When your life is focused on planning for success, it can be easy to treat leisure time as a low priority. In fact, though, you may find it easier to attain your goals if you plan your free time equally well.
Our time is valuable. Yet when it comes to enjoying our recreation time, we can find it slipping away. It’s understandable that we may feel reluctant to plan our downtime—with all the pressures of life, we don’t want to turn fun into yet more work—but a bit of forethought can mean the difference between time lost and time relished.
The universal goal
The desire to enjoy our leisure time spans nations and generations. Research conducted by the World Health Organization in 2008 found that an enjoyment of leisure time, especially when it produces “flow” experiences, improves people’s quality of life in a range of countries around the world. Meanwhile, a 2006 Brazilian study found that a structured outdoor adventure program markedly improved the quality of life of citizens aged between 60 and 80. Whatever our age or place of origin, we need free time—but it’s more “freeing” when it’s at least moderately planned.
Making it worthwhile
When we’re tired and overwhelmed, we often long for more time to relax. Sometimes, though, quality is better than quantity.
A 2010 study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies documented the lives of 403 students over the course of a month. It found that simply having more free time didn’t necessarily lead to an improvement in the students’ well-being. What mattered was how well they used their free time. Those who did benefit from their free time had a proactive approach to it. They tended to:
- Engage in physical activities
- Engage in social activities, with both friends and family
- Engage in specific leisure activities, such as excursions and hobbies
- Set specific goals, such as, “I want to improve my fitness”
- Schedule activities in advance.
If we assume that our leisure time will take care of itself, we are more likely to end up feeling bored and unsatisfied. This can raise our stress levels, as the sense that time is slipping away is more likely to make us feel anxious than rested. Research suggests we thrive most when we see “time off” as a period for doing things that matter to us, rather than just a spell when we’re not working.
What fills your time?
Psychotherapist and business coach Lynn Grodzki states that our time can be divided into three basic categories:
- Work time. Activities that bring us either joy or money.
- Spirit time. Meaningful activities that rejuvenate our souls.
- Buffer time. Time spent on practical and psychological “inessentials” that can eat into the two other, more important categories.
How much of your time is being spent on buffer activities? Could you fill it with something more effective?
types of Leisure activity
What do we get out of leisure? Working from Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” (see “Our deepest needs,”), psychologists Mounir Ragheb and Jacob Beard identified six types of activity that give us satisfaction:
1 Psychological. Look for activities that reward you on an emotional or cognitive level.
2 Educational. Find activities that improve your knowledge and understanding.
3 Social. Involve your friends and family in your leisure activities.
4 Relaxation. Seek out peaceful and unchallenging activities.
5 Physiological. Enjoy pleasant physical activities.
6 Aesthetic. Engage in activities in which you can enjoy beautiful places and things.
Our deepest needs
In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow first advanced his theory of the “hierarchy of needs”—the idea that we meet our most basic needs first, and then seek to meet “higher” needs, which help us achieve our full potential. Maslow based his theory on his study of outstanding individuals, such as physicist Albert Einstein and abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass, believing that such people represented the healthiest in human psychology. Leisure activities tend to represent the upper tiers of the hierarchy. Which of the following needs do your leisure activities satisfy?
