So Little Time… So Many Enticing Ways to Waste It
Many years ago, I wrote a series of essays in Early to Rise about the many activities that compete for our spare time.
I began with the obvious point: Since the hours of genuine “free time” we have each day are so limited, it would be foolish to fill them with whatever random diversion happens to appear. Having squandered so much of my own time in the past, I resolved not to let chance – or worse, habit – determine the value of those hours. They were mine, a precious resource, and I had both the ability and the responsibility to choose wisely.
To deal with this challenge, I developed a theory and a method for optimizing the value and pleasure of my spare time.
It began with a simple realization: After any given activity, I would almost always feel one of three ways.
* I felt good about how I’d spent the time.
* I felt nothing at all.
* I felt bad about it.
It didn’t take long to see the obvious conclusion: I needed a system to select spare-time activities that would leave me feeling good and never feeling bad. The next step was to figure out the qualities or characteristics of the activates that left me feeling one way or the other.
That wasn’t difficult either. I kept a simple ledger of what I was doing and how it felt. Within a month, the pattern was clear.
Among the activities that left me feeling good were these:
* Writing books and essays
* Exercising – strength training and hard cardio
* Giving speeches to large audiences
* Running workshops for sharp, ambitious people
* Mentoring young professionals in my industry
* Reading a good book
* Watching a great film
* Watching an edifying documentary
* Developing Paradise Palms, my botanical garden
* Running Fun Limón, our family’s community center in Nicaragua
* Expanding my collection of Central American modern art
* Planning a museum for that art
* Spending time in museums – especially art museums
* Having stimulating conversations
* Learning about art, music, or any subject I cared about
* Practicing jiu jitsu
* Listening to good music
* Enjoying food and drink
* Spending time with my kids and grandkids
Among the activities that left me feeling bad were these:
* Watching bad or mediocre movies or TV
* Reading mediocre books
* Eating junk food or overeating
* Getting drunk
* Playing solitaire
* Gossiping
* Giving unsolicited advice
* Consuming salacious or depressing news
From there, I sorted my spare-time activities into three categories:
* Those that improved me
* Those that damaged me
* Those that did neither but left me with the hollow sense that I’d wasted my time
I then gave names to the three categories: Golden Choices, Vaporous Choices, and Acidic Choices. Mixed metaphors though they were, I felt they captured the essence of why some options leave us nourished, others leave us empty, and still others corrode us from within.
As I laid all this out again recently, it struck me how closely this hierarchy mirrored one I had already developed for my working hours. In earlier essays and in one of my books, I had argued that the best way to maximize the value of your work is to discipline yourself to spend the first hours of the day on the highest-value, most difficult tasks – the ones that move you forward – and push the lower-value, routine tasks to later in the day when your focus and energy are diminished.
I realized the same principle applies to leisure. If I wanted to get the most satisfaction from my spare hours, I needed to rank activities by the value they brought me, and then commit to choosing the higher-value, higher-pleasure options whenever I had a choice.
My Golden Choices
My best experiences come from activities that are both intellectually challenging and emotionally engaging – the work that I believe is truly necessary and important. That includes writing books, producing films, and building my nonprofit foundations. It also means investing in and sustaining strong personal relationships.
These are the things that matter most to me – the things I think of when someone asks, “How do you want to be remembered?” But they are rarely easy. They demand focus, discipline, and energy. When I’m tired, I tend to avoid them. I have to push myself to begin.
Yet once I start, the resistance fades. Progress breeds hope. I begin to feel the worth of the effort and the value it will have when it’s complete. The work itself becomes energizing. Even inspiring. And when I finally step away at the end of the day, I feel satisfied, not just with what I accomplished but with how I chose to spend my time.
My Vaporous Choices
Welcome to the Vapor Zone. This is where I go when I don’t feel like working hard, but I don’t feel like completely wasting my time either.
Vaporous activities are easy to slip into. They’re also easy to spend hours doing. These are the activities that feel like fun while you’re in them and leave you feeling sort of okay when you’re done and move on to something else. Not good. Not bad either. Just… okay.
We treat them as acceptable choices when we don’t feel like making choices at all – e.g., the neutral, happy world of poker, sitcoms, and gossip.
When I’m ready for some relaxation, my first impulse is to reach for a Vaporous activity. Having “worked hard all day,” I want something simple and mindless so I can gear down. Getting into the Vapor Zone is easy. Staying there is easier still.
The problem with Vaporous activities – and this is a very big problem for me – is that they leave me feeling enervated rather than energized. And empty. Like Vaporous foods (comfort foods), they fill me up, but they wear me out.
My Acidic Choices
Everybody has vices. And while I haven’t had all of them, I’ve done plenty to destroy, reduce, or disable myself.
