Anyone who has taken a stroll in his or her neighbourhood these past few weeks would have seen wildflowers and weeds shooting long and lovely and lush among the uncut grass.

Near my home, overgrown mimosas and kancing baju, or coat buttons, dance in the wind, having - for the moment - escaped the fate of the grasscutter when cutting services were put on hold during the Covid-19 circuit breaker.

Many of us welcomed this glimpse of a less manicured Singapore - matched by our unkempt locks after months without a hairdresser, and a flexible schedule that has given some people time for simple pleasures such as reading and baking while hunkered indoors.

We are often reminded that time is our most valuable asset.

There are people who respect this maxim by trying to live as efficiently as possible.

"I schedule every minute of my day", proclaimed one entrepreneur in a Forbes article.

Someone I know from university listens to podcasts at twice their original speed. A friend of mine throws his food into a blender so he doesn't have to "waste" too much time chewing it.

My favourite time-saving hack: skimming through transcripts of TED talks instead of watching the online videos.

Such is the cult of productivity - where life becomes an endless to-do list, hobbies turn into hustles and every task is zealously undertaken with lofty goals in mind.

The slowing down that came with the circuit breaker, however, may have given some of us a new perspective.

While compiling a list of all the movies and books I had seen and read in recent months, I suddenly realised how little of all this had stuck with me. I had formed few interesting opinions about these things - no sooner would I finish one book or film than turn to the next.

In my hurry to "consume" more culture, I had actually ended up absorbing less.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the problem with speed-reading and binge-watching lies in the fact that these practices don't encourage you to reflect on what you have just consumed - be it an episode of Stranger Things or a memoir you'd just read cover to cover.

You spend less time drawing connections between things, and your thoughts have less time to ferment. You aren't producing ideas.

The Internet has changed the way people read. Some studies suggest that people are doing more browsing, scanning and non-linear reading, panning texts for nuggets of information, rather than reading for reading's sake.

Curling up with a 900-page novel isn't as easy as it used to be, not with the lure of social media within arm's reach.

"Distracted from distraction by distraction", to steal a line from T.S. Eliot, we leap from one hyperlink to the next, losing ourselves in a rabbit hole of websites and brands competing for our attention, or - to use that ghastly word for consumer awareness - "mindshare".

Research scientist Andrew Smart would agree.

People are now "too purposeful, too directed", he argues in his 2013 book Autopilot: The Art And Science Of Doing Nothing, making the case for a link between idleness and creativity.

"Chronic busyness is bad for your brain," Smart writes, "and over the long term, busyness can have serious health consequences. In the short term, busyness destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social - and it can damage your cardiovascular health."

He cites the late German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who had wondered if the days when we are forced to remain idle are "precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days".

One of the most comforting books I read during the circuit breaker was Nora Ephron's 1983 autobiographical novel, Heartburn, based on her marriage and divorce to journalist Carl Bernstein.

It is a generous, funny read - chicken soup for the lonely person's soul - with recipes for mashed potatoes, bread pudding and cheesecake folded into the chapters.

The whole point of cooking, Ephron's narrator says, is that it is "totally mindless" - the longstanding principles of cookery dictate that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick.

"It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles."

In today's hurried world, these buffer zones are important.

They take on an almost meditative quality because they give you the room to daydream.

Perhaps it is in these still, quiet moments that the real work begins, when you realise that busyness is often laziness by a different name, and a kind of escapism from the things in life that truly matter.