PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT | WRITING

Are You Using Your Downtime Smartly? Why Not Try Creative Lollygagging

There is virtue in work, and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither. -Alan Cohen

Have you asked yourself every day if you are being smart when having your downtime as a writer?

Let me define first the term, downtime for a person. It is the time when you can relax or your idle time when you don’t do much work. As the Cambridge Dictionary states:

The time when you relax and do not do very much.

On the other hand, the term lollygagging is having some dilly-dally, dawdling, loafing around, or goofing off. If you’re lollygagging, you’re wasting time by moving slowly or doing something less important than what you should be (or doing nothing at all).

Both terms are almost related in one way or another. As they are referring to the time when we are not doing our writing tasks.

A Writer’s Availability

Every single day we spend in our lives as writers, is composed of our uptimes and downtimes. Yet, due to the number of tasks we have each day we forget to assess ourselves if we are really doing our best especially as a newbie writer like me.

We become obsessed primarily with our uptime of creating content. Due to this obsession, we forget and don’t realize that our writing process becomes poor in quality.

We get to the point that we mostly favor just creating more and more articles but not thinking if we are helpful to our readers or not.

This usually comes from burnout, overwhelming tasks in front of us like aspiring to submit to many publications at the same time to earn more than to help more. Thus, we lose the quality of writing that we have promised ourselves beforehand in this profession.

Our Brain Is Like A Rubber Band

If we let ourselves unfailingly beaten by burnout, our brain mainly suffers.

This results in the enlargement of an almond-shaped part of our brain called the amygdala which helps us process fear and emotions.

According to the World Health Organization,

“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

If our brain is constantly exposed to burnout it becomes like a stretched rubber band. As K.M. Weiland says it all,

Your brain is like a rubber band. Stretch it too hard for too long, and it’ll either snap or end up so limp it won’t hold anything together.

Now, here comes our number one enemy, and that is the writer’s block or simply called mental block.

To Spark Fresh New Ideas Be Idle

The ultimate solution for your brain to rejuvenate completely from burnout only goes to being idle for once in your life.

Do N.O.T.H.I.N.G.

Yes, I am seriously talking to you, Dear One.

The obvious and most profound solution to being drained from fresh ideas is by doing nothing, but not necessarily meant as in “nada.”

I have come across a post that fascinated me which I can’t stop thinking about, even when I am doing the house tasks like washing the dishes, mopping the floor, listening to my favorite music, chopping vegetables for dinner’s soup, or doing stationary biking.

Honestly, I really can’t direct my thoughts to take a rest about it that I decided to write an article and yes, this is it!

Is Creative Lollygagging For You, Too?

Unknowingly, I am on my own way of creative lollygagging myself. I was not doing my usual writing work, but I have noticed that while I am performing not-so-intense tasks, my mind was wandering off somewhere as if writing on a blank slate, deeply immersed in my thoughts, that I have formed and created a new post. Hell ya!

Slowly and quite enjoying my found solitude while doing my sometimes hated (I admit really) and boring duties, I have finally decided to write, visualize and finally finish it, from the title, down to the introduction, the body of the post, and the ending or conclusion.

Mind you that happened only at the back of my mind.

Letting my imagination take its toll on a fresh new idea, like lathering it fully until it forms into a mass of bubbly ideas and later getting it ready to get rid of a reader’s ignorance of a topic or two.

As the famous novelist Michael J. Vaughn says in his interesting article;

“The key to successful lollygagging is to do it creatively. So what makes lollygagging creative lollygagging? Let’s look at the basic elements. First, consider activity. We are not talking about sitting around on a couch. Just as a satellite dish needs electricity, you need some blood pumping into that brain. Next, consider low focus. The activity shouldn’t be so intense that you don’t have time to think (Grand Prix and ice hockey are out). Look for a mellow pursuit, surrounded by low-level distractions.”

You can, of course, do this during your downtime, that is whatever you are doing at any time of the day, waiting at a bus stop, buying your coffee and waiting in line, or just simply strolling outside, you can have your downtime be remarkable.

Here Are Some Creative Lollygagging You Can Try Yourself

Pick some activities that are of low concentration that you can spend alone while a part of your brain does some inferring. Below are just some I can think of and have tried myself.

!. Making your bed

2. Kayaking

3. Brisk walking

4. Jogging

5. Doing situps

6. A train trip

7. Mowing your lawn

8. Watering your garden

9. Flying a kite

10. Beating drums

As Melody Beattie says,

”We need to build downtime into our lives, so that we can have solitude without feeling overcome with guilt.”

If we accept the fact that we are just humans who suffer burnout, we will come to discover that having a scheduled downtime gives us new ways to ignite our brains to produce fiery thoughts and create quality posts in time.

Soon, we will start to love performing our boring home chores, and running errands and the like, and even relish our solitary brief walks in the early morn getting a breath of some fresh air.

You see,

Life is all about balance. You don’t always need to be getting stuff done. Sometimes its perfectly okay and absolutely necessary, to shut down, kick back and do nothing.

So, why not try it? If it works for me, it might work for you, too.

©2020 Josh Balerite Acol All Rights Reserved