I also grew up with parents who felt that "idling" was pretty much akin to wasting life. As my mother would often say — if I came into the kitchen to see what she was doing — "if you can LEAN, you can CLEAN!"
And I learned to be very careful about how I replied to my dad if he found me idling... if I said nothing in response to "What are you doing?", chances are he'd send me off to mow the lawn or rake leaves.
As I have aged, I also find that I have strived to remove as many things as possible from my surroundings that require me to attend to them all the time. There's a lot of stuff I just don't need, and maintaining that stuff amounts to little more than busy work.