MOTIVATIONBOARD

Busywork has a bad rep. Keeping yourself (or someone else) busy doing meaningless or unnecessary tasks, simply for the sake of avoiding idleness, seems like a pointless waste of energy.

Only it turns out there is a point to it — recent research shows that keeping busy doing anything makes you a whole lot happier than you would have been doing nothing. Just sitting around, bored and inert, is a recipe for misery.

But if that’s true, why then do we so often choose idleness? Why do we do nothing, when we could almost always be doing something?

The study of human behavior is full of such paradoxes: People are happier when they do X. If you ask them, they’ll even tell you they prefer to do X. Unfortunately, people often don’t actually do X — they do The Opposite of X. And they have no idea why.

In this case, the answer seems to lie in our ability (or inability) to justify our actions. We really do prefer to be busy than to just sit around doing nothing, and being busy does in fact make us much happier, but