The Power of Loafing

Introduction

I am not a lazy person and don’t consider myself an expert loafer. Nor do I advocate sloth in general. That said, I will argue that being judicious about when to take your foot off the gas can turn loafing into a superpower.

Who, what, where, when, why, and how?

This post is for the modern knowledge worker who nowadays has a lot of flexibility in his or her workday. The what herein is to explain how this freedom can be an issue. It doesn’t overmuch matter where this work is done, but the ability to work from home is part of the equation. When is of course right now and going forward, and the why is because I sense the encroachment of so-called “grind culture” and want to help spare you from it, just as I continually attempt to spare myself. Now, there is plenty of literature out there about the evils of grind culture, but I’m going to illustrate, through what I hope is a potent metaphor, how to convince yourself to passively fight it—that is, to loaf strategically.

Some background

If you haven’t come across the term “grind culture” (aka “hustle culture”), you either lead a blessed work life, or (like me up until recently) you have been missing out on a handy way to describe something you’ve surely noticed, probably pondered, and—I hope—have found yourself questioning. The New York Times, in this article, calls grind culture “performative workaholism” and cites Elon Musk’s pro-grind tweet, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” It’s worth pointing out that Musk, who advocates working at least 80, is a douchebag.

Grind culture promotes unabashed ambition, supported by long hours and what its proponents like to call “grit” (though “self abasement” would be more accurate in this case). Its adherents don’t seem to realize, or at least don’t tend to acknowledge, that a company’s executives are the main beneficiaries of this culture. Grinders also apparently don’t grasp (or perhaps simply don’t care) that this relative minority of highly ambitious people can set a new productivity standard for a workplace, that spills over onto colleagues who might prefer greater work/life balance.

The Times article I just cited was written before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, I fear things have only gotten worse. These days, a lot more knowledge workers work from home, and the flexibility this gives them to tend to personal matters (e.g., picking up a kid from school, putting in a load of laundry) also gives management a reasonable basis for expecting employees to be available for a much longer period of time each day. As another Times article explains, “Cellphones and laptops have made it impossible for many people to wall off eight hours of the day for paid labor and another eight for everything else, and they threaten to return all of us to an era of nonstop, undercompensated labor.” And as this Forbes article asserts, even as productivity has increased with teleworking, management doesn’t often perceive this; a study by Microsoft found that “49% of managers of hybrid workers struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” In this climate, perhaps the nervousness we may have about the visibility of our output (since we’re not observed to be in the office at our post) contributes to our temptation to send emails or Slack messages at 10 p.m.

So how do we combat this impulse to work longer and more? How do we fight the trend toward performative workaholism? For me, it’s a matter of differentiating between doing more and doing my best. Since this is a vague notion, I will now proceed to my metaphor.

Life imitates sport

I’m an assistant coach for a high school mountain bike racing team. Unlike a track coach who just stands around on the infield with a clipboard and shouts instructions, we cycling coaches actually ride with the kids, the whole time, every practice. This gets progressively, inevitably more difficult every year. The kids obviously never age because it’s a rotating crop: every year a quarter of them graduate and are replaced by incoming freshmen. I, on the other hand, am not getting any younger, or stronger, and my bike gearing isn’t getting any lower. Needless to say, the hills around here aren’t getting any flatter.

It’s been such a wet winter, there are only a few trails we can reliably ride without getting bogged down in mud. This leaves two main routes we can ride right now: Big Springs Trail and Seaview Trail. The summit of Seaview, at 1,905 feet elevation, is the highest point in the Berkeley hills, and the climb up it is a bitch. In fact, there’s a section I can barely make.

Let me describe how this works for me, with my last trip up it as an example. There’s this long, steep opening bit that is a total grind, but doable, and then we descend for a bit and catch our breath. Then it the trail starts climbing again, and this time of year we’re dodging puddles and so forth, and then, just before the grade gets truly brutal, there’s a very shallow, almost flat bit. I happen to have a photo.

After the slow slog up to this shallow bit, it’s always tempting to pick up the pace, but I never take the bait. For this reason, I frequently get passed at this spot, as happened last time. One of the kids I coach had been nipping at my heels the whole way, and when I laid off the pace here he blew right by me. I cared not a whit. He’s inarguably faster than I am, and after all my job isn’t to beat him, it’s to coach him. Moreover, my job in this moment was just to get up the damn hill.

