The value of doing nothing

In a world ruled by screens, the 3 p.m. work slump—in between Zoom meetings and emails and Slack messages—can feel like an inevitable part of our daily routines. To combat it, we might seek a brief reprieve on social media, which means even more screen time. That moment of supposed “rest” is followed by immense regret for not completing all the day's tasks.

What if we reframed how we thought about our relationship to screens, and perhaps even carved out time without them?

In a new essay for TIME, human-computer interaction researcher Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, explores how taking time away from screens and doing nothing can actually make us more productive. Among her most intriguing points:

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