The Case for Wasting Time with People

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Last week, I had two blocks of time on my calendar that others might have questioned – a 90-minute Joyful Connection Masterclass and a 2-hour coffee meetup with someone I’d only met online once. As an entrepreneur with a perpetually full plate, both felt like luxuries that I wasn’t sure I could justify, but something told me to find the space in my calendar to make them fit.

What I got in return for committing to those “questionable” blocks of time was more than I could have imagined. None of it was planned and all of it came because I chose to show up without an agenda.

My experience echoes the premise of a recent piece by Former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy. He recalls a time when his mother wanted to thank a government official for his help by inviting him to their home for fresh mangos from her garden. Against all expectations, not only did he visit, but he spent three hours with the family and took extensive care to get to know them. When asked why, the official said, "If you want to build relationships, you have to be willing to waste time with other people."

In our relentless pursuit of efficiency, we’ve eliminated the very conditions that allow real connections to grow. We’ve been taught to treat productivity as our primary goal and make sure that every activity has a clear purpose. We fill every moment with something measurable and wonder why our relationships feel thin and our networks feel hollow.

What “wasting time” looks like

The Masterclass was designed for those of us who typically help others build relationships, and gave us the rare opportunity to be on the receiving end of this work. Most of our time was spent in pairs answering specific questions and prompts. I was randomly matched with a fellow Gen Xer originally from Long Island, which is where I was born.

We had way more in common than we ever would have discovered in a typical networking context. In each of the 5-7 minute breakouts, we managed to go surprisingly deep. The facilitators created an environment that allowed us to show up as our whole, authentic selves, and I learned so much about Chris in the very short time we had together.

The one thing I didn’t learn? What he does for a living.

Yep, we made it through the entire session without asking the most typical introductory question.

The 2-hour coffee meetup has a longer backstory. Jessica and I met through a mutual connection and had a lovely conversation about a potential business partnership. While that never materialized, when she recently responded to one of my posts with a podcast recommendation, we decided to meet in the middle for coffee.

We talked about everything from life and family to the Boston housing market and the books we’ve been reading. By the end, we’d moved well beyond professional acquaintances into people who genuinely understand each other, and we’re now most certainly connected on an entirely different level.

Neither conversation had a clear purpose going in, and both have already led somewhere I didn't expect.

What we lose when we don’t take the time

We tend to short-circuit connection because we’ve been taught to value conversations that produce tangible results. But there are three kinds of conversations that matter in building real connection, and only one of them truly moves things forward.

Conversations for relationship are where you simply get to know someone without any agenda and show up with genuine curiosity. Conversations for possibility allow you and the other person to think together, explore ideas, and co-create something neither of you could have arrived at alone. And conversations for action are where the decisions get made and things move forward.

Most of us treat the first two conversations as “prerequisites” on the way to the “real meeting.”  We jump straight into a conversation for action without taking the time to establish trust, and then we wonder why our networks feel transactional and our connections don’t hold.

What Dr. Murthy is really arguing, and what my own experiences repeatedly confirm, is that action without relationship is just a transaction, and transactions don’t compound the way connections do.

What we need to give in order to receive

Building relationships requires a willingness to show up with a spirit of generosity and without rigid expectations of what you’re looking for. Otherwise, that person is just a piece in a puzzle that you’ve started to assemble in your own head.

The very first client I had with The Connectors – even before I launched my website – came from one of these “time wasting” conversations. We didn’t pitch ourselves to one another and we certainly weren’t networking in the traditional sense. We were just genuinely curious about how we each show up in our professional lives. Several years of conversations and relationship building led to her recommending me to someone who, ultimately, became my first client.

What you can do right now

As Dr. Murthy suggests, we need to stop filling every spare moment with something measurably productive and protect space for conversations that don’t have a clear outcome yet. The next time that you’re looking at a block on your calendar that feels like a luxury you can’t quite justify, ask yourself what it might actually be worth, not just now, but well into the future.

Because the relationships that have mattered most in my professional life were never the ones I planned for. They were the ones I made time for, even when I wasn’t sure why.

What’s a “wasted” conversation that turned into something meaningful for you? Feel free to join the conversation on Substack or drop us a line at hello@theconnectors.net.