A friend sent me a blog last Friday on the importance of find time for leisure, both for personal well-being but also for work productivity. Funnily enough, I worked until very late on Friday on a thesis chapter, so didn’t read it until the Saturday morning…

Working so late is actually a rarity for me. I have done it twice in the last year, and in both cases it was simply because I felt in a particularly productive mood, and had nothing too urgent the following day that would suffer from me being more groggy than normal. 

On the whole, I think I manage my time reasonably effectively. I will be the first to admit that I struggled at the start of the PhD. You find yourself with thousands and thousands of words ahead of you over 3 years, or 1000+ days. Even when you break it down into chapters, the prospect is no less daunting. As such, you spend your time reading article after article, book after book, and putting together notes like there’s no tomorrow. Except there is tomorrow, and more notes to put together. After a while, you have thousands of words of notes, all of them reviewing other people’s work. Eventually, you form ideas as to how those reviews can contribute to your own thesis, and (hopefully) at some point down the line, they form a coherent argument on a piece of paper.

The nature of this work means that it can be done from Monday to Friday, 9-5. It can also be done before 9, and after 5, and at a weekend. It can be done in an office. It can be done at home. It can be done on a computer, tablet, phone, or on printed copy. Yes, you can always find time for leisure, but you can always find time for work too. The danger is that the ‘work’ aspect dominates your thinking, and we probably all know people that do this.

For those people, ‘busyness’ becomes the order of the day. You meet a friend for a catch-up, and the conversation might go something like this:

A: Hello. How are you?

B: I’m busy.

A: Oh. What have you been upto?

B: This, this, this, this and this. And then I’ve still go this, this, this, this and this to do. Then there’s this meeting too and then this person is nagging me to do this.

A: Okay. Well, let’s enjoy lunch at least, eh?

B: Yeah. But I’m just so busy. I can’t stay long  cos, you know, I’m busy.

A: I get it.

B: This is fun.

A: Yeah.

And so it goes on. The problem, I might suggest, is that being busy is often equated with worth, value and importance. It’s a perfectly reasonable position to take. If you look like you’re not constantly doing work, then you look as though you’re not doing all you can to further your career, improve your life prospects, and get ‘ahead of the game’. With more and more degrees, more and more competition for work and the like, it can be an easy attitude to slip in to.

The blog I linked to earlier suggests a few alternatives to the idea of ‘being busy’. Find more time for leisure, break up your work pattern, and you’ll find you’re more productive as well happier. Each person will have their own patterns and choices, but there’s some useful tips, and it’s worth a read. In particular, walking is always useful I find. From the linked blog:

Walking and thinking seem to go together so naturally that perhaps it’s walking that made us thinkers. Aristotle famously taught while walking along the colonnade connecting the temple of Apollo and the shrine of the Muses. That link between philosophy and walking has stuck and was memorably parodied in Monty Python’s sketch about the Philosophers’ Football Match. Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking(2000), concurs that walking is good for thinking: she concludes “a desk is no place to think on a large scale”.

Franklin and Solnit, Woolf and Darwin were, and are, wise to walk. An active lifestyle is helpful in treating depression and reduces the risk of suffering from it. Physical activity, according to a 2004 report by the Chief Medical Officer, makes people feel better, improves sleep and reduces anxiety and stress. Even 10 to 15 minutes of walking can bring about a substantial improvement in mood.

From my own experience, I find breaking up the day into blocks very helpful. I work in the mornings, take a reasonable break in the early afternoon (usually including a walk), and work again until the early evening. Before I go to bed, I’ll probably read an article, and then that’s it for the day. I’ve only begun to break it up like this for a month or two, but I’m finding I’m enjoying my work more, it’s better, and I still get enough free time to do what I want to do. I find time for sports, for leisure reading, for walking, for seeing friends and family, and whatever else life might bring.

I tend not to work weekends. I’ve had the odd glance from those that do; a sort of shifty look that says ‘how do you find the time’? I find it because when I work, I work. I read, I write, and then I stop. I am loath to say that ‘I am busy’. Indeed, I avoid it as much as possible because I don’t deem myself to be it. Some people genuinely are, and so be it. Some people genuinely aren’t but wish to be. Again, so be it. At points, I am and will be busy. No doubt at some point in the final year of my thesis, I will be awake at 3am typing up notes on a re-draft. Then, I promise to write a blog simply saying:

I’m busy.

Until then, I’ll leave it to others.