Enjoyable ‘activity’ - Organidling
By TAN SHZR EE
In: The Star Newspaper,
If you find mundane chores more seductive in the face of important tasks, you could be an ‘organidler’.
YOU would rather re-organise your office e-mail Inbox according to an extremely complicated but potentially useful colour-coded cataloguing system.
You’d align all the spines of your files and arrange them by height from right to left instead of left to right.
You’d do anything except that big proposal which was due yesterday.
Chances are, you’ve been initiated into the culture of organidling.
Invented by The Guardian newspaper’s resident word-inventor Pascal Wyse last year, “organidling” is an amalgamation of the words “organise” and “idling”, and refers to the state of finding mundane chores far too seductive in the face of much more important work.
As Wyse puts it: “You can feel productive without producing anything.”
Let me explain a little further. Organidling is about doing everything in the name of doing nothing, for the whole purpose of not yet (though eventually, of course you will) doing the one thing you’re supposed to do.
You’re basically “setting the scene” for all-important work to come, but concentrating on the act of enjoying the viscerality of now. You’re savouring each particular moment as it passes, lapping up the existential effect of real time slipping through your fingers as you engage in potentially useful activities like suddenly becoming green and recycling your used envelopes all at once, or changing and standardising all the fonts in old documents to Zapfino.
But organidling is not quite the same as slacking or procrastination, although these three modes of non-activity are inter-related.
This is found in the common theme of idling: how not doing any work is actually productive in itself, as proven by philosophers like Aristotle and Plato and, more recently, by health scientist Dr Michaela Axt-Gadermann.
Publishing her findings in medical journals, Dr Axt-Gadermann wrote: “Laziness is important for a healthy immune system because special immune cells are stronger in times of relaxation than stress. During relaxation, or down time, your metabolism is less active, which means the body produces fewer free radicals.”
She is not the only champion of laziness. Prof Michael Wekily, a professor of cognitive studies at the University of Rochester, shares the same opinion.
He played segments of sci-fi film The Matrix to ferrets and measured their brain activity in response to stimulated visual neurons.
What surprised him was that the visual neurons continued to work within the brain’s central system even when the ferrets were left in the dark for stretches of “control” time, deprived of Keanu Reeves and Co.
This led him to conclude: “There is a tremendous amount of real-world processing going on – 80% – when there is nothing to process. If you’ve got your eyes closed, your visual processing is pretty much at zero, and when you open them, you’re running at 100%.
“This suggests that with your eyes closed, your visual processing is already running at 80%, and that opening your eyes only adds the last 20%. The big question here is what is the brain doing when it’s idling, because it’s obviously doing something important.”
What does the brain do when it’s idling, indeed? Here is where organidling is slightly different from slacking and procrastinating.
Slacking, in its purest form as characterised by authors Tom Hodgkinson and Louis Theroux, is about extreme laziness. It has connotations of being slovenly, potentially stoned, unemployed, not currently engaged in education nor training.
Procrastination, on the other hand, is simply the act of avoidance behaviour: The point is not to do something at all costs and under any circumstances. Sometimes this may involve activity of some sort, other times it may not.
Organidling, however, always involves plenty of activity. In some ways it’s even the opposite of laziness: It acquires the sparkle of industry and bustle. While organidling ostensibly seems to be carried out under the symptoms of work-avoidance, in reality it is part of the long, extended process of preparing for the preparation of eventual work.
You know what I mean. There is never such a great feeling when a physically clean slate is prepared for the important work that will be carried out, after the offending clutter of books, pen-stands, accumulated receipts and empty coffee mugs have been cleaned away from your desk.
Organidling, however, can also be retrospectively understood. What might have been carried out previously in the name of slacking or procrastination in the past – such as watching soppy afternoon soaps or reading Hello magazine in the toilet or surfing YouTube at 2am – can in the future be re-appreciated as “research”, “fieldwork” or “participant observation” in a creative re-contextualisation of history and personal culture.
This is particularly important if you happen to be a social anthropologist based in an urban area, or are surreptitiously conducting silent market surveys of potential clients.
But really, organidling is for everyone, young and old, salaried or unemployed.
You organidle because, well, you enjoy it. You organidle because you’re productive without having produced anything – the greatest luxury of existence. – The Singapore Straits Times / Asia News Network
Oh.. aren't we all organidlers? hehehhee.. I know I am.. I just vacuumed my room. hmm..
