The Productivity Trap: Why Leisure Isn’t Wasting Time

Have you ever felt you are wasting your time when taking a day off, resting, and focusing on doing something that is not necessarily categorized as being productive?

If you google productivity or search it on YouTube, thousands and thousands of blog posts and videos will come up. Heck, I might have contributed to this subject somewhere. This is something most people are obsessed with in this day and age and have been for quite some time, especially in North America, and some people end up spending hours upon hours, and in some cases a lot of money, trying to find the best approach, the all-time hack, the greatest method to be more productive.

I am guilty of having the same approach for years, and I have lost count of the number of books I have read on this matter and the number of videos I have seen and webinars I have watched. Yes, ultimately, I have come up with my own system, getting ideas and bits and pieces from the information I gathered, and I can say I am productive, at least in my workplace. I was called the Queen of Efficiency at one point in my career.

But there is a downside to this hard-earned glory. My system wants me to be productive in everything I do, all the time, in all aspects of my life. This inevitably has led to a lot of multitasking, because there are only so many hours in a day, and if your mind tells you that you need to make every minute count, you will find yourself facing the dread of wasting time, even if you're doing something you enjoy.

For example, I tend to couple house chores with some other activity, like listening to a book or a podcast when washing dishes. Weirdly enough, washing dishes is actually a chore I enjoy doing. Growing up, it was a therapeutic activity for me—the gush of water on my hands, the cleaning, the screeching sound the dishes used to make, yelling they are clean. Yes, we didn’t have a dishwasher back then, and no, I don’t regret that time. I know, I know. You might be rolling your eyes at this, but I stand by what I said.

At one point, I caught myself doing laundry and ironing while attending an online class and taking notes from the class in the middle of steaming my shirt for my work outfit. Like so many others, I am guilty of reading and responding to emails while attending online meetings. I used to respond to emails, Teams messages, and drop-ins at the same time, all day, every day at some point.

That is why, when I pick up a book, sit on the couch, and start reading—one of the rare activities in life you cannot fit into the craziness of multitasking—I feel like I might be wasting my time. Imagine what must have happened to your poor mind to label "reading" as a waste of time. Now, don’t come at me—I know there are some books out there that some people consider a total waste of time, but this is where I have to disagree. If it is giving you pleasure and keeps your mind off of whatever you were thinking about before you opened that book, it's working for you, and it does not matter what others think. Literature is supposed to be an escape, after all.

Let me take this even further. After all this time and even with bringing all this into my consciousness, I still feel guilty when and if I have to call in sick to work. Yes, you read that right. That is what this unsquashed thirst for productivity has done to me. If I call in sick to work, you can be assured I am at a point where I can’t function at all, because I have made myself go to work in so many half-assed health conditions before.

Recently, I picked up a book called Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee, which focuses on this very issue and talks about how the industrialized world changed the notion of work and leisure time through decades, what it's doing to our lives, and how we are all prisoners of our own cult-adjacent productive systems. Some of what I read in this book was quite eye-opening. As someone who recently went through a major case of burnout (something I will get into in a separate post), I could clearly see what damage this mindset can bring to one’s life if we don’t think about it carefully.

She says, “We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.” Lo and behold, thinking about all this and working on this piece since last week, the laws of synchronicity came into play, and I saw this article in The New York Times this morning: Satisfying vs. Productive

I used the word “satisfying” above, but I originally had “productive.” A productive day implies a day in which you got some things done, a certain degree of industry. Whereas a satisfying day might be one in which you didn’t necessarily do very much at all, but the contents of the day seem totally appropriate given any number of factors: the weather, the mood and mind-set of the participants, the complexion of the days leading up to it, the forecasted events of the days to come. It can be hard sometimes, for those of us who are perpetually running over a mental list of things to do, things undone, to accept a day in which no boxes got checked off to qualify as productive.

These days, I am trying to take things slow. I am rediscovering picking up a book, putting my phone away, and not thinking about anything else while trying to focus on the story shaping before my eyes. It has not been easy, and I have not always been successful at maintaining my focus, but I can feel that it is getting better. The book talks at length about the effects of tech and smartphones on people's habits:

One of the tragic consequences of rising smartphone usage is the death of boredom. In our hours of leisure, we used to experience some measure of ennui from time to time, but we are rarely bored these days, and the younger generation almost doesn’t know the meaning of the word. This is not a good development because boredom is an inherently fertile state of mind. It’s true that we don’t enjoy boredom. That’s what makes it valuable, though, because when we feel bored, our brains are strongly motivated to find a meaningful occupation. Thoughts are not directed or controlled and are therefore free to travel in unexpected directions.

