When I was at McKinsey, I worked 70 hour weeks. I didn't have much time or energy left to do anything else. I stopped playing rugby for the first time in 14 years, I saw my friends less and I stopped reading.

When I went on holidays, I'd spend the first few days just trying to get my brain to slow down and stop thinking about work.

Over time and with some job changes, I started to work less. Seventy hours down to sixty… sixty to fifty… fifty to forty...

But even though I was working less, the need to be productive remained. The pursuit of productivity had been baked into my mindset. The new non-working hours of my life screamed to be filled with other tasks.

So I filled them. Doing other "productive" stuff. I'd set myself goals to learn a new skill, start a side hustle, redecorate my spare room, you name it. If I wasn't doing something productive I'd feel anxious and like I was wasting my time. I'd beat myself up over it too.

I'd lost the ability to just do nothing.

I recognised this was a challenge and started to address it. Little by little I learned to stop chasing this productive activity.

And as I learned to stop chasing, a surprising thing happened… a new space emerged in my life.

A “Nothing Space”.

This was a space where my mind could be at ease. Where it could find respite from the constant drive for achievement, where I could enjoy the now of nothingness and anticipate the joy of the future, where the snow-globe of my brain could settle and my own thoughts could appear to me with clarity.

There is a Japanese concept called yohaku no bi. It emphasises the beauty of the space left empty. The part of the canvas left unpainted, the part of a room without furniture, the well timed silence in a composition.

The painter Ike no Taiga said “It is precisely those blank areas on the paper that are the most difficult to produce.”

And though this nothing space is difficult to produce, it has brought me value in ways that “productive” activities never could.

You see, as this space emerged for me, new things grew. Things that made me feel content and peaceful.

When I worked all the time, I had no time or head-space to look forward to things. Holidays would rush up on me. I’d be sitting on a plane going somewhere nice but not feeling much excitement about it. Within the nothing space, I’ve been able to look forward to things more. I can think about what I want to do, make those plans and just daydream about what it’s going to be like. There's research to show that we derive as much satisfaction from the anticipation of an event as the event itself and now I get to enjoy all that extra satisfaction. It also makes the event itself all the better. It's like that feeling you get as a kid going on holiday, that excitement where you couldn’t sleep the night before. I now get to enjoy that childish excitement again.

In this nothing space I can also do pointless things, silly things that have no purpose, where the doing of the thing is the end in itself. I tinker on the piano, read a random book for the sake of it, sit on my balcony and just drink a glass of wine looking at the sea. I spent an afternoon recently just drawing Kookaburras onto cardboard plates as awards for my touch rugby team. Pointless, pure and perfect for making me feel content in that moment.

Practically, this nothing space has allowed me to say “yes” more often. When my calendar was packed I couldn't accept random, last minute invitations. But these invitations often hold such lovely surprises. Yesterday I accepted a last minute invite to the members section of the SCG to watch a cricket match with two new friends. It was the space in my life that allowed me to say yes.

I desire clarity of thought. It allows me to see what I want from my life and make decisions to help me find it. Sometimes I work with people to help them figure out what to do with their career. But I often worry that they are too busy to clearly see what they want in their career. It's like that snow-globe. If you're constantly shaking it, the vision will always be obscured and changing. It's only when you lay it down to rest, that everything can begin to settle and a clear image can appear. In my nothing space, the snowglobe of my mind starts to settle.

Our world tells me us to do more. Hustle, learn, progress, earn.

Many of us were raised in ways that reinforced this belief that productivity was the goal. We did well at school, sports, music, and got rewarded for that. We learned to crave the feeling of achievement.

This was certainly the case for me.

But while everything is telling us to do more, what would it mean to do less?