How to Change Your Life With Leisure, With Writers John Fitch and Max Frenzel
This week we will learn how taking breaks and breaks from work can really help us improve our creativity and productivity. Writers John Fitch and Max Frenzel talk to us about how to develop what they call a quality ‘leisure ethic’, why strategic breaks and breaks are essential for creativity and innovation, and how we can begin to transform our culture of work into a coherent whole. greater emphasis on work-life balance.
John and Max are the authors of Taking Time Off: A Practical Guide to Fostering Ethics for Relaxation and Stress-Free Success .
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with John Fitch and Max Frenzel
On how we need to rethink the concept of vacation:
We have all contributed to this culture of employment. [T] his concept: if you are clearly busy, you are efficient. If you take a step back and think, the amount of input never guarantees the quality of the output. And I look at it like we need a new vocabulary for time off, because before our book I found that people appreciated vacation, but their connotation was very limited. Usually it was just a holiday or vacation, whereas I know that this is a daily practice, a weekly practice, and it includes not only these macroforms of free time, but also microforms of free time. And so I think our goal was just to remind people that the connotation of this was much broader than our default.
On how to start normalizing the concept of leisure in the workplace:
[All] all of us are part of the team in some way, be it your direct job or freelancer, you have clients and you are kind of a team. [J] First, ask people what they do in their free time? We usually just say by default, “Hey, let’s get to the project.” “Hey, let’s talk about the timing.” It’s all about work ethics. Work, work, work, work. If we take the time to really inquire about what people do in their free time, you’ll see people’s eyes light up and they’ll talk about their hobbies or the things they do outside of work. And this is the best fuel for any team. This is their essence, the parts of us that make us interesting. And I found that there was no such talk in my professional career before writing this book. And so talking about them at work, I think, will help people realize that, wow, what Alice or what Jordan does and what Max does outside of work actually makes them really interesting. So we have to respect that more. And maybe there was a tiny shift in our culture after this conversation.
On how taking a break can help awaken creativity:
I mean, think [oh] what creativity is. It really is a connection of these distant points. And if you can’t see what’s going on in the smallest detail, if you’re always too close to the problem, you’re not going to connect these distant points. You really need to step back and kind of tune your subconscious mind with this long leash and let it move freely so you can do all the work for yourself. Indeed, as John said, giving your subconscious mind time to do it on its own is such a wonderful process. You just need to let him do it. And it gives you the gift of discernment and innovation.
For more advice from John and Max on how to take a break to your advantage, listen to the full episode above or through your podcast platform of choice.
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