How the ‘Waiting Around’ Habit Can Make You Infinitely More Productive Without Working Harder

Most people think about productivity as doing more. It’s not. Productivity is mostly about doing more of the right things — and knowing when to do them. For most of us, the problem is that we’re always doing something, so it’s easy to feel busy. But being busy isn’t the same thing as being productive. It’s also not the same as mindlessly occupying our time with things that don’t accomplish anything.

For example, if you’ve ever found yourself staring at your phone in line at Starbucks, you know what I mean. You check Instagram; scrolling, refreshing, and scrolling some more. It’s not that you’re making progress on anything meaningful, but just because you’re waiting.

In fact, we all spend a fair amount of time waiting. We wait for meetings to start, or for our friends or colleagues to show up for coffee. We wait for our flight to board, and we wait to pick up kids from school. Those in-between moments add up more than you might think, and how we choose to spend them can quietly change everything about how much we accomplish.

The power of the in-between

We tend to think of productivity in terms of large chunks of uninterrupted time, but it turns out the small chunks can be even more useful if you change how you use them. Four minutes waiting in line doesn’t seem like much. Neither does the ten minutes before a Zoom call starts or the seven minutes sitting in your car before you walk into a meeting. But add those together over a week, and it’s hours of time that could be used for something better than doomscrolling.

No, you’re not going to write a novel while you’re waiting for your latte, or create a new marketing strategy while your flight boards. But you can do something that matters. You can capture an idea before it slips away or jot down a few sentences of an email you’ve been putting off.

Those moments are perfect for the small mental tasks that never seem to fit into your “real work” time — because they don’t require focus so much as attention.

The quick brain dump

My favorite use for those in-between moments is what I call a brain dump. Whenever you’re waiting, open the Notes app or your to-do list, and just write down everything that’s floating around in your head. Maybe that’s the things you need to do, the ideas you don’t want to forget, or the people you need to follow up with. Don’t organize or try to edit them, just get them out.

Doing that gives your brain room to breathe. It turns all the background noise into something tangible you can deal with later. You’ll be amazed at how much more mental energy you have once you stop trying to remember everything all the time.

Even if you don’t do anything else with those notes right away, you’ve turned waiting time into something useful. You’ve turned passive time into productive time.

If you get in the habit of using those little windows well, you’ll start to notice something: you’ll feel less rushed and more organized. You’ll end the day with fewer things hanging over your head because you didn’t waste all the moments in between.

Waiting around with intention

The goal is to build a rhythm that makes your actual work time easier. That’s what makes this kind of productivity infinitely powerful: it compounds. Using the time you spend waiting to capture your thoughts or handle a relatively simple task makes the time you spend on bigger tasks more productive. Every note you write down now is one fewer distraction later.

Here’s the irony — the “waiting around” habit isn’t really about doing more. It’s about doing less mindless stuff. When you stop filling every idle moment with noise, you start to make space for clarity. Sometimes that means opening your notes app. Sometimes it just means taking a breath and letting your brain think.

It turns out productivity isn’t about doing more stuff; it’s just about being more intentional about waiting around.