One of the bigger lessons I got from reading Cal Newport’s recent book, Digital Minimalism, was the importance of scheduling your leisure time.
Scheduling time for hobbies may sound unnecessary. Aren’t those the things you do for fun?
Yet, I would wager that most of us have activities we’d like to do on the side but never seem to have time for:
- Learning a language
- Art
- Sports and activities
- Reading for fun
- Creating something
A common way to look at this state of affairs is to argue that we don’t have time for these things because we’re too busy. We want to relax at the end of a hard day, with whatever meager hours are left over.
This idea assumes we mostly use our time wisely, and if there isn’t time for something at the end of the day, it must be because there wasn’t time for it to begin with.
Where Does Your Free Time Really Go?
The view put forth by Newport in his book is that we tend to invest a lot of our time on various, low-value leisure activities that neither give us meaning or much enjoyment. Think television, Netflix, video games, social media and web surfing.
These activities often don’t provide much value, but they have really low barriers to get started. That combined with carefully engineered reward mechanisms keep them occupying our attention for many hours in the day.
The view put forth by Newport in his book is that we tend to invest a lot of our time on various, low-value leisure activities that neither give us meaning or much enjoyment. Think television, Netflix, video games, social media and web surfing.
These activities often don’t provide much value, but they have really low barriers to get started. That combined with carefully engineered reward mechanisms keep them occupying our attention for many hours in the day.