I continued to loaf, and before long could hear another rider behind me. And now the grade suddenly became almost unbearably steep. I had no choice but to dig deep. I could still hear the kid behind me, gears whirring and panting increasing, and I now faced the hardest part of the climb: a very rocky place with a lot of tree roots, which don’t actually look so bad in this photo but can easily stop a middle-aged rider dead when he’s barely handling the climb to begin with.

Over the years I’ve compared notes with other coaches about the best path through this notoriously difficult section. On this last trip, I managed to thread my way through, just barely, through a combination of the perfect line and an all-out, leg-searing effort that bumped my bike over the inevitable rocks and roots I couldn’t steer around. And now here’s my point: the rider behind me didn’t manage it. I heard the distinctive sound of a cleat clicking out of a pedal (so he wouldn’t tip all the way over after losing all momentum) and the inevitable whuff of frustration. A rock or root had stopped him cold. And this didn’t happen because he’s less strong than I am (after all, in the group I ride with these days, they’re all stronger than I), nor because he’s less skilled. It’s almost certainly because he was closer to being redlined than I was when he reached that section: because he was already drilling it before the steep stuff began. On the shallow section, I wasn’t just loafing to loaf. It was a matter of survival. That steep, rough part is so hard, I have to be rested—physically and psychologically—before giving it my all to get through it. When a 100% effort is required, you (or at least I) cannot already be maxed out before reaching it. That pause to collect myself was as important as the odd, protracted centering routine a high-diver goes through before starting his or her dive.

Alas, the grade doesn’t ease up: this section of climbing demands several more minutes of excruciation. But you know what’s worse? Trying to get rolling again on a rocky, pebbly, loose, root-infested 16% grade with only one foot clipped in. It’s awkward and frustrating and saps your will. There’s a world of difference between making it the whole way in one shot, and getting stymied and starting over. Having to unclip from your pedal is how you lose a mountain bike race.

I trust this metaphor isn’t particularly hard for you to decode. Just as I would advise you, on your first-ever bike ride up Seaview, to ease up and rest your legs before the really steep part, I  want to convey to you how important I think it is to pace yourself elsewhere in life. Alas, the metaphor falls flat pretty quickly, because life does not  always imitate sport. In real life, you’re not heading up a known trail; you can’t plan ahead where you’re going to strategically loaf.

When to loaf in life

My workplace, which I suspect is typical of a modern American corporation in a fast-changing industry, is unpredictable. It’s generally impossible to predict when the hammer will come down. (I sometimes envy tax accountants or line cooks who know in advance when things are going to get crazy.) In my industry we’re conditioned to see change as opportunity, and to embrace the ethos of “disruption,” to figure out new schemes to go take more market share, and blah blah blah. We don’t have the luxury of cooling our jets just ahead of a big effort because we never know when that will be—or, more to the point, we’re supposed to be bringing it about ourselves, constantly. That is the essence of grind culture. (This extends beyond the workplace, of course, unless you’re a childless bachelor(ette) and orphan. Families introduce countless opportunities for entropy to throw us into a tailspin, particularly if we’re trying to run our family like a CEO would run a business.)

So, without guideposts like a really steep, rough section of trail, and with the constant pressure to find more work to do, how are we supposed to know when to loaf? My answer is “whenever we reasonably can.” Of course this will vary from job to job, and from life to life, but the point is, we are all free to pause and question, throughout our workday, what truly needs to be done next, and when, and why. Who is waiting on it? Am I doing this because somebody is counting on me, or am I trying to show somebody up?

In my experience, we’re not always given deadlines, but instead are asked how soon we can have something done. This question can feel like a version of “How good are you?” It can seem to force a reckoning: am I going to do right by my employer no matter what the personal cost, to prove I’m a team player and the kind of baller Elon Musk would praise? Or do I stick up for my right to work a normal day? Actually, I think this is a false dichotomy. Over-committing yourself and failing to deliver doesn’t help anybody. We have to accept—actually, to understand and to some extent define—what is sustainable for us. I define “sustainable” not as “the outer limit of what I am capable of” but “what I can sustain without wearing myself down, making mistakes, and spinning my wheels.” To return to my cycling metaphor, I don’t want to overextend myself, grind to a halt, and have to clip out of my pedal.

Strategic loafing isn’t just about how we run our day, but how long we run our day: when we decide to shut down and what shutting down means. Just as a physical workplace used to help us segregate work and life, the act of powering off our computers became the more modern way to close the door on the workplace, even for telecommuters. Now, as the Times has pointed out, cellphones can tether us for our entire waking life. Strategic loafing means the courage to close down Slack (etc.) at a reasonable hour and resolve not to open our work email until tomorrow. (Ideally we’d resolve also to limit indulgence in our digital “feed,” that fusillade of incoming crap so many invite in for their poor brains to grapple with on personal time. But that’s another post.)

