Do Nothing: What I Started Noticing After I Set My Status to Away

Jacob Jaffe spent 30 years building a successful career - and the next few unlearning why he thought that mattered so much.He began his professional life in 1991 and spent more than two decades at Microsoft, where the habits of productivity, responsiveness, and outcome-driven thinking settled in without much resistance. They served him well in business - and proved much harder to shake in retirement. In 2021, he stepped away from corporate life with no grand plan, only to find that slowing down was harder (and more valuable) than it sounded.When he's not writing about what it means to stop doing, Jacob can be found playing pickleball, serving on his local condo board, or taking long walks with his wife, Carolyn, and their labradoodle, Guinness. They live on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where Jacob's still learning how to let a day unfold without needing to justify it. Their two kids, Jonah and Nora, show up often - both in his work and in the life that shaped it.Do Nothing was his first book - and, fittingly, not part of any five-year plan.