When Mad Men first aired in Australia on SBS, I was a regular viewer. Part-way through the third season I missed a number of episodes and stopped watching.

Before streaming became so ubiquitous it was easy to lose touch with a show if you weren’t military about being home when it was on. Simpler times.

Now that I have a streaming service at home and the entire catalogue of Mad Men is available, I was keen to watch it again. From the start with new eyes. I’m quite a few years older, have developed a bunch more opinions, have experienced the workplace more fully and am not so easily swayed by handsome men (!).

Advertising in the 50s-60s was delivered via print, radio, television, POS (point-of-sale), OOH (out-of-home i.e. billboards) and packaging. Marketing and PR roles in the 2020s deliver similar opportunities across an even broader range of mediums. Digital has opened avenues that make getting your message out there easier while at the same time complicating the landscape.

There’s plenty of aspects of the show reflecting real-life attitudes from that time that I’m glad are either long gone or relatively less prevalent.

But there’s one thing in Mad Men that I believe has been essentially squeezed out of today’s workplaces.

I never picked it up the first time around.

Stillness.

In one episode Lane Pryce (I guess in today’s language he’s a CFO) is tasked with making the agency leaner through severe cost-cutting measures and redundancies. Speaking to Creative Director Donald Draper, he mentions the amount of paper and pencils the Creative department is using. He also takes a swing at how the team appear to be ‘doing nothing’.

And sometimes they are.

But Don defends the team’s use of supplies and their time ‘doing nothing’, saying it’s essential to the creative process.

In my experience it really is.

On the show, Creative’s process involves copious amounts of whisky, spit-balling, brain-storming, smoking. They regularly work weekends and nights looking for that killer campaign. They’re also napping. Staring at the ceiling. Spending time at the movies.

I’m not going to start shotting whisky but I think it’s curious that stillness is quite absent from the modern workplace.

Working through problems requires deep thinking. Deep thinking is accessed when the mind can submerge itself in a problem and work through the tangles to get to the root. We can’t do that when we’re multi-tasking or distracted in our attention.

Anyone seen being still is assumed to be in a negative mindset – ill, hungover, tired, lazy, sad or procrastinating.

Deep thought access is hindered by an ‘always-on’ mentality.

But we can reclaim it.

Here’s how I would do it. It’s nothing revolutionary.

Turn off notifications for email and comms platforms. Rather than checking them as soon as you get a notification, check them periodically at a cadence that suits your role and expectations (attempt to reset expectations if they’re unreasonable).

Consider some kind of gadget you can hold or use that helps you think or indicates you’re working – especially helpful if you’re in an open plan office. It could be a fidget spinner, a mini slinky, a colouring book, it might even be going for a walk.

Reduce multi-tasking. Every time you switch your attention, it can take a while for your focus to engage properly. Go deep on one project and devote a decent chunk of time to it. See if you can batch tasks so you’re in the appropriate mindset for a certain type of work.

Practice being okay with not ‘looking busy’ or ‘doing something’. It may feel uncomfortable at first.

Give your brain the opportunity to grow. With AI infiltrating everything we do, it can be tempting to throw a prompt in and get something out in seconds. Allow some leeway to think and develop a personal response. Remember that anything coming out of a large language model is essentially common thinking. Does that serve your project?

This one is a bit rich considering this is my second blog post reviewing a Netflix series but it’s still valid (do I need to watch The Social Dilemma next?). Think about passive use of social media or streaming and how this may be affecting your experience of down-time. If you are streaming or scrolling as an escape, distraction or perceived reward night after night, consider tracking that time. Ask what it’s giving you that other forms of down-time cannot. I can also guarantee no deep thought will occur while you’re doing this.

Which leads right into boredom. What the Creative team in Mad Men was practicing when staring at the ceiling.

This is something I want to explore in more detail because I find it both fascinating and critically endangered due to our reliance on smart phones. Once I’ve written that post I’ll link it right here.