Why I do these things, I can only guess. Sometimes I think I need the challenge of surviving self-imposed obstacles. Whatever the reason, the result is almost always the same.
I get a dull pleasure, tinged with a faint trace of pain. Even when the pleasure feels intense, it comes through a foggy brain. It feels like I’m having a great time… but I’m never quite sure. And if the experience of Acidic activities is muddled, the feeling afterward is anything but. It is bad.
The interesting thing about Acidic activities is how seductive they are. Nobody would claim they’re good choices. We pick them because we’re too weak to pick anything else, and then we use what little mind we have left to rationalize our own self-destruction.
A Closer Look at the Three Categories
As a rule, the easiest choices are rarely the best ones. Bad habits (Acidic choices) are easy precisely because they’re habits. Vaporous choices are easy, too, because they require no fortitude and almost no energy. It’s the Golden choices that are hardest, because they demand effort and focus.
When we are at our best – confident, rested, full of energy – we can easily choose Golden activities. When we’re just okay, we usually have the strength to reject Acidic temptations, but not quite enough to reach for Golden. And when we’re at our worst – tired, discouraged, doubtful – that’s when Acidic choices look most appealing.
I’ve also been thinking about these categories from another angle: through the lens of what I call sustainable pleasures.
Sustainable pleasures are activities that give us genuine satisfaction every time we do them – no matter how many times we repeat them. And, as with spare time, there’s a hierarchy here, too.
In my early writing on this, I broke it down into three sustainable pleasures:
* Working on something you care about
* Learning something you believe has value
* Sharing the benefits of what you’ve gained from that work and learning
Underneath those distinctions is a simple truth: The more importance you attach to the work or learning itself, the deeper and longer-lasting the pleasure you get from it.
You may not agree with every item on my list. And that’s fine. Think of it as a template, a way to establish your own hierarchy of choices.
In creating your list, consider the following:
The Characteristics of Golden Experiences…
* The activity/experience is intellectually challenging. It teaches you something worth knowing or develops a skill worth having.
* It is emotionally deepening. It helps you understand something you hadn’t understood before and/or makes you sympathetic to situations you had previously closed yourself off to.
* It is energizing. The experience itself charges you spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually. You have greater strength and more endurance because of it.
* It leaves you happy with your choice. During the experience and afterward, you have a strong sense that you are doing the right thing.
* It builds confidence. Because you know that you are improving yourself, choosing Golden activities makes you feel better able to make wise choices in the future.
The Characteristics of Vaporous Experiences…
* The activity/experience is intellectually and emotionally easy. It feels comfortable and comfortably enjoyable. You’ve done it before, it amused you, and you expect it will amuse you again.
* It is usually passive rather than active. It is watching TV rather than going to a stage play. It is getting a massage rather than practicing yoga. It is chugging a brewsky rather than savoring a good wine.
* It tends to be habit forming. Because it feels good (in a medium-energy sort of way) and is so easy to do, you find yourself doing it again and again.
* Whether it’s eating starch and fat or sitting on the couch and staring at the TV screen, a little doesn’t hurt. But too much leaves you with the unpleasant feeling that you’ve wasted your time.
The Characteristics of Acidic Experiences…
* The activity/experience is physically or mentally damaging. Often, it kills brain cells. Sometimes, it gives you cancer.
* Although it is bad for you, it is alluring. There is something about the way the experience takes you out of yourself that you find attractive.
* It attracts bad company. Since most healthy people don’t approve, you end up doing it with a different set of friends. Eventually, you reject the ones who don’t “get it.” They’re too straitlaced or lame to understand, so you figure you don’t need them in your life.
* It disables you intellectually, emotionally, and physically. In the moment, you are less capable of performing complex skills or handling complex issues. If you engage in acidic activities often, your overall capacity for peak performance declines.
* It has an ever-rising threshold. What excites you at first is never enough later. You fall into the mistaken belief that more is always better.
Applying the Formula to Your Spare Time
If you’d like to apply this formula to improve your own experiences of your own spare time, here are some suggestions to help you do it:
1. Don’t let your spare time happen by happenstance.
Unless you take a few extra minutes each day to consider your options, you’ll keep ending up with the same bland – or negative – feelings about how you used your hours.
2. Plan your spare time.
It may seem finicky, and maybe it is, but I’ve found that my leisure is always better when I plan it in advance. After I block out my workday – by the hour or half-hour – I look at what’s left: my spare-time hours.
3. Review your options.
You don’t need to list your Vaporous or Acidic choices. They’re always right there, clamoring for attention. Focus on your higher-value options. Go for the Gold!
