In our relentless pursuit of productivity, we’ve developed a peculiar relationship with time—measuring it, optimizing it, lamenting its scarcity. “He’s such a hard worker,” we say, or “she’s always the first to arrive and the last to leave.” What emotions arise when you encounter such phrases? Some might identify with them proudly, while others, like myself, experience something closer to an eye roll. Yet these expressions persist as compliments, albeit sometimes ambivalent ones, in our evaluation of work and workers.
Perhaps more unsettling is how we’ve internalized these metrics socially. Statements like “I’m so busy,” “I don’t have time for anything,” or wishing days had 48 hours aren’t just accepted—they’re proclaimed with a kind of suffering pride. When we make such declarations, we’re essentially boasting, though it appears we’re complaining1. This phenomenon suggests that quantity of time has become a measure of self-worth, not just work value.
the paradox of time: diagnosis
Our relationship with time harbors a dangerous fallacy: that time dedicated equals work quality and competence. This blatant untruth continues to be nourished by business schools and their celebrated management “theorists” who reinforce paradigms where urgency, speed, and scarcity reign supreme: do more, faster, with less2. Organizations perpetually cycle through wellness initiatives—from workplace happiness to employee wellbeing, from psychological safety to mental health—not as ends in themselves, but as instruments to ensure people spend more time working and thinking about work, albeit under more appealing banners.
These “dead ideas” of management aren’t solely responsible for our distorted relationship with time. Our obsessions with productivity and efficiency commonly intrude, contributing to experiencing time as linear and finite—something that’s running out, something we’re losing3. Every moment becomes measured by what we believe we’re producing. All time spent in the office carries the expectation—from ourselves and others—that it must be useful time, time spent creating and producing.
This demand to produce something useful with our time deprives us of the possibility to engage with things that are useless yet important, perhaps even fundamental4. This thinking has become so pervasive that we now plan our leisure and vacation time using the same paradigms and tools—like Excel, to-do lists, and project management apps—we employ while working. “If I have limited vacation time, much less than my working hours, I must plan it well to maximize enjoyment.” Does this statement not strike you as strange and paradoxical?
the origins of productivity obsession: etiology
How did we arrive at this condition where even our leisure must be optimized? The origins lie partly in the industrial revolution’s mechanization of time. When the factory whistle replaced the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset, human activity became measurable, standardized, and commodified. Time transformed from an experience into a resource—something to be spent, saved, or wasted.
The English poet John Keats offered a prescient antidote to this utilitarian conception of time in his notion of “negative capability”—the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without irritably reaching for facts and certainty. This state of receptive openness, of being rather than doing, has largely vanished from our achievement-oriented culture. We’ve lost the ability to value what appears useless precisely because it doesn’t conform to productivity metrics.
This perspective creates a dialectical tension: our thesis of productivity culture generates its antithesis in alienation and stupidity. The potential synthesis lies not in rejecting work entirely, but in rediscovering what emerges when we abandon the direct pursuit of productivity. Throughout history, our most significant breakthroughs have often emerged from seemingly “useless” activities—Newton’s contemplation under apple trees, Einstein’s thought experiments, or Archimedes’ insights during his bath. The mind at play often accomplishes what the mind at work cannot. John Cleese puts this brilliantly in his proposal of our “open and closed modes” - a distinction between the purposeful, stress-driven 'closed mode' where we execute tasks efficiently, and the playful, contemplative 'open mode' where creativity and insight flourish. His observation that our most significant breakthroughs occur when we create space for the open mode aligns perfectly with the paradoxical utility of uselessness.
the bureaucracy of stupidity: pathology
The absurdity of our relationship with time and productivity becomes particularly evident when we examine bureaucracy in the workplace. In his brilliant compendium, “The Natural History of Stupidity,” Paul Tabori dedicates an entire chapter to bureaucracy. Driven by desires for control and delusions of grandeur fostered by hierarchical structures, bureaucrats create rules, procedures, and dense layers of stupidity that impede lucidity and the free flow of common sense in human relationships.
