“Underemployment”: A Key to Personal Productivity
The devil is out to steal from us all that is truly precious, including our time. After all, time is life. Our first thought might be that Satan’s first order of attacks on our time is through tempting us toward laziness, but more often it’s through busyness.
Most people in the rat race don’t want to be in it, but rather feel obligated to it. We’re afraid to rest or take time away not only because of what we’ve heard all our lives about laziness, but also because of a deep-seated fear of being unproductive or falling behind.
Oddly, you may discover that in backing off of so much busyness you might actually get more done. Busyness can give a false sense of productivity while actually being counterproductive.
Eugene Greissman in his book Time Tactics of Very Successful People, speaks of what he calls “underemployment” as a means toward greater personal productivity. He relates the story of James D. Watson and Francis Crick who successfully discovered the genetic code of DNA:
- “[It’s] the story of how underemployed they were—the stories of their meanderings and long weekends, parties, visits, and other diversions as told in The Double Helix, a human-side-of-science classic. Watson and Crick had the luxury of being able to study all sorts of ideas, interact with scientists in many fields, attend conferences all over the world. But most of all, Watson and Crick had time to think about what they were reading and hearing and seeing. That’s what Watson means when he praises underemployment.”
He goes on to explain that it was because Watson and Crick didn’t have to have full-time jobs to make ends meet—grants took care of that—they could spend time doing the creative thinking that made their discovery possible.
Now I’m not saying to quit your job. But how often have you read several books that struck you as helpful, but never took time to meditate on and interact with the principles taught there? Oh, you read ‘em, alright. And quick! But nothing to show for it.
How many times have you took notes on a sermon only to lose those notes in a stack of “important items I’ll get to later” that is growing without any focused contemplation? Took notes, yes! But nothing really gained.
Too often we’re like the like a person who refuses to pull over and ask for directions when he’s lost because he’s “making such good time.”
Moving often feels better than stopping because it feels like we’re making progress, when in actuality the activities we engage while stopped would contribute to the greatest progress! Stopping long enough to re-evaluate, plan and engage in discovery will get you much further down the road in the long run.
As Greissman says, “People on treadmills don’t get very far.” In other words, they’re going nowhere… fast.
Are you living on a treadmill, wondering where all the time and energy goes with little to show for your time and energy? Are you making time (“free time” is a myth) for contemplating the important questions of life? Questions like:
What if you get to the top of the ladder that you’re climbing so frantically only to find that it’s leaning against the wrong wall? We can “busy” ourselves right out of our God-ordained purpose if we’re not taking time to come aside and take inventory.
Like you, I wrestle over this principle constantly. But the bottom line is this: it is a true possibility that some “underemployment” might be more productive than the rat race we’re usually keeping—the race no one really wins.
