There’s a recurring paradox in life: when forced into constraint—normally in the office—it’s easy to get a surprising amount of work done. When free—at home, with a desk full of possibilities—I do almost nothing. Probably most people have felt this: paralyzed by options, not liberated by freedom.
In the office, there’s a clear system. Hours, tasks, deadlines. None of these promise joy or meaning. You just show up, pick the thing that needs to be done, and do it. Often it’s boring, sometimes hard, sometimes fun—but mostly it’s ordinary execution. And it gets done, the meaning/joy shows up later, if it does. In other words, meaning is retrospective, not prospective.
At home, when anyone could be the architect of their own life—at least in theory—everything feels like a potential project rather than a commitment. There’s a long list of things to do someday. You start something, lose interest, start something else, lose interest there too. The pile grows. The mind feels like a full cup, overflowing, useless as a vessel since it has no volume available. I had a lot of energy running toward the possibility of things, and none toward actually doing any of them.
There are all these things to do, but when the time came, I would just scroll through random websites and stuff. Not for lack of desire but because every possibility was simultaneously “urgent” and none had any context, boundary, or commitment. I was waiting for the meaning to arrive—expecting to feel it first, and act second. A kind of dopamine-before-action loop that never materializes, because dopamine isn’t a starting signal; it’s a reward signal after progress has been made.
I recently realized this was not a motivational problem but a structural one.
The ideas.txt file, where the latest projects and ideas get stored, was
effectively a home version of what at work would be called unnecessary.txt: a
repository of work items that don’t currently need attention (see this
article for more on this approach). But
because at home all of those things are regarded as “alive”, they were
cluttering the “mental desk”, competing for attention and claiming emotional
validity. This is exactly how productivity systems fail: they mistake interest
with execution rights. You think something is alive because you wrote it down.
That creates mental load.
So I enforced a constraint.
I adapted this: Only one productive leisure project gets execution rights at a
time. The rest become cold archive—“not right now, maybe later.” They live in
ideas.txt, not in the working memory.
This is not suppression of curiosity. It’s admission control, a bit like the WIP limits (the kanban-style work in progress caps, see below) that enforce unity of purpose and prevent jamming the “system” with too many requirements.
The curious thing: once all the other activities besides the “One Hobby” became off-limits to tracking and obligation, they lost their psychological “landmine” quality. They became playful again, instead of competing for real estate in the head. Then they were constantly evaluated, compared, prioritized—a swarm of partial commitments without form or finish.
That distinction matters.
Productive Leisure is an activity that:
These are the things that can fill up the mind if left unconstrained.
In contrast, restorative Leisure is play without future stakes:
Once Productive Leisure items were formally demoted to “cold archive unless active,” many of them felt like Restorative Leisure: something you might do because it’s pleasant, not something you have to do to avoid guilt or loss.
This distinction mirrors the essence of constraint in productivity: by making clear what counts and what doesn’t, you reduce the cognitive load of decision-making and let intentional action happen.
Kanban, in its original form at Toyota, was a simple, physical system for managing production flow on the factory floor using cards that each represented permission to produce or move a specific part. Rather than relying on schedules, forecasts, or manager oversight, kanban used these tangible cards to regulate when work could start and when it could move forward. The system naturally enforced limits on how much unfinished work could exist at any moment.
The key irony is that the system makes work more productive by preventing work, that is, an excess of work. Each step in the production line is governed by a small number of physical kanban cards, and a task cannot move forward unless a card is available. It recognizes that no worker or process has infinite capacity and it helps no one to pretend otherwise. Bottlenecks become visible immediately, there is no illusion of productivity or busy-work, queues cannot silently grow, and problems are forced to surface where they actually occur.
Fewer parallel tasks means less context switching, faster feedback, and higher quality, since defects were discovered close to their source. Crucially, kanban does not rely on motivation, discipline, or managerial pressure; it embedded restraint directly into the environment. The tokens made overcommitment impossible, and in doing so created the emptiness in which steady, reliable work could actually happen.
I was struck by how this aligned with a very old idea: the usefulness of emptiness:
I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness. The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. [Tao Te Ching, 16]
The way never acts yet nothing is left undone. [37]
The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. [38]
The Taoists observed that a cup is useful because it is empty; a room is useful because it has space. When something gets completely full, it loses its usefulness. The same applied to the “mental desk”: when it was totally full of half-alive things, it became rigid, dead, and useless.
In this emptiness—not the absence of goals, but the absence of competing commitments—things can actually happen. You don’t wait for meaning; you let meaning emerge from action.
“The Way does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone.” Action arises unforced when the system isn’t cluttered with demands, comparisons, and anticipation.
The system distilled down to a simple invariant:
In other words, interest does not grant execution rights. Execution rights must be scarce, just like kanban tokens. When they are, things get done; when they’re abundant, nothing happens.
In this system, willpower or motivation became almost irrelevant. When the mind is freed from the need to do “everything”, the intention can take over. This kind of intentional action, in my experience, only works when there’s very few intentions to compete with each other.
Emptiness isn’t the absence of desires. It’s the absence of conflicting claims on your attention. Start there, and you can actually practice something.