David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, has an interview in Fast Company in which he talks about the value of… getting nothing done:

“A hallmark of how well you can do this methodology is how well you can do nothing. How well can you actually have nothing on your mind?”

Allen is a big fan of doing nothing, of daydreaming and napping as a means of engaging the reflective as opposed to the reflex brain. But having loose ends, or open loops, cluttering up your headspace makes that difficult.

“If you still need cat food, you can’t fully focus in an undistracted way and you can’t stop and relax. People think meditation is stopping the world and having the world go quiet. No. The universe is always on. It’s just which part of it you want to listen to.”

Indeed, some of the most enthusiastic fans of GTD are clergy:

“The clergy love it,” says Allen…. “They know how to do the God stuff, but it’s all the stuff they have to handle that they weren’t trained to do. The more they do that, the more they can focus on the more meaningful stuff.”