I love to be efficient.

The first of these efficiency hacks was all about reclaiming your downtime. Doing just this I’ve been consuming an awful lot of information lately.

Anyways, there I was, listening to a podcast (played at double speed) whilst walking the dog, quite enjoying it and enjoying the usual process of just soaking up lots of ideas and information, when suddenly the podcast stopped and music started playing in my ears instead. It was a song that I hadn’t heard for ages, thought it had been sitting there in my iPod all that time.

The song was ‘Drops Of Jupiter’ by Train. Not one of my favorite favorite favorites, but hearing this suddenly blasting in my ears just made me feel really inspired and so instead of switching back to continue listening to the podcast, I just started singing along and continued listening to the music instead.

Then I listened to a few more songs until I got home.

What occurred to me is that I’ve been so obsessed with consuming all of this information that every time I have ‘downtime’ I’ve seen it as an opportunity to listen to more podcasts.

So what’s the problem? Why am I being a hypocrite?

Because sometimes downtime should be just that – downtime.

So yes, I love efficiency, but more than that, I love to have the flexibility to be efficient when I need to be, and at other times, when I don’t need to be efficient, just to enjoy whatever it is I want to do, like listening to nothing at all or to music.

This is actually the second time this has occurred to me recently – the other time was after I posted an article about the pomodoro technique (another technique for being more efficient). Sometimes I use the pomodoro technique because it’s very effective if you have lots to get through and limited time, but then sometimes I deliberately don’t use it and just take my time with things instead.

The point is about having the flexibility to be really efficient when needed but then to kick back and just enjoy life, the moment, doing nothing sometimes too.