One secret to achieving more: Finding time to do nothing.

In our efforts to squeeze every second from the day, it seems counterintuitive to watch a pot of coffee boil or gaze out the window. But your brain uses those free periods for important cleanup work, neuroscience research indicates. And during the pandemic, as the boundaries between work and home have blurred, it has become harder to create mental breaks.

Even brief timeouts help the brain reinforce long-term learning and productivity. You come out of downtime able to learn more, and can access that learning faster. “When you take a break, you may want to do something mind-consuming to help with motivation, but technically your best way of taking a break is to do something mindless,” says Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan who teaches a popular online course on how to open your mind to learning.

To ease into allowing yourself to do nothing, start with something familiar. Here are some techniques.

Take a long shower

A natural place to start slowing down is a habit that’s already built into your schedule, such as taking a shower. Letting your mind wander here can be a stepping stone to quieting more hectic environments. Or try blocking off time to look out your window. In her book “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” writer Jenny Odell describes how bird-watching became her favourite slow-down activity: Exhausted after pulling an all-nighter, she had gazed out the window and noticed a cluster of yellow birds. “I burned out, and in that state of forced relaxation, that happened to be when I noticed,” she says.

Play a game without keeping score

Dr Oakley points out that while our body’s dopamine reward system might encourage tasks, keeping score is labour. Instead of competing against your crossword best, find a puzzle game on your phone that requires simply swiping.

Take a solo walk

Leave the Fitbit at home, and free up an hour to absorb the scenery in silence. Being in nature has been linked to a multitude of physical and mental benefits. But be sure not to create a competition, which can take the relaxation out of the activity. “We get fixated on taking 10,000 steps,” Ms Odell says. “Yes, it’s good to go for a walk, but this isn’t a job.” Enjoy the meandering, rather than the race, she suggests.

Cook a big meal

Borrowing from the downtime that the Italians call dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing), the act of cooking a meal can encourage a wandering mind. It can be tempting to create a culinary masterpiece to make the time worth it, but fight the urge. Ms Odell suggests trying to “see the nonwork time as something other than the negative space left after work.” Try a simple recipe that requires slow preparation. Not only is the activity downtime, but bonus points for resting at the table between courses.

Just sit down

If you’re struggling to get enough rest at night, try a short nap. Simply find a comfortable chair, and breathe. While you’re napping, remember that your brain never is. Rest is one of the most important ways to enhance the neurological flexibility to build the kind of conceptual understanding that is related to identity and purpose, says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Consider that a reason to lose the guilt over a daily rest.

At the last global sales meeting he attended before the pandemic, Jeff Chase went to Caesars Palace Las Vegas with about 60 colleagues, plus many of their spouses. In February, the biotech sales manager scouted a location for their next retreat, the Renaissance Aruba Resort & Casino, on Zoom. He never left his home in Indianapolis.

The woman organising the visit, travel entrepreneur Sarah Reuter, instructed him and 70 other attendees from the corporate world to locate sunglasses, a hairdryer and a refreshing drink in their homes. When the video panned to the Caribbean, they were asked to turn on their blow dryers to simulate a coastal breeze in their hair.

“Myself, no, I don’t have long hair, so I couldn’t do that part,” Mr Chase says. He still enjoyed the whirlwind tour enough that he’s planning to book one of Elevate Travel Co.’s virtual retreats for the company’s biannual sales meeting this fall.

Vaccines are now reaching many American workers, but some companies are in no rush to bring back the in-person off-site retreat. Instead, they’re turning to a host of increasingly elaborate virtual options, including murder mysteries staffed with actors, webcast trips to beach resorts and safaris, and purpose-built digital islands for multiday gatherings.

They’re not quite a substitute for the splashiest pre-pandemic corporate off-sites—where some participants might have slept in a castle or raced Fiat 500s around the Tuscan countryside—and usually require much less time and money. But they can still help employees bond and let off steam after months of working in unusual conditions, their participants say.

Sean Hoff, managing partner of Toronto-based corporate retreats company Moniker, says clients have started inquiring about in-person trips, but are holding off on deposits and flights until at least June. So he’s ploughing ahead creating a virtual island for an upcoming retreat of around 240 people for Webflow, a San Francisco website-design company.

Employees will participate in videogame-like team-building activities, including a boat-building race. They will inhabit customized avatars and gather in virtual locales like a “tiki hut” and a “treehouse” for small-group meetings.

“The HR team, for example, will be able to say, meet us over by the dock at 5 p.m.,” he says.

“I’m not going to lie, I was a little sceptical at first. But after a year of remote work I was so desperate to meet more of my colleagues that I just dived in,” says Allison Williams, an account manager based in St. Louis at Articulate, an e-learning software company. Articulate held a weeklong virtual retreat in early February with over 104 sessions, including virtual yoga and virtual escape rooms. Out of 291 employees across 10 time zones, 267 participated, according to a company spokesman.

Ms Williams taught a class to 45 colleagues on calligraphy and says she made a new friend, a “fellow pen nerd,” in the process. She also made new work friends through the happy hours at a virtual beach club staged on Remo, an online conferencing platform. There were various seating options, including a bar, fire pit, or surfboard-shaped table. Employees talked in small groups with whoever else gathered at each site.

Alejandra Sereleas, a vice president of accounting at the France-based videogame company Ubisoft, hired Moniker to stage a virtual, 1980s-themed murder mystery for her team of about 80 people last June.

The scenario is a wedding: The groom mysteriously drops dead after taking a sip of his drink. The participants meet eight suspects, all paid actors, and must interrogate them to solve the crime.

“We asked everyone to be in character and be creative, and sent them a wedding invitation before the event,” Ms Sereleas says. People embraced the theme, she says, donning side ponytails and chunky jewellery and setting ’80s-themed Zoom backgrounds like a Pac-Man maze.

After the murder mystery, which made its debut last May as Moniker’s first virtual offering, the company created a “lunar outpost disaster scenario” set in 2037. It was adapted from a NASA training exercise for aspiring astronauts. Participants act as mission control for a crew of colleagues whose exploratory trip to the moon’s surface has gone awry.

“We’ve kissed the Blarney stone in Ireland, had whiskey at the top of a mountain in Patagonia, rode on a dogsled in Finland, sailed a yacht off Cannes and hung out with a gorilla doctor in Rwanda,” says Liz Lathan, Austin, Texas-based CEO of Haute Dokimazo, an events company that pivoted to virtual experiences during the pandemic. Her corporate clients Zoomed with travel guides in 28 countries between last May and December.

Vanessa Blackburn, Cleveland-based enterprise retail strategist at Retail Zipline, a communications startup for retail stores, has already done two virtual retreats with her team. Their last off-site, planned before the pandemic, was to take place in Lake Tahoe, and Ms Blackburn hoped to tack on a few extra days to ski. Her company’s two-day virtual retreat in March struck a different tone.

Instead of lavish catered meals, employees got to spend $25 on their corporate card to order coffee and lunch delivery. And the goody bags sent to their homes included a tub of slime, a plastic Slinky toy and a colouring book—not for the workers themselves, but to occupy the young children that many still had at home. “My daughter loved that,” Ms Blackburn says.