How to do nothing, on purpose
Quiet Wall ·
Doing nothing is harder than it sounds. What it means to do it on purpose, where the idea comes from, and how to start with ten minutes and a wall.
What doing nothing means
Not resting in front of a screen, not meditating, not napping. Doing nothing means a stretch of time with nothing added to it: no phone, no podcast, no task, no technique. You sit, or stand at a window, and let the time pass without filling it.
It sounds like a non-event. For most people it is the hardest ten minutes of the day.
Where the idea comes from
The Dutch have a word for it: niksen, to do nothing. The journalist Olga Mecking wrote about it in a widely shared New York Times piece in April 2019, and then a book, Niksen, published in the UK in 2020 and in the US in 2021.
The same spring, the artist Jenny Odell published How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Her book is about taking attention back from the things built to hold it, more than about sitting still, but its title has become the phrase people look up.
Why it is so hard
Every gap in a day now has something ready to fill it. A queue, a bus, a kettle coming to the boil: each used to be a minute of nothing, and each is now a minute of phone.
So the first thing anyone notices when they try is the urge. A minute in, the hand wants something to hold. Five minutes in, there is a sudden list of things that need checking. That urge is not a sign of doing it wrong. It is what doing nothing is up against.
How to do it
- put the phone in another room, or face down across this one
- sit somewhere with little to look at; a blank wall is ideal, for reasons on stare at a wall
- set a timer, so you are not checking the time
- add nothing: no music, no book, no plan for what to think about
- when the urge to do something comes, let it come, and stay where you are
What to expect
Thoughts, mostly, and more of them than expected, in no particular order. Then often a stretch where very little happens at all. People tend to describe coming back calmer than they sat down. Some sessions are restless from start to finish, and those count just the same. There is nothing to get right.
How often
Ten minutes, at a time you will keep: after work, before dinner, the first gap of the afternoon. A short stretch most days is closer to the point than a long one once a month, because the point is to make an empty minute ordinary again.
A timer for nothing
Quiet Wall is built for exactly this. A reminder arrives, you tap once, the phone goes across the room, and you look at a blank wall until a sound brings you back. No voice, no technique, nothing to learn.
What is the art of doing nothing?
Leaving a stretch of time empty on purpose: no screen, no task, no input. The Dutch have a word for it, niksen.
How do you do nothing?
Put the phone out of reach, sit somewhere with little to look at, set a timer, and stay there without adding anything until it ends.
Read on
- Dopamine detox — what the quiet is for, and what it is not
- Digital detox — removing the input, not just the apps
- Stare at a wall — why a blank wall, and how to be bored again