Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is nothing.

As a busy academic, you’re constantly juggling competing priorities – teaching, research, service work, not to mention trying to carve out a personal life. The pressure to keep accomplishing more is relentless and your instinct may be to react as you try to regain control of the situation. But sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is…nothing.

By resisting your instinct to constantly act, we open up vital head space to reflect, recharge, and discover creative solutions.

Strategic inaction

The art lies in knowing when strategic inaction is wiser than friction-creating busyness. When facing a crisis or conundrum, the gut reaction is to frantically start tackling it. Yet taking hasty, reflexive action often stems from a place of fear, fatigue or flawed thinking – which paradoxically compounds the problem.

Don’t just do something, stand there.

Martin Gabel (1945)

Instead, try purposefully pausing amid the storm. Embracing a period of conscious inaction in the face of a problem can:

• Let intense emotions settle so you can think rationally.
• Gather more context and information before responding.
• Prevent overreacting or making a hasty decision you’ll regret.
• View the challenge through a new, fresh lens.

For example, don’t instantly react to challenging feedback on a journal submission. Set it aside for a day or two to gain perspective. You’ll probably respond in a more grounded, productive way.

Or if you’re struggling to work through a difficult research problem, instead of grinding away at it relentlessly, take a deliberate break. Go for a walk, or do something unrelated to clear your mind. When you come back, you may discover the insight or innovative solution you were missing.

I can’t help but think of the sector-wide knee-jerk reaction to the emergence of generative AI, and universities’ desperate need to be seen to be doing something in the face of this perceived threat. How much of that frenetic energy actually produced something useful? Would we have been collectively better off if the sector had simply paused, and waited to understand what was happening, before acting?

This state of non-doing is a difficult mindset to cultivate, because we’ve been conditioned to always be in high-productivity mode. But if you can build the habit to stop and resist rash reactions, you may be amazed at the innovative solutions that can arise in that space.

For busy academics, judicious pausing isn’t about checking out. It’s about checking in and reconnecting with your core priorities and high value activities.

Doing less thoughtless busyness allows you to do more of what ultimately matters.