The Trap of Low Quality Leisure Time
When I was in middle school my math teacher, Mr. White, had a printed-out sign that read, "Work Hard, Play Hard."
I'm sure a lot of you have heard this idea before... but it often has a catch with ADHD - our version of work hard often has us grinding ourselves in the ground until we can't function and let alone play anything... and if we don't hit that ridiculous standard of what hard work is, well then, in our brains, we don't deserve time off.
Which is absolutely... look, while I like the idea of earning my time off in theory, it often doesn't work out in practice because of my warped idea of what hard work is.
And let me ask you, what constitutes hard work? Is it an 8-hour day? 10-hour? Do you have to exert yourself and do something physically demanding? Or maybe you have to check off every single thing on your to-do list to consider it hard work.
As an added wrinkle let's think about dropping in the Wall of Awful from Brendan Mahan. What about those tasks that we think should be easy but are difficult for us? Or at least difficult for us to activate on. Even if it took me 30 minutes to build up the mental fortitude to make that phone call and drained me of a bunch of EFs, my brain is going to go, "well actually, that was an easy task, you're still going to need to put in some hard work today.
Additionally, my brain has a propensity for deciding that when I've found ways to make difficult things less difficult, well that just means that they weren't that difficult to begin with. Take writing for example, I've been working as a writer for a number of years now and I've figured out a few things that make the process easier. That doesn't mean that it still isn't a difficult thing to do - and in fact, it's only because of years of practice that I'm any good at it.
Or how about things where you don't get the result you wanted. Last week I was troubleshooting a tech issue and it took 90 minutes to implement a solution that didn't work. That took a lot of effort, but in my head, since it didn't work, it means I didn't put in enough effort.
Isn't that a fun Catch-22 there, if I got the results easily or if it was so hard I didn't get results, either way, my brain will tell me it didn't count.
And then when I haven't put in the hard work, well I haven't earned that time off, right?
So what I'm proposing here is that we uncouple some of these ideas. We don't need to tie results to effort. But beyond that, and more importantly, I don't have to tie doing hard work to deserving time off.
When reading through the book The One Thing by ... there is a section on how to plan your year, and one of the first things you are supposed to plan is your time off. I think this is pretty great advice, but I want to take it further and say that as we're planning our days and weeks, we should also be putting an emphasis on scheduling our leisure time.
Which I know, sounds a bit gross from a couple of different angles. Part of it comes from the hustle culture telling us that we should always be working and part of it comes from the idea we'd rather have our leisure be organic. Is it really a leisure activity if we planned it out?
Yes, it absolutely is.
In fact, we often get more out of our leisure time when we plan it out. Just think about the last time you had a day off - infinite possibilities of what you could do - but by the end of the day, you felt like you squandered that time. Maybe you found yourself watching TV for hours while scrolling through social... not really paying attention to either - or maybe you didn't even get that far.
Yeah, that was last weekend for me as well. It's an easy trap to fall into when we don't really have a plan - we could do anything, so we end up doing nothing.
According to the 2019 American Time Use Survey - which is a yearly survey of how American's spend their time - the average American has 5.2 hours of daily leisure time. Now I'm not entirely sure what does and doesn't count as leisure in the study and there are some things I might not count, for example, it looks like exercise is considered part of your leisure time - which I guess is leisure, but also because it's so important I often put it in its own category. One piece of data that also sticks out is the most popular leisure activity was watching TV, which clocked in at an average of 2.8 hours a day and holy moly, that's a lot of TV... but also, yeah, not that much on those days where I can't seem to get myself off the couch.
One stat they didn't have that'd I'd be interested to see is time spent on social media or just on our devices in general. I know it's all too easy to get sucked into scrolling through social media trying to get those dopamine hits - and really it's never enough.
To help curb some of that screen time I used to rely on the iOS screen time app to create some limits on how long I'm using my phone, but a recent update to iOS made it a little to easy to bypass those restrictions and my impulse control when I'm bored and want to scroll a little farther on Twitter isn't great. Oh, I just have to enter a 4 digit pin and I can unlock this - thank you! I guess I could just have my wife set the pin so I don't know it, but I've also got other options.
