Brigid Schulte, Leisure is the new productivity

“Leisure is the new productivity.”

We spend too much time working, as a result, we have a lot of unproductive, sick, unhappy, burned out, and disengaged workers. Ironically, we are less productive, creative, and innovative than we would be if we had more time off.

Our continual state of busyness, prevents us from entering the loose, associative mental state in which unexpected connections and aha! insights are achieved. 

Although we may appear idle while daydreaming or mind wandering, the brain is actually working especially hard in these moments, tapping a greater array of mental resources than are used during more methodical thinking. 

This unfocused “default mode,” is like a series of airport hubs in different and typically unconnected parts of the brain. When activated, it puts together stray thoughts, makes seemingly random connections and enables us to see an old problem in an entirely new light.

If we don’t allow our minds to have this kind of downtime—because we’re always under stress and on deadline, always making calls and checking email—such connections and insights won’t materialize.

At work and at school, we expect people to pay attention, to focus. To focus on one thing, you have to suppress a lot of other things. Sometimes that’s good. But sometimes a solution to a problem can only come from allowing in apparently unrelated information, from giving time to the quieter ideas in the background.

We need to make room in our lives for two distinctly different kinds of mental activity: the directed, focused attention usually expected of us at work and at school, but also a more diffuse and leisurely state in which we’re focusing on nothing in particular. 

“Oscillating” between these two modes—a kind of interval training for the mind—is the best way to reap the benefits of both kinds of thought.

As we move ever further into a knowledge economy, in which ideas are our products, we have to think about where ideas come from. Where they come from, is not only from conventional work, but from productive leisure.