Anthropologist David Graeber expanded on this phenomenon in his works “Bullshit Jobs” and “The Utopia of Rules,” where he documents the proliferation of meaningless work created not to fulfill human needs but to maintain systems of control. One example Graeber shares involves an employee who detected a problem with his desk and, following protocol, contacted the department responsible for repairs. The carpenter assigned to the task was delayed. After a week of daily calls, the employee received a call from a newly hired person informing him that the carpenter had received the request but was delayed due to the volume of requests. Remarkably, this company hired someone to manage the carpenter’s schedule because he was too busy—rather than hiring a second carpenter to address the volume of requests. In the minds of those responsible, this made perfect sense.
In the 1940s through 1960s, futurists dreamed that the workweek would eventually be reduced to fifteen hours. Advances in automation, computers, and other machines would bring us closer to the ideal many have sought since humans began contemplating their existence: living without the necessity of work. However, these visionaries failed to account for the scope, creativity, and timelessness of human stupidity. Resistance to change—or rather, the blind need to maintain the status quo—leads us to idiotically occupy the space we create and the time we save. The notion persists that we will be liberated through work. And paradoxically, this desire for freedom makes us build increasingly sophisticated cells.
the absurdity in action
In my own early professional experience, I was tasked with converting texts into a format comprehensible to store operators. Given a week to complete this uninspiring task, I naively decided to finish it as quickly as possible—completing it in just two days. I was then reading an article at my desk when approached by the person who had assigned me the work. I’ll never forget the disappointment and indignation that crossed their face. Despite being well-executed, the task wasn’t supposed to be completed so quickly. Now they had nothing for me to do, and it was “unacceptable that I was doing nothing on their time.” Their time? This was my first encounter with the notion that when working for others, “ownership of time” (if this concept even makes sense) is exchanged for a salary. By finishing early, I’d created a problem: they needed to invent something to keep me occupied. The solution, using appropriate jargon5: “Do exactly the same thing but experiment with different layouts.” I complied, allowing myself to be stupefied.
In this idiotic work world, effectiveness isn’t rewarded. Apparently, aspects like owning others’ time and the power derived from it are more valued. Therefore, a clever worker with a minimal sense of effort economy won’t do their best. They’ll do just enough to give the impression they’re doing something useful with time that, after all, isn’t theirs.
when useless becomes useful: treatment
Two very different books were fundamental to stimulate my thinking about these themes: the already referred Paul Tabori’s “The Natural History of Stupidity” and Nuccio Ordine’s “The Usefulness of the Useless.” Despite their differences in nationality, era, and style, both authors turned to history to find the foundations and examples that embody their ideas.
One extraordinary aspect of books is the possibility of finding and creating associations and connections with other texts, with our experiences, and with situations we observe in others. All this happens through the reflections and emotions that reading awakens in us. This seems useless, doesn’t it? Perhaps, but it might be interesting or important. These particular readings allowed me to make a connection I hadn’t made before, at least not from this perspective: human stupidity is intimately linked to the utility-inutility dichotomy. Much of the most grandiose stupidity produced by humanity was created by attributing utility to what is absolutely useless.
The workplace perpetuates one of the most difficult forms of stupidity to detect. For this very reason, it’s a stupidity we frequently encounter. I’m referring to a phenomenon that I believe all readers of this text have felt at some point—I hope not constantly, as that wouldn’t be a good sign. Doing something you believe to be useful when, in reality, there’s no utility in it whatsoever. Today’s work world excels at creating conditions to convince us that what we do is useful. In many cases, it isn’t. It’s merely something someone invented because they believed we needed something to do. In turn, that person may also be subject to the same by someone higher in the hierarchy. Stupid, isn’t it?
the technology of distraction
The various technologies and communication forms that have become ubiquitous make our presence ubiquitous and our attention dispersed. The combination of these two characteristics is having a dangerous effect on our species: we’re forgetting how to be present and, consequently, forgetting how to think in a certain sense; we’ve ceased knowing how to contemplate and how to elaborate on what we contemplate.