What I've started using instead is an App that I've already been using on my computer call Freedom. With Freedom on my phone, you just run everything through a VPN - which in simple terms means that Freedom can limit what sites will load on your phone. Right now I've got it set up so that I can't access social media first thing in the morning, which is helpful in making sure that I'm not going to be really using my phone in bed and I'm not going to zone out on when I should be getting ready to get out the door.
This is just a scheduled reoccurring event that happens every morning and I've been thinking about adding some similar blocks for the evening as well.
Our phones aren't evil, but often they are all to easy to access when we want to be doing something else. while it would be great if we could just not pull out our phones when we want to do something more engaging, it's unfortunately unrealistic. Our phones are just simply too easy for us to use and I know most times I going to take the path of least resistance.
Too often we trick ourselves into believing that this time we won't fall victim to our phones. We think, okay, I'm going to just look up this one thing real quick, and then... 15 minutes later we realize we're on Instagram. I didn't open up my phone for this? How did this happen!?
Oh, I go to sit down and my body automatically reaches down and slip it out of my pocket? I didn't mean to get out my phone, but now it's in my hand and if it's in my hand I guess I'm going to check my email... even though I have no reason to.
Relying on willpower is a fool's errand and even if we're good about it in the beginning we're bound to slip up as the day goes by... especially when we're a bit more tired. I mean even while working on this section I went to check my phone use statistics and saw that my most used app was a new game I downloaded... and then I just clicked it open and... why!? I'm trying to work! So yeah, be careful with those dopamine roulette machines and create some sensible limits because it's all too easy to get sucked in.
Let's talk about what quality leisure time actually is - but first I want to make sure that one thing is clear here - we're still talking about leisure time, so this means that we're not just pretending work is leisure and scheduling more work.
We need to acknowledge that we don’t always need to be productive. Instead of embracing leisure, we get questions like "why watch TV when you could be learning a new skill?" Well, because sometimes I don't need to be doing something and it's okay to prioritize rest. I've only got so much energy throughout the day - while I like learning new things, that also tends to be cognitively demanding.
Additionally, I know I railed against TV and time on our phones in the last sections - I'm not saying that we need to remove those from our life. In fact, if what you want to do is watch something on TV, by all means, do that - but what I want us to do is be intentional about how we're spending that time.
There are absolutely times when I want to just sit and watch some TV and that's okay - and this is especially true when we're doing these things with someone else. Spending time with my wife watching a TV show we both like is definitely quality leisure time - watching 3 hours of anime alone in my office... not as much.
Either way, it's okay for us to let ourselves have some rest - we don't need to feel guilty about resting and taking breaks. One of the things that's become increasingly more apparent to me while working on these podcast scripts is that I write so much better when I take breaks throughout my writing process. Now, the content of these breaks is important - I don't just sit at my computer and pop open YouTube. For me, a break from writing is usually a quick 15-minute walk. It lets me get away from my computer and get some movement in so that when I come back I'm ready to write again.
And really that's one of the big things we're looking for, what's going to get us back to that state where ready to do things.
There are a few ways that we can think about this to help facilitate that recharging effect.
Prioritize doing, over consuming
Prioritize things that take some skill to do
Think about making something
Seek activities that foster social interaction
Prioritize Self-Care
Now we don't have to hit all of these things in one go, they're just a guide for us on how we can think about how we want to spend our leisure time. If something doesn't hit any of those metrics then we might want to rethink the activity.
And this is going to be kind of open-ended here because we all have different things that we enjoy doing and that are going to recharge us in different ways. Extroverts might get more out of going to a party, while introverts will probably fare better with a book and a quiet nook to snuggle in. Regardless of what you choose to do, make sure that you are choosing it and not just letting yourself follow that path of least resistance to those things you don't really want to be spending your time on.
This Episode’s Top Tips
You don't have to earn your time off - denying ourselves real leisure time because we "didn't earn it" is counterproductive only leads to burnout.
Don't rely on discipline to keep yourself from falling into low-quality leisure time like scrolling social media - use blocks on your phone to divert yourself from the path of least resistance.
Our five pillars of quality leisure time are:
Prioritize doing, over consuming
Prioritize things that take some skill to do
Think about making something
Seek activities that foster social interaction
Prioritize Self-Care
