GIRL TALK: Rediscovering art of doing nothing

Those who do it well attract a God-like status. IN AN age when everything needs to be done by yesterday the ability to multi-task has become almost as important as breathing.
Those who do it well attract a God-like status and self-help books selling the secret of productive time management are like bibles for the modern age.
Back in the glory days before technology arrived and allegedly made our lives so much easier, we methodically completed a short list of daily tasks to the best of our ability and those awaiting the outcome did so with patience and grace.
Now if you juggle fewer than half a dozen balls in the air at any one time you are perceived to be grossly incompetent, and extra brownie points to those who can do it with one hand tied behind their backs.
While more is undoubtedly being done by fewer people, how well it is being done is a matter of debate and it would seem the only real winners on the day are the bean counters who get to extract five times the amount of work out of us in a fraction of the time.
And time, as we all know, is money.
In the home, washing machines and microwave meals have reduced the time spent on domestic matters from days to hours or even minutes.
Computers and mobile communications have improved productivity exponentially in the workplace. Even our social lives are now compactly managed by mass-communicated status updates on Facebook, rendering friendly catch ups on the telephone or over a slowly-cooling coffee virtually obsolete.
From the outside looking in, this could all be potentially marvellous ... if only we were using our extra time to sleep in, read trashy novels, play with our children or generally just "be".
Instead, we have filled the gaps created by the glorious gift of technology and time management and filled them with more work and ultimately, more stress.
Mothers have become breadwinners, workers do the job of ten men on the paycheque of one and friends find out about the major developments in our lives by seeing our online status switch from married to divorced.
It's all marketed very enthusiastically as efficiency gains, but lately I've been wondering exactly what is being gained?
Since moving my office to a studio space in town and separating work from home, I've rediscovered the art of doing nothing. But it hasn't been easy. So brainwashed was I by the 21st century obsession with making productive use of every moment (to the point that at one especially busy time during my career I used to actually run to the toilet if it wasn't possible to hold on), that it actually took a concerted effort to be a bum.
Now, of course, I've had a taste for it and the temptation to lie in bed just that little bit longer, or sneak off home that little bit earlier, has seen me trying to fit a 14-hour working day into almost half of that.
The result has been to throw so many balls up into the air that I'm in danger of not being able to juggle even one.
But I'm proud to say that I'm the perfect product of the age that I live in and (provided I don't look at too many of those Facebook updates) I might just have found a way to fit a long day's work into a short one and, most importantly, use the spare time I've created to simply be ... me.