Não era o tema para hoje mas depois deste dia tranquilo não resisto ir recuperar um artigo da Economist de meados de Agosto intitulado “In praise of laziness” que li imediatamente antes do final das férias e de que me recordei muitas vezes ao escutar as pessoas à minha volta a discutir qual delas tinha regressado mais cedo de férias e estava a trabalhar hà mais tempo…

O autor depois de mostrar alguns números preocupantes

“All this  is producing an epidemic of overwork, particularly in the United States. Americans now toil for eight-and-a-half hours a week more than they did in 1979. A survey last year by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that almost a third of working adults get six hours or less of sleep a night. Another survey last year by Good Technology, a provider of secure mobile systems for businesses, found that more than 80% of respondents continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.”

Continua explicando que

“Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, who has been conducting a huge study of work and creativity, reports that workers are generally more creative on low-pressure days than on high-pressure days when they are confronted with a flurry of unpredictable demands.”

e que

“The most obvious beneficiaries of leaning back would be creative workers—the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy. In the early 1990s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, asked 275 creative types if he could interview them for a book he was writing. A third did not bother to reply at all and another third refused to take part. Peter Drucker, a management guru, summed up the mood of the refuseniks: “One of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste-paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours.” Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time—and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing.”

E acaba a contar a história de Jack Welch

“When he was boss of General Electric, Jack Welch used to spend an hour a day in what he called “looking out of the window time”. “

O livro que estou correntemente a ler sobre creatividade aborda o mesmo assunto num dos seus capítulos e cita mais uns quantos estudos que mostram a importância de encontrar tempo durante o qual o cérebro possa fermentar as ideias… E assim aqui fica o meu elogio aos domingos tranquilos em que aparentemente nada se faz…