Herewith a list of things you can do when you don’t want to do anything important, and don’t want to scroll mindlessly, along with the necessary equipment and supplies:

• Take a nap. This requires a comfortable chair or bed, a good book, and a to-do list full of worthy tasks you don’t want to do. A lap quilt. A cat, if possible, who will come and nestle on you or next to you and make it impossible for you to move. Put your phone on a charger a little too far away to reach easily.
• Do a crossword puzzle, a word search, or any kind of word or number game. Not a serious game, not one that requires thinking and is too much like actual work. If you’re going to have to think about strategies, you will notice that you could be doing your taxes instead. Don’t do anything that elicits guilt. Jigsaw puzzles are acceptable but take up so much space they remind you that you could be doing something else.
• Read a book. Supplies: A book you want to read. Another book you don’t want to read, but think you should, or possibly two of those. A pencil, for taking notes. (You will not take notes.) A Kindle account so that you can, instead of reading any of your other three books, re-read a book you have already re-read several times. This will require your phone, unless you have a dedicated e-reader.
• Organize something. All you need is a pencil drawer, a stack of bookmarks from various bookstores, or an app where you store documents, though you don’t actually need any of those. You can organize cat food cans, if you like, or the food in your kitchen cabinets. The main requirement is that you should be able to rummage through something and put it in a pleasing order, but only when what you should really be doing is filling out your tax return or making a phone call to schedule a veterinarian appointment.
• Write. Sit down at a computer or with a handwritten journal, reflect that you don’t have anything to say, give it a title or enter the date, and start writing. You can write about anything. What you ate last night. Errands you could run. Deep thoughts about your childhood. Complaints. I used to tell my sixth grade students they could write, “I don’t know what to write,” over and over again, until something came to mind. It worked because they would get so bored they would rather think of something else to write.
• Make that list of things you don’t want to do, and contemplate it. Reorganize it. Write about it. Take a nap, happy in the knowledge that you achieved something.
• Having done all of these, take a nice long walk, preferably to run an errand such as buying paper clips or apple sauce.
• Repeat as needed.