If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People

And a handful of ways to find "unproductive" time

What would change in your life if you stopped trying to use every minute well?

That question sounds almost irresponsible in a culture that teaches us to squeeze productivity from every corner of our day. Many of us have learned to move through life as if we’re always late for something else—optimizing our routes, multitasking through conversations, fitting connection into the leftover space between obligations. I’ve done this too. For a long time, I believed that being efficient was a form of virtue.

But lately, I’ve been asking a different question: What might we be sacrificing when we treat time as something to master, rather than something to give?

As a doctor, I was trained to look for patterns—signals in the body that point to what’s working and what’s breaking down. As Surgeon General, I came to see patterns in people’s lives, too. Over and over, in quiet conversations across cities and countries, I heard a similar story: people were busy, capable, and outwardly successful—yet deeply lonely. They had calendars full of commitments, but few relationships that felt spacious enough to breathe in.

Loneliness is not just a feeling. It’s a health risk. It raises our risk of heart disease, depression, dementia, and early death. And yet, many of the habits we’ve come to reward—constant optimization, relentless efficiency, treating every interaction as transactional—are quietly eroding the conditions that allow real connection to grow.

A while back, I was reminded of this in a small, unexpected way. My mother knew a man in government who had once helped answer a time-sensitive question. Months later, when she was coming to visit me in Washington, DC, she messaged him to see if he might stop by to receive the mangos she brought from her own garden as a small gesture of thanks. He was a busy man, with responsibilities that occupied most of his waking hours. I wasn’t sure he’d have the time or inclination to pay a visit to virtual strangers.

To our surprise, he came. And he didn’t just stop in. He stayed for three hours, even though his schedule was packed. At one point, we asked him why he had made the time. He smiled and said his kids had asked him the same thing before he came. “Why was he going to waste time with people he didn’t even know?” they asked him. His answer has stayed with me. “If you want to build relationships, you have to be willing to waste time with other people,” he said quietly. Not time optimized for outcomes. Not time aimed at extracting value. Just time spent in the presence of another human being, with an open heart and an open mind.

There was something radical in that statement. It challenged an assumption so embedded in modern life that most of us have stopped noticing it—that every interaction should have a purpose, that connection ought to be efficient, and that time spent on relationships is time we’re not spending on the real priorities in life.

Our new friend’s statement also underscored the unhealthy relationship we’ve developed with efficiency. We’ve been taught to make our days as frictionless as possible. We find the fastest route to work. We rinse dishes as quickly as we can, instead of letting the warm water run over our hands for a moment. We fill the four minutes it takes the kettle to boil with email or headlines. None of these habits are inherently wrong. But when the pursuit of efficiency becomes our default way of moving through the world, it can quietly hollow out the texture of our lives—and the depth of our relationships.

I know what this feels like. Because I’ve spent too many years as an overoptimizer, trading work and achievement for friendship and conversation. Rarely has it ever been worth it.

There is a classic image that has always stayed with me—a jar filled with rocks, pebbles, and sand. The rocks are what matter most. The pebbles, a little less. The sand is everything else. The lesson is simple: if you fill the jar with sand first, there is no room left for the rocks. But if you place the rocks first, the sand finds its way around them. I think about this often when I consider how we fill our days. Most of us, without quite meaning to, let the sand set the rhythm—the notifications, the errands, the low-stakes busyness—and then wonder why there is so little room left for the people we love.

Finding “Unproductive” Time

If you want to build community, you have to give it time. Not optimized time. Unstructured, unhurried, “unproductive” time. The kind of time where conversations wander. Where nothing needs to be accomplished. Where people can show up as they are, not as the most efficient version of themselves.

For many people, pausing can feel impossible when you’re working hard just to make ends meet. But even small moments of connection can matter. Just 10–15 minutes of unhurried conversation or shared presence can help calm the body’s stress response and give our nervous system a chance to reset.

So what does this look like, practically?

Here are a few small experiments you might try:

• Choose one moment a day to stop optimizing. Let the microwave cook without filling the time. Walk a slightly longer route home. Notice what happens in the extra minutes you reclaim.

• Create “aimless” time with someone you care about. No agenda. No productivity goal. Just shared presence.

• Audit your time sinks. Where does your time quietly drain away—on screens, on low-stakes busyness? Not to shame yourself, but to notice what might be crowding out the big rocks.

• Protect one recurring window for connection. A weekly walk. A standing dinner. A phone call you don’t rush.

These are not grand gestures. But small practices, repeated over time, can change the shape of a life. Much of the magic of being alive happens in these “white spaces”—the gaps where we aren’t multitasking or furiously chasing a checkbox. When we put down our devices to wait for a friend, or linger for a few minutes with a neighbor without an agenda, we create the stillness necessary for unexpected insights and reflections to surface. It is in these unscripted moments that we often find the clarity we’ve been trying to “work” our way toward.

If you want to build community, you have to be willing to “waste time” with people. The irony is that this kind of time is never truly wasted. It’s where trust grows. It’s where belonging takes root. It’s where we remember that we are not meant to live our lives alone.

I’d love to hear from you: Do you, too, sometimes feel that relentless pressure to be efficient at all costs? Have you experienced the tyranny of the “to do” list? Where in your life might you make a little more room for unhurried time with others?