Many of our experiences are now mediated by metal, plastic, and glass parallelepipeds with high-definition cameras and screens. One need only look around in any restaurant or attend a concert to realize that devices with the potential to free us from the constraints of the physical world can distance us to such an extent that we become trapped in the digital world, in some “cloud,” far from the experience happening around us, counting the number of likes we receive. This way of experiencing the world and reality is forcing us to associate a quantitative dimension (counting) with the quality of any experience—the same thing that happens with time6.
As our devices fragment our attention and quantify our experiences, we find ourselves trapped in a closed loop of productivity metrics and digital performance. Yet this technological entrapment contains within it the seeds of its own transcendence—by revealing the emptiness of perpetual productivity, it invites us to consider an alternative relationship with time and attention.
liberation through uselessness: prognosis
Ordine’s manifesto demonstrates how acquiring freedom and developing the capacity to surrender to the useless can bring us great benefits. One of these is combating human stupidity, beginning with ourselves. However, I believe we’ll gain little if we don’t question the utility of what we do. For this, we’ll probably need to dedicate ourselves to reflections that others will consider completely useless. And for this, as Tabori tells us in the final lines of his book, we must have the will to cure ourselves of our own stupidity.
During vacation periods, are you able to completely “disconnect,” as they say in workplace jargon7? But before that, how did this desire and need to disconnect become installed in us? What do we connect to when we disconnect from work? It seems we have limited plugs and cables, and in a certain sense, that’s true. We need to sleep, to disconnect consciousness, to recover energy. Like time, our energy also has a limit. I believe a good relationship with time will involve knowing how to connect this dimension with our energy. But this subject deserves dedicated reflection.
For now, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, merely counting time doesn’t allow us to assess its quality. Much needs to change for work time to be viewed and experienced differently. Starting with rethinking how work is contracted, where, very basically, we surrender occupation of part of our time in exchange for money; we can move toward a set of perspective changes that, above all, each of us should and can make in how we live and occupy our time.
We are in a total re-individualization, meaning the individual has to behave like a flawless machine to feed the mega-machine. Today, we’ve even managed to make people sick and feel deeply guilty about it because they’re not working. Leisure is only unpunished if it involves buying something. All non-mercantile leisure, like reading, is highly penalized.
Vasco Santos
(Portuguese psychoanalyst, publisher and cultural commentator, in an interview with "Observador")
How about starting by reading a book that is, from the outset, thoroughly useless for your work, and distributing the reading time throughout your working hours? In embracing such seemingly useless activities, we might discover the paradoxical synthesis—that true utility emerges precisely when we abandon its direct pursuit. The useless, it turns out, may be the most useful thing of all.
Footnotes
- Being tired isn’t a badge of honor in Signal v Noise ↩︎
- Management theory is becoming a compendium of dead ideas, in The Economist ↩︎
- Productivity is dangerous, in The Outline ↩︎
- Tão inútil e tão importante, humor e liderança! in Líder Magazine (So useless and so important, humor and leadership!) - an article exploring how seemingly useless elements like humor can be essential for effective leadership ↩︎
- Chamar os bois pelos nomes - o caso do jargão empresarial (Calling a spade a spade - the case of business jargon) - an article in Portuguese about the obfuscation created by corporate jargon, that will most certainly be one of the essays to be featured in this publication. ↩︎
- On the themes in this paragraph, I recommend reading Byung-Chul Han’s book In the Swarm (Im Schwarm in German, published as No Enxame in Portuguese), which explores how digital communication transforms our social behaviors and attention patterns. ↩︎
- Vídeo “Férias”, Porta dos Fundos - A comedic sketch by “Porta dos Fundos” (Back Door), a popular Brazilian comedy group, satirizing how modern workers struggle to truly disconnect during vacations ↩︎