate management in the car."
Notice what happened? He wasn't sitting at his computer frantically searching through Notion. He was just driving. Present. Available. And something warm and insightful came through him.
This is the difference between compulsion and inspiration:
Compulsion feels hungry, urgent, never satisfied. It scans endlessly for problems to solve. It's coming from a place of lack, of fear that if we're not constantly doing, we'll somehow cease to exist.
Inspiration feels warm, effortless, complete. It comes through us, not from us. It arises from spaciousness, from presence, from what Pang calls "deliberate rest."
Redefining Work
Here's the radical shift: What if the thing we call "work"—sitting at desks, checking emails, grinding through task lists—isn't actually work at all? What if work is the mountain bike ride, the golf game, the long walk in nature?
This isn't fantasy. It's backed by research. A 2015 workplace survey of 1,989 office workers found the average daily productive work time was only 2 hours 53 minutes. Beyond the famous "10,000-hour rule," Alex Pang found that high performers often needed approximately 12,500 hours of deliberate rest (e.g., naps, leisure) and about 30,000 hours of sleep to support that practice. Even more striking, a 1950s survey of scientists showed that those working 35 hours/week were 50% less productive than those at 20 hours.
"Rest is not work's adversary. Rest is work's partner. They complement and complete each other. Further, you cannot work well without resting well."
The most creative minds in history understood this. Darwin took daily walks. Dickens wandered London for hours. Stephen King writes for four hours in the morning, then stops. They knew that the big ideas, the breakthrough insights, don't come from more effort. They come from less.
As John discovered: "The big ideas are gonna come at those moments, not while I'm sitting there in my email and task list.”
The Experiment
So John designed an experiment. Mornings for what makes him feel alive—workouts, nature, golf. Afternoons for administrative tasks. Evenings for family. He was going to test whether "doing nothing" might actually be the most productive thing he could do.
But here's what's beautiful about this: he wasn't trying to prove anything. He was exploring. He was curious about what would happen if he stopped feeding the compulsion and started listening to inspiration.
The Permission
This requires something our culture doesn't readily give us: permission. Permission to believe that your best work might happen on a hiking trail. Permission to trust that the solution you've been forcing might arise naturally in the shower. Permission to consider that feeling good and doing good work aren't opposites—they're the same thing. When John told his friend he was going to play golf in the middle of a workday, her first response was, "But don't you need to work?" And his old self would have agreed. But his new understanding? That golf game was work. That's where the insights live.
In Practice:
Notice the difference between compulsive thinking and inspired thinking. One feels hungry and urgent. The other feels warm and effortless.
Schedule time for what makes you feel alive. Treat it as seriously as any meeting.
Trust that your best ideas are more likely to come during a walk than during a task-list review.
Experiment with doing less and seeing what wants to emerge from the space you create.
