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April 23rd, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

🪤 The Trap of Busyness

Yesterday I ended the day exhausted. I’d been going nonstop since morning with endless emails and back-to-back meetings. It felt like a productive day, but when I sat down and asked myself what actually moved forward, I couldn’t point to a single thing that mattered.

That gap between effort and impact points to a deeply rooted psychological tendency: we don’t like being idle.

A well-known study on idleness aversion captured this very elegantly. Participants had to wait 15 minutes between two parts of an experiment. They could either sit and wait, or walk to a farther location and back.

When both options offered the same reward, most people chose to sit still. But when the farther option meant they could choose a slightly different flavor of candy as a reward (a difference nobody actually cared about) most chose to walk.

This shows we’d rather stay busy than sit with ourselves – but we need even the flimsiest reason to justify it.

That’s because busyness is reassuring. It’s a numbing strategy, a way to avoid difficult thoughts by making sure there’s always something next on the list. It shields you from questions such as whether your work actually matters and whether your time reflects what you value.

And it doesn’t help that our culture celebrates it. When you say you’re “crazy busy,” people assume you must be doing important work.

The trouble is you can spend hours answering emails, jumping between tasks, and putting out fires, and over time you lose space for reflection and creative thinking. You feel productive, but you’re just busy.

So how do you break free from mindless busyness? Here are four strategies you can start experimenting with:

• Track how you spend your time. Write down what you do for a full week, including the small tasks. When you see it laid out, you’ll notice how much of your day goes to things that feel busy but don’t move anything forward.

• Cut the dead weight. Find the activities that neither advance your work nor feel meaningful – meetings without clear outcomes, status updates nobody reads, or tasks you do out of habit, and try experimenting with NOT doing these for a week. What happens? Does anyone notice?

• Reflect on your progress. At the end of each week, complete a quick Plus Minus Next review to ask what actually moved forward. This will help shift your focus from how busy you felt to what you actually accomplished, and what you can tweak the following week.

• Get comfortable with stillness. Experiment with blocking out ten minutes a day to sit, reflect, or walk without a podcast playing. It will feel uncomfortable at first but that discomfort is exactly what you want to reconnect with.

Most importantly, remember that a full calendar is not proof of a full life. It might just be proof that you never stopped long enough to ask what you’re filling it with. So if you’ve been feeling “crazy busy” lately, try those four strategies to make space for the discomfort of stillness.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to make room for idleness:

You can set a timer and keep your phone in another room so you’re not tempted to reach for it. This experiment helps build awareness of how quickly the urge to “do something” shows up, and teaches your brain that nothing bad happens when you don’t act on it.

Over time, this creates space for clearer thinking. Want to dig deeper? ​​Get your copy of Tiny Experiments​.

👀 Into the Mind of...

TOM RATH

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from researcher Tom Rath, whose latest book What's the Point? explores the science of fulfillment.

1. One daily practice you can’t do without? The major do-or-die foundation for me is getting a good night of sleep. That is the ‘reset button’ that makes or breaks everything in my daily routine. So anytime I am running on inadequate sleep, I do everything in my power to get that back on track.

2. One idea that keeps you up at night? I am increasingly convinced that at least 80% of us never even have a chance to even try the job we could’ve been best at in life. I think most of us need about ten times the exposure we actually get to different careers.

3. One strategy to restart your creative engine? I’ve tried to develop a habit of always asking myself “why aren’t you thinking bigger?” Especially in the era of AI with unbelievable resources at our disposal, most of the time I am just thinking too small.

What’s the Point?

🛠️ Brain Picks

• Want more freedom and fulfilment at work without changing career or quitting your job? Stop following everyone else’s career scripts and start writing your own. Discover how in How To Work Your Way, a free guide created by London banker and “anti-career coach” Tom Grundy.​
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• Writing is a terrible way to capture ideas. Your brain thinks 3x faster than you type. Whisper Memos lets you speak freely and does the rest – AI transcription, smart summaries, delivered anywhere you want. The best note you’ll ever take is the one you don’t write. Try Whisper Memos free.

• Discover a practical, no-fluff course on building self-confidence from Michael Herold. Grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, it offers actionable tools, real-life exercises, and 8 hours of lessons to help you act confidently, even with anxiety or overthinking. Check it out here.

Many thanks to our sponsors and cross-promo partners for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.

🗓️ Community Events

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Let curiosity lead your career. In this session, Gosia Fricze will help you explore what happens when curiosity guides your career decisions and how paying attention to what interests you can shape your path over time.
​• Build professional influence as an introvert. Join author Stephanie Thoma for a workshop where she will walk you through how intentional relationship-building, strategic communication, and calm presence can help you build meaningful connections and grow your influence as an introvert.
​• Reimagine your relationship to retirement. In this workshop, Jim Eagar will share what he’s learned from coaching others through the retirement transition, including the phases most retirees go through, the losses nobody warns you about, and how tiny experiments can help you find your way back to meaning.
​• Make progress on your project. Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones.
​• Improve your knowledge management system. Join our next PKM Collective meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
​• Host your own workshop. Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.