Is leisure part of your productivity routine? | Hacker News Reader

Is leisure part of your productivity routine?

1 pointcborenstein4 comments

I recently read the book Do Nothing: How To Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. Despite the title, it wasn't about actually doing nothing. It was about being intentional with your work time and your leisure time and scheduling both.

Placing a conscious value on leisure time has helped me to be more creative and energized with my work. It also helps me make sure that when I am working, I'm working towards something worthwhile and productive.

Is leisure part of your routine? What works for you?

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After burning myself by overworking for almost a decade with out break, I recently got a 3 months break. Got laid off, thanks to COVID and it showed me the value of leisure. I was so stressed out I didn't felt like working at all. I am the kind of person who used to spend the weekends on the latest js framework or some new language features. I simply dropped everything for almost the whole time. Read a lot of non-fiction. Did lot of physical activity like swimming and running. Spend most of the time listening to podcasts while learning to bake.

This gave me a new perspective on the leisure time, which I didn't had before. Now that I am slowly getting back to work I want to make leisure an active part of my routine. It is going to be tricky but at least I will try to continue my swims & runs.

Yes but it's cloudy for me because my leisure sometimes involve things that take a lot of work (spending hours in the recording studio, cooking an elaborate meal, spending all day in the garden). So I'm not sure if I'm doing it right.

Do you do those activities for the joy of it or for self-improvement/another goal?

The way the book talks about leisure is that it's time you spend not striving for things. An example she gives is going for a walk without focusing on how many steps you're taking.

That's a murky grey area, I definitely have more aspirations as a musician that prevent me from enjoying it as much as if I didn't care at all about producing a good album.

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