Time Management
Learning to Be Leisurelyby Jeff Davidson
In our high speed world, many people seem to have forgotten how to use their free time for true leisure. This article gives suggestions for recapturing the spirit of leisure in your life.
Can you withdraw from the maddening crowd? Can you actually go whole weekends without doing anything, taking true vacations, and spending evenings sitting on the porch, as the late John Lennon said, "watching the wheels go 'round." These are not lost arts. Nevertheless, if you've spent too many anxiety-ridden days in a row, like ten years worth, or maintained some mono-maniacal quest to fill up every minute with meaningful or worthwhile activities, your task is cut out for you.
Why it's Getting Harder to Take a Break
The great paradox of being an ambitious, career professional functioning in an over-information society, is that you tend to keep doing what you're doing. If you're working too long, trying to keep pace, and taking in more and more information, the impetus is for you to keep doing that, even when it isn't satisfying or healthy.
Anyone can fall into this trap; it's human nature. As your responsibilities mount at work, you may actually find yourself dreading the notion of taking a vacation because of all the work that would pile up when you're away. Entrepreneurs in particular have a problem knowing when to drop back and punt.
Author and historian Arnold Toynbee once said, "To be able to fill leisure intelligently is that last product of civilization." He is right on target. An increasing number of people have problems in this area. I could go so far as to say that the concept of leisure time is on the rocks. As I discussed in Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society, it no longer means total hours minus work hours. True leisure--where you get to enjoy rewarding activities free from work and preoccupation with work--is vital. However, when you attempt to force leisure between constant frenzy, the quality of leisure is going to suffer.
Do the strains of the work week prompt you to place great emphasis on your weekends and other days off? If you seek to relax, but are still hounded by pressures, it's hard to get legitimate rest--even when you've got the hours to do so.
Retraining Yourself
Hope springs eternal, and I know that you have the ability to change. When I was in Boston visiting my best friend, Peter Hicks, I saw on his den wall the "diploma" he received in kindergarten. It was there as a kind of joke. I was in the same kindergarten class and had saved mine too. His was fading. Perhaps he had exposed it to the sun. When I mentioned that I still had mine, he asked if I could make a clean copy, and send it to him so he could reconstruct his original.
Back home, while I was looking for the diploma, I also found my first grade report card. This is one of the lifetime treasures that you don't throw away. Not having looked at it for years, I eagerly flipped it open.
In those days (right after dinosaurs ruled the world), report cards came in booklet form. The teachers actually hand-wrote both the letter grade and the comments at the bottom. As I looked at each of the grades, I smiled, "A, B, A, A..." Then I got to arithmetic and saw the "C."
I didn't remember being bad in arithmetic. In fact, I led my high school in SAT scores for math. I looked down at the bottom where the teacher had written, "Jeff has a good understanding of arithmetic fundamentals, but he rushes his work and sometimes makes careless errors." I was aghast. Here I was, decades later still making the same kinds of errors!
I resolved then and there to be more methodical in my work, whether it related to numbers, writing, or speaking. And I can report that since that time, I have become much more astute. People can change, and you can too In late 1989, I sent a book proposal to an editor at Warner Books for a book titled A Layman's Guide for Saving the Planet. This book would tell readers how they could walk through their homes, room by room, and be more environmentally responsible. The editor rejected the idea, saying that he thought the proposal and book had great merit, but the editorial staff at Warner felt that no American would change his "cozy, comfortable, lifestyle."
Four months later, another publisher released the book, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It quickly became a world-wide best seller, endorsed at the highest levels of business and government, including the White House. Several other environmental books quickly followed, many of them doing quite well.
As a partial result, many organizations, and state and local governments, initiated environmentally sound policies. New recycling centers were established. People began to recognize the value of recycling newspapers, tin cans, plastic, and other materials. The editors at Warner were wrong. People can change. You can change.
Here are some tips for periodically abandoning the rat race, small steps first:
Give yourself permission to go a whole weekend without reading anything.
Decide to put your home phone answering machine on "answer," flip the ringer off, and don't play back any messages until the next day.
Collect all the magazines piling up around your house and give them away--to a seniors' home, library, or school.
Schedule that spa treatment you've been dying to take.
Make an agreement to exchange photos with a friend you haven't seen in years.
Mail him two or three photos of you and the family, and receive two or three in return, or spend one Sunday afternoon writing or calling friends and relatives with whom you've lost touch.
Unplug your phone each Friday night.
Get schedules of your favorite professional or amateur teams, and mark on your calendar the appropriate dates to sit back and enjoy the games.
Visit a botanical garden to enjoy the variety of flowers, and let your sense of smell, rather than your eyes and ears, dominate.
Attend the graduation ceremonies of your local high school, even if you don't know anyone who's graduating. Recapture the spirit of completing an important passage in life.
Next time you're at the grocery store, pick up a bouquet of fresh flowers and display them somewhere in your home.
Walk around your yard barefoot like you did when you were a kid. Feel the grass between your toes. Stick your feet in dirt or in a puddle.
Visit a historical monument and let yourself become immersed in the challenges that people of that era faced.
Attend a free lecture some evening about a topic outside your professional interests.
Sleep late.
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Jeff Davidson, MBA, CMC, is a popular conference speaker and author of 28 books, including Breathing Space (Feb 2000). For books, videos, cassettes, or presentations, visit http://www.BreathingSpace.com, FAX (919) 932-9982, or call (919) 932-1996.
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