I have a confession to make. At the end of my first year, I didn’t do the done thing of embracing post-exam freedom with lie-ins, or, God forbid, netflixing and chilling. Instead, I went on a frantic search, running around Cambridge in between garden parties and cups of strawberries and cream, looking for the most intriguing pieces that would unleash my inner brilliance. No, it wasn’t a hunt for the perfect May Ball attire, but an expedition much more daunting – my end-of-the-year book haul.

Yes, whilst most of my friends slept in the sunshine, I was that person who raced at Usain Bolt speed to those coveted single copies of books everyone else in my Tripos wanted. Forget endorphins, I had the warm, fuzzy feeling that only October due dates provide. I was the Indiana Jones of the University Library, often narrowly escaping death at the hands of the poor souls still revising, who could be aggravated by any sound. I was going to be prepared for Michaelmas. I was going to outshine my supervision partners with my comprehensive knowledge of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (obviously after reading the original in German). I was going to nail that elusive starred first.

Only I didn’t.

Come October, my vacation loans were still sat in the same sorry pile on my floor as when I unpacked them after May Week, and the notion of a ‘productive day’ had become redefined as managing to plough through twenty pages of English Linguistic History for Dummies.

Now I know Cambridge doesn’t really do common sense (what with eight week terms jam-packed with near innumerable essays and spending your free time prancing about in Harry Potter-esque gowns), but it’s just a basic rule of life that the non-super-humans among us simply cannot function on 100 per cent brain power non-stop. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone – although given the Cambridge mindset, I fear it will – but there comes a point when doing becomes unproductive.

I may not have secured a future job in finance through a summer internship, nor did I manage to memorise the details of how Old English vowels shifted in acoustic quality in the Middle English period, but at least I had some grey matter left when Michaelmas kicked off. Maybe it’s just me who doesn’t spend their summer reinventing code as the 21st century reincarnation of Alan Turing, stealing the spotlight with my exquisite playwriting skills at the Fringe, or becoming the head of corporate banking at HSBC, but I still like to think that doing nothing is sometimes more productive than doing something.

Doing nothing isn’t only a matter of doing so (semantic paradox right there – wish I’d read my Wittgenstein after all) because you need to for the sake of your sanity and general survival. It’s about doing nothing because you can.

I don’t want to be overly pessimistic, but when after university will you next be able to do nothing in your life? I listen in increasing horror to how my friends who have moved into Real Life with Proper Jobs count their annual paid leave in weeks and not in months – farewell June to October vacation. I’m not saying that everyone is in a fortunate enough position to jet off to their parents’ holiday home in Mallorca and sunbathe their days away (I wish); there is money to be earned, summer jobs to be done, and career prospects to be thought of. Compared to the grindstone that is Cambridge, though, even doing bits and pieces here and there feels like doing nothing. And compared to when you have children crying for attention and a mortgage asking to be paid, it is certainly easier to do nothing now and ignore that reading list without being sued for child neglect or financial fraud.

Just think about it for a second: what do you do when you procrastinate? Facebook stalk people you last saw in nursery school? Google recipes for gyp room-friendly cakes? Look for cheats for Pokémon Go? Go, embrace it: hunt Pokémon all day and finally bake the cakes you’ve saved on Pinterest. Doing nothing ‘productive’ and embracing what is normally procrastination is simply glorious. And when you’re back doing something useful, who knows, you might have less of an urge to check what Jimmy from your primary school maths class is up to now.

Do nothing because, seriously, you bloody deserve it.