Illustration by Graham Roumieu
Benjamin Errett is the author of Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting and writes a weekly newsletter at getwitquick.com.
So, any plans for the weekend? No? Fantastic! Perhaps you’ll just hang around your place, pull a few weeds in the garden, organize a junk drawer, fill a bag of clothes for Goodwill, call an old friend, fix a squeaky door, make a pitcher of lemonade or do whatever the moment suggests.
Congratulations in advance! This is a sublime form of active relaxation – a useful uselessness, a disassociated flow state of minimal effort, moderate productivity and maximum spontaneity. But what do you call it?
It’s not quite nothing, but is it something? Yes, and it’s something to celebrate, to revel in, to soak up, and to defend from those who would stamp it out. And to reclaim this aimless pursuit, we first need to name it.
Perhaps it is “to putter.” This is the North American preference, though in most dictionaries, including the Oxford that Google prefers, it’s the third definition of the word, the first being a golf club and the second a verb used to describe the audible progress made by a slow-moving vehicle. Only after these do we find that the term means to occupy yourself in a “desultory yet pleasant manner, doing a number of small tasks and not concentrating on anything in particular.”
In the spirit of puttering, let’s wander over to the word desultory. In ancient Rome, circus riders who would leap from one horse to another were called desultores, from the Latin “to jump down.” To be desultory is to jump from one thing to another. So why do they say “desultory yet pleasant,” as though leaping from horse to horse is not an inherently fun activity? As though acrobatics are unpleasant? Here we see a negative sentiment baked into the word, one that subconsciously dissuades us from this optimal experience.
The fact that this definition sounds vaguely mechanical may explain why puttering often leads to tinkering. Richard Feynman, one of the most accomplished scientists of the past century, spent his childhood fooling around with radios, spark plugs and anything else he could find. His particular genius, as his friend Marvin Minsky explained in the book No Ordinary Genius, was understanding this: “The important thing is not to persist; I think the reason most people fail is that they are too determined to make something work only because they are attached to it.” Jump to another horse!
This digression comes dangerously close to an argument for puttering as a spur to creative problem-solving, but let’s take extra care to avoid it. Even a casual reader of this newspaper is well aware that Canada remains mired in a grinding productivity crisis, and yes, by ever-so-briefly being less overtly productive, we might actually become more productive. And sure, no less a titan of industry than Jeff Bezos has praised puttering, telling a business audience in 2018 that he gets up early and doesn’t start working until 10 a.m. because “my kind of puttering time is very important to me.” But closely following this logic is like counting calories at a Michelin-starred restaurant: exactly how you miss the point. And hey, instead of conversation, we can just hand each other USB keys full of content. Peak efficiency!
And while we’re studiously avoiding the puttering-is-productivity argument, let’s also sidestep its mirror image, the rest-as-resistance campaign. You may well convince yourself that reorganizing the sock drawer is a radical act of opting out of capitalist culture. And maybe, in an imperceptibly small way, it is. Dust mites made right! But if you focus on this thought in mid-putter, using it to justify your random enjoyable tasks as a deeply subdued form of political action, you’re not puttering. The only point of puttering is the random tasks you accomplish along the way.
The word putter isn’t even the worst term out there. If you speak a Midwestern dialect, you may know this activity as putzing around, or even futzing around. This variation of the term appears to derive from Pennsylvania German and is unrelated to the Yiddish insult putz – a stupid or worthless person, or alternately the male organ – and yet there is some guilt by association.
In a 2012 New York magazine piece titled Why Do Women Love Puttering?, Lisa Miller suggested that the more generic word “relaxing” is the acceptable way to say the P-word. It’s a two-way street: If we say we’re relaxing as we putter, we’ve removed the onus of accomplishment. And if we putter as we relax, we create “the cover of busyness that creates the insulating bubble, for it shields you from the disapproval of onlookers – and even from yourself.”
Ingenious to be sure, but what if no shield were necessary? What if we puttered proudly, saying aloud that we’re not afraid to find satisfaction in the desultory, taking a stand at least until we see a better horse on which to leap?
The vocabulary improves when you cross the Atlantic. In the King’s English, to putter is to potter, a term deeply associated with gardening. Happily, it has nothing to do with wizards. In its most blissful state, pottering around the yard brings you back to nature’s timetable, a prelapsarian state. And isn’t this how Adam and Eve filled their days before everything went apple-shaped? The potter’s shed is at the heart of the English garden, and the British definition is generally kinder. As per a character’s description of Lord Emsworth in P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave it to Psmith: “He’s so dreamy and absent-minded. He potters about the garden all the time.”
This positivity comes as no surprise, as the United Kingdom is united in part by a well-developed vocabulary of idleness. The Scottish term to spraff means to speak excessively or pointlessly. Meanwhile, to faff about is to spend more time than necessary immersed in a task. Who among us doesn’t enjoy the luxurious pleasures of a faff and spraff? What better prelude to a putter?
Things get even better in French, where “pottering around” translates as bricoler, the noun form of which was elevated by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe nothing less than how humans create their foundational myths: Bricolage! Rather than create our stories from scratch, he explained, we look around for whatever’s at hand and assemble something on the spot, as the mood strikes us. Our whole civilization, by his telling, is built on a series of odd jobs, a hodgepodge of this and that. Now, a long weekend in August is probably not the time to dig into structuralism, but the point is that the French aren’t adverse to puttering as a guiding philosophy.
The North American aversion gets even worse when you consult a thesaurus. Loitering, dawdling and procrastinating are all listed as synonyms for puttering, despite the fact that nothing about the term implies that you’re faffing about instead of doing something more important. This is the insidious bit that suggests a phantom whip held over the head of the putterer, an unspoken criticism that you really ought to be doing something else, or at the very least doing the small tasks more efficiently. Why? For whom? That’s not what the word means, yet the Protestant work ethic is baked in.
But maybe there is a deadline, the ultimate one that awaits us all. How can we putter when we have but 4,000 weeks on this planet? The answer is simply the inverse: How can we not?
So assuming you’ve puttered this far, perhaps with occasional breaks to freshen your coffee and merge the two open jars of peanut butter into one, how do you keep going? Of course the only direction is that there is no direction, but there are two key points of the methodless method.
First, puttering requires listlessness. Very precisely, there shouldn’t be a list of chores to accomplish. Or perhaps there is a rough list, not written down, vaguely remembered, and supremely open to substitutions and alterations as the mood strikes. The twist of Robert Benchley’s classic essay How to Get Things Done is that he installs some shelves, gets a haircut, catches up with his correspondence, arranges his books and comes up with several new ideas while avoiding a deadline. Now imagine doing all that without the deadline: Total bliss.
Second, we must add the modern specification that puttering is a distinctly analog activity. Yes, you can jump from one website or app to another in a desultory manner, but in practice this is nothing like happily puttering in the home or garden. A more accurate physical comparison would be wandering around a casino, where every element of the experience is designed to manipulate you. Puttering can’t happen in a marketing funnel.
Rightly considered, puttering is pottering is putzing is relaxing is bricolage is life: a series of random tasks completed in the order and at the speed you choose while you enjoy the time, freedom and leisure to take them on. Or, if you choose, leave them be and move onto something else.