The Art Of Doing Nothing

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NPR

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4.3 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Twiddling your thumbs is often associated with wasting time. But feel shame about thumb-twiddling no longer. In a world of calendars and to-do lists, something has got to give.

We so often fear doing nothing, missing out, or getting behind. Our smartphones make it increasingly hard to disconnect from the attention economy.

But studies show there are benefits to dilly-dallying when it comes to your work and your health.

We'll discuss what it takes to reap the benefits of doing absolutely zilch on any given day.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.
0:08.5	With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next.
0:14.0	Learn more at concur.com. Why is it so very hard to do absolutely zilch? Nothing on any given day. Are there really
0:31.6	benefits to doing nothing at all?
0:34.0	You were supposed to come in on Saturday. What were you doing?
0:37.0	Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be.
0:45.0	Today we're talking about what we as Americans so often fear, doing nothing.
0:52.2	And that does include some of you.
0:54.4	I find it impossible to sit and do nothing because I'm hyperactive,
1:00.7	regardless of my being 64 years old. I just can't I can't do nothing. It's impossible. I've tried. There's always something to be done and rather than leave it go I just do it.
1:15.0	We'll talk about meditation and how to build a habit of doing nothing.
1:20.0	I'm Todd Zwilligan for Jen White, you're listening to the one a podcast where we get to the heart of the story back with more in just a moment.
1:31.0	This message comes from NPR sponsor SAP Concur.
1:35.0	Stuart McClain, CFO of Brother UK,
1:38.0	shares how SAP Concurs Audit and Expense Tool supports their work across multiple offices.
1:45.0	Across Europe, we have a presence in 17 countries, which obviously involves 17 different
1:50.4	tax regulations, 17 different fiscal authorities, you know, and this makes life
1:55.3	complicated for us. But actually with SAP concur we're able to configure the system
2:00.0	correctly for each of those countries, We're able to configure the audit rules
2:04.9	correctly for each of those countries. So actually it gives us a lot of
2:08.0	efficiency and good governance as well. So actually for us a solution like SAP concur makes life so much easier.
2:14.4	Otherwise we'd be forever checking back to regulations, checking back to
	...

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