In: The Star Newspaper,
If you find mundane chores more seductive in the face of important tasks, you could be an ‘organidler’.
YOU would rather re-organise your office e-mail Inbox according to an extremely complicated but potentially useful colour-coded cataloguing system.
You’d align all the spines of your files and arrange them by height from right to left instead of left to right.
You’d do anything except that big proposal which was due yesterday.
Chances are, you’ve been initiated into the culture of organidling.
Invented by The Guardian newspaper’s resident word-inventor Pascal Wyse last year, “organidling” is an amalgamation of the words “organise” and “idling”, and refers to the state of finding mundane chores far too seductive in the face of much more important work.
As Wyse puts it: “You can feel productive without producing anything.”
Let me explain a little further. Organidling is about doing everything in the name of doing nothing, for the whole purpose of not yet (though eventually, of course you will) doing the one thing you’re supposed to do.
You’re basically “setting the scene” for all-important work to come, but concentrating on the act of enjoying the viscerality of now. You’re savouring each particular moment as it passes, lapping up the existential effect of real time slipping through your fingers as you engage in potentially useful activities like suddenly becoming green and recycling your used envelopes all at once, or changing and standardising all the fonts in old documents to Zapfino.
But organidling is not quite the same as slacking or procrastination, although these three modes of non-activity are inter-related.
This is found in the common theme of idling: how not doing any work is actually productive in itself, as proven by philosophers like Aristotle and Plato and, more recently, by health scientist Dr Michaela Axt-Gadermann.
Publishing her findings in medical journals, Dr Axt-Gadermann wrote: “Laziness is important for a healthy immune system because special immune cells are stronger in times of relaxation than stress. During relaxation, or down time, your metabolism is less active, which means the body produces fewer free radicals.”
She is not the only champion of laziness. Prof Michael Wekily, a professor of cognitive studies at the University of Rochester, shares the same opinion.
He played segments of sci-fi film The Matrix to ferrets and measured their brain activity in response to stimulated visual neurons.
What surprised him was that the visual neurons continued to work within the brain’s central system even when the ferrets were left in the dark for stretches of “control” time, deprived of Keanu Reeves and Co.
This led him to conclude: “There is a tremendous amount of real-world processing going on – 80% – when there is nothing to process. If you’ve got your eyes closed, your visual processing is pretty much at zero, and when you open them, you’re running at 100%.
“This suggests that with your eyes closed, your visual processing is already running at 80%, and that opening your eyes only adds the last 20%. The big question here is what is the brain doing when it’s idling, because it’s obviously doing something important.”
What does the brain do when it’s idling, indeed? Here is where organidling is slightly different from slacking and procrastinating.
Slacking, in its purest form as characterised by authors Tom Hodgkinson and Louis Theroux, is about extreme laziness. It has connotations of being slovenly, potentially stoned, unemployed, not currently engaged in education nor training.
Procrastination, on the other hand, is simply the act of avoidance behaviour: The point is not to do something at all costs and under any circumstances. Sometimes this may involve activity of some sort, other times it may not.
Organidling, however, always involves plenty of activity. In some ways it’s even the opposite of laziness: It acquires the sparkle of industry and bustle. While organidling ostensibly seems to be carried out under the symptoms of work-avoidance, in reality it is part of the long, extended process of preparing for the preparation of eventual work.
You know what I mean. There is never such a great feeling when a physically clean slate is prepared for the important work that will be carried out, after the offending clutter of books, pen-stands, accumulated receipts and empty coffee mugs have been cleaned away from your desk.
Organidling, however, can also be retrospectively understood. What might have been carried out previously in the name of slacking or procrastination in the past – such as watching soppy afternoon soaps or reading Hello magazine in the toilet or surfing YouTube at 2am – can in the future be re-appreciated as “research”, “fieldwork” or “participant observation” in a creative re-contextualisation of history and personal culture.
This is particularly important if you happen to be a social anthropologist based in an urban area, or are surreptitiously conducting silent market surveys of potential clients.
But really, organidling is for everyone, young and old, salaried or unemployed.
You organidle because, well, you enjoy it. You organidle because you’re productive without having produced anything – the greatest luxury of existence. – The Singapore Straits Times / Asia News Network
Oh.. aren't we all organidlers? hehehhee.. I know I am.. I just vacuumed my room. hmm..
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