How to get the most from your free time
Parent Post
Unfortunately, our off-hours fail
Unfortunately, our off-hours fail to live up to our ideal and we get caught in the low-quality leisure trap.
Our time gets sucked into easy and available distractions like phones, television and social media, rather than the pursuits that actually matter.
The goal of the focused life at home isn’t to be perfectly productive, wringing optimization out of every second of the day.
It simply means choosing where to spend your time.
“Why wasn’t I doing
“Why wasn’t I doing this years ago?”
Refocusing your personal lives means greater time and space for meaningful activity.
With the right system, you can avoid the low-quality leisure trap and spend more of your free time doing things that actually matter to you.
But most of us don’t want to give up all modern entertainment, we simply want to limit it to a reasonable proportion.
A stable system requires careful design much more than willpower.
Take action nowHere’s a
Take action now
Here’s a simple change you can make.
- Pick an activity you wish you did more.
- Pick an activity you feel you do too much.
- Ask yourself how you could restrict the second activity to a narrow context. (If you want to cut back on online news, restrict yourself to checking once in the morning).
- How could you inject the activity you’d like to do more in the time you’ve taken back?
Write down your thoughts and analyze!
We want to do
We want to do more meaningful things with our precious spare time, but it’s too much effort.
The paradox of effort
What would you do if there were no smartphones, television or even electricity? – You’d probably read more books, start painting, or play an instrument.
Do you suppose that these activities would be exhausting? Of course not. People did those things for fun because they were fun, and there weren’t any other alternatives.
This explains why people
This explains why people could spend all their time reading in earlier eras. They could do so because this activity didn’t need to compete with cheaper stimulation.
If you want your free time to more closely resemble your imagined ideal, make the alternatives less salient.
Reading will be hard when Netflix is always an option. Family time will seem boring if your phone is always within arms reach. Easier will beat better if it’s always available.