How many of you reading this spend any time doing nothing? When I say nothing, I don’t mean nothing worthwhile or nothing of value, I literally mean nothing. Where you are stood, sat or lying somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

If you’re anything like me, the chances are you’ll reply never. It struck me today that at every opportunity I had for doing nothing, I was doing something, and that something was typically checking emails, web browsing or logging into Twitter or Facebook. I stand in the lift, I check emails. I’m on the train home, I’m watching video, reading an e-book or today writing this blog. I’m on the toilet and I’m surfing the web (sorry, too much detail I know!).

Somewhere along the line I seem to have lost all ability to just do nothing, to just sit there and let my mind wander. To be honest, I’ve never been particularly good at this as I always like to be doing things, but I realised today, technology is making it much harder to just do nothing. Why should all time be productive?

And I think the mind needs a bit of a break from constant stimulus of this kind. I suspect it’s not enough to rely on sleeping to give yourself a bit of a break because of course you dream whilst asleep, so your mind is still active. What to do? I find myself in the position where I need to force myself away from access to technology for a period of time. Perhaps it’s as simple as going for a long walk, leaving the smart phone behind, and find a nice spot during the walk to sit down and just look around me. After all, we managed to survive quite happily without mobile phones, so I’m sure I can for a few hours. But bizarrely enough the idea of doing nothing for a while is a bit disconcerting!

Anyone else have the same problem? Anyone else deliberately having technology free days to wean themselves off information overflow?