Again, going back to my childhood, I remember those summers when parents’ biggest fear was what to do with a bunch of bored kids at home for three months. I remember how many games, adventures, and art projects we kids used to invent ourselves to fight that boredom. How much fun and creativity it would bring to our little worlds. One summer, I completed a 1,000-piece puzzle of a lion’s head. I know people still do that, but how many of us really?

We are trading leisure time for money, and because wages haven’t grown much, the trade isn’t a good one. The sense that time was too valuable to be spent at a barbecue or baseball game started to make people feel anxious about what they did in their off-hours. Leisure began to feel stressful. In the back of their minds, people worried about the money they weren’t making.

It is all about taking a long, hard look at what you consider important in your life, because if you don’t do anything about it, it will only get worse as time goes by. Because that is the thing with productivity and efficiency: the better you become at it, the more time you can free up because you are doing things efficiently. But if you are not careful to fill up that time with something that brings you joy, you will find yourself working more and more, just because you can.

In many ways, I think we’ve lost sight of the purpose of free time. We seem to immediately equate idleness with laziness, but those two things are very different. Leisure is not a synonym for inactive. Idleness offers an opportunity for play, something people rarely indulge in these days.

She talks in detail about social media and what it does to people’s minds, motivations, and aspirations. One point that resonated with me most is summarized in this paragraph:

The truth is, when smartphones are overused, they have a strong impact on the brain that’s mostly negative. Your mind treats all those notifications that come in as seriously as it treats a fire alarm or a knock on the door. Basically, whenever you have your phone at hand, your brain is spending a certain amount of energy preparing to respond to possible emergencies.A little chime sounds, indicating that you’ve gotten a text message, and it activates the stress hormones in your head. Your body goes into fight-or-flight mode and your muscles may even contract, preparing you to run. Now imagine that process being repeated hundreds of times, perhaps thousands, over the course of a day, every time your phone vibrates or makes noise. The effect can be so strong that you may feel sore after your muscles spent the day contracting and releasing.Turns out, the more interaction you have with your phone, the “noisier” your brain is. The noise I’m referring to here is called “neuronal variability.” It’s a term that describes a certain kind of extraneous, possibly distracting, electrical activity inside our skulls. It’s static interfering with our brain’s radio signals.So our phones interfere with sleep and focus and stress, and there’s also the not insignificant cost we pay for checking texts while we’re on a conference call or answering emails while reading a book. This is a good opportunity to revisit the issue of multitasking and the price we pay for trying to do it.

There is a chapter in the book dedicated to the importance of leisure and how we should really invest in it. There is an important distinction between leisure and spare time she is trying to shed some light on. She says:

Taking regular breaks is so important that it can’t be left to chance or whim. I found I had to schedule leisure the way I schedule a yoga class or a business meeting. There are two kinds of rest: leisure and time off, or spare time. Spare time is not true rest. As Sebastian de Grazia explains in his 1962 book, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, what we call “spare time” is the minutes and hours we find in between the work we do. It’s inextricably tied to work and is meant to recharge our batteries so we can get back to work feeling refreshed. Leisure, on the other hand, is separate from work. It should be unpolluted by work, meaning that you don’t check your emails or answer work calls during this time, nor do you worry about how your activity might impact your work life. The purpose of leisure is not to make you better at your job, but to let you enjoy the life you work so hard to achieve. However much time you spend in focused work, when it’s time to get up and take a break, make sure you’re really resting your brain.

Circling back to where I started, it is a practice of acknowledging that leisure is an important part of life, and you have to consciously shut that nagging part of your brain up, the one who keeps saying: Is this really necessary? Do you know how much work you have to do that you’re postponing to read a mystery novel? Are you even going to remember this story in six months? Ah, you’re wasting your life; you’re getting old, and you still haven’t done anything with your life.

OK! You need to shut the hell up and let me enjoy this book. Maybe it’ll give me ideas on how to kill and dispose of you!

I would like to conclude with a quote I am trying to live by:

Work is necessary and can be fulfilling when you feel a sense of purpose in what you do, but it is not the justification for your existence. Remember that we are not biologically and evolutionarily “born to work.” We are, however, designed to relate with other people and form intimate bonds with friends and family. While work is a tool used to gain other necessary things, belongingness is a fundamental need. That’s why it’s important to also set aside time to be social.