More cycling metaphor

Cycling has taught me more than just how to pace myself in the moment. It has also taught me how to pace myself through the season. There is a time for rest, and a time to hammer. Yes, I can give it my all, that heralded 100%, but only for about two hundred meters until I go anaerobic. And I can dial my effort up until I’m at my anaerobic threshold (e.g., like when going up Seaview), but I can’t keep that up for hours at a time. And not every ride can be a hammer-fest; some days need to be mellow—a conversational pace. Time off is necessary, to let the body recover. The analogy here to resting our minds and psyches throughout our workweeks and careers should be pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t brag about how long he’s gone without a lunch break or a vacation. What if all that world-beating doesn’t end up enabling a person to make a killing and retire at 45? Then what? Twenty more years of the same? I guess Elon Musk has never heard of base miles.

Call to inaction?

When I entered the corporate workforce, I was terribly afraid of workaholism. What if it ran in families? My dad was a hopeless workaholic. Every morning he was in the office by 8:30, came home promptly at 7:45 for dinner, then left again and wasn’t home until after 10pm … seven days a week. It was the rare week he didn’t put in at least 80 hours. Alas, this didn’t result in a particularly brilliant career; in fact, when he was right about the age I’m at now, he burned out completely and fell out of the workforce. (All three of his marriages had already ended.) That was my example of what not to do.

Such was my paranoia about falling into bad work habits, I made a point not to put in too many hours. I was willing to risk not meeting some vague expectation; I figured if my hours were too low my manager would let me know. Obviously my output had to be on par with my overworked colleagues, which meant working fast. Cycling had given me an obsession with efficiency, and I applied that to my career. Hoping that MO would be enough, I didn’t layer overlong workdays on top of it.

So did this approach work out? Well, here’s a telling anecdote. A few years into my career, I was at a team-building offsite in Palm Springs (back in the days of such things) and management presented a bunch of awards. I don’t remember the categories, etc. but toward the end our branch director presented a big one, and started describing the winner: he’s this, he’s that, and (this is the part that jumped out at me), “He is no stranger to working long nights and weekends.” At this, I started to feel something like sour grapes—as in, “Is that what it takes to get recognized around here?” but then I caught myself and reflected on my principles. I reminded myself, “Hey, I don’t need to be the big winner. There’s more to life than career ambition. I have work/life balance. Let this guy have his glory, he’s made sacrifices for it.” My rumination was suddenly interrupted when the director called out the name of the winner: “Dana Albert!”

I was absolutely stunned. Me? Long nights? Weekends? Huh? It wasn’t until I reflected on this later that I realized the director wouldn’t have been around in the evenings or weekends to see me hard at work, any more than my dad’s bosses had witnessed him. That I put in long hours was just an assumption. My reputation was based more on results than on rudimentary metrics like hours worked. So: if what ultimately matters is our output, who needs the performative workaholism of grind culture?

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating naps throughout the day, or only working eight hours a day as a golden rule. I’ve used the word “loafing” here somewhat flippantly, to get your attention. What I am talking about is more of a return to a work life with guardrails. If the traditional work/life boundaries are no longer available, at least we should have an awareness of the need to set new ones. I want to take care of myself first, and my employer second, because this serves us both better in the long run. Professionally speaking, I want to be the guy who, when a bomb is dropped, isn’t already overwhelmed, isn’t sleep-derived, won’t get frazzled, knows how to work fast, and can quickly put his hands on all the resources he needs. In a nutshell, I want to be the guy who’s not gonna clip out and tip over. To the tired old cliché “I work hard and I play hard,” I would add a crucial third element: “I rest hard.”

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All I Need to Know About Corporate America I Learned in Team Time Trials - Part 2

Vlog

What could be more embarrassing to my teenage daughters than my blogging? Well, vlogging is probably on the list. For that reason alone I’m providing this post in both text and video formats. If you want to laugh with me, at me, or at my kids for having such a dorky dad, click the Play button below. Otherwise, just scroll down for the text.

Introduction

This post continues my discussion of how lessons learned in cycling team time trials (TTTs) can apply to survival in corporate America. If you haven’t read my previous post, go back and start there.

Lesson 2: Pace yourself

On the face of it, pacing in a TTT is pretty straightforward: you just go flat out the whole time, right? Well, yes and no. When you’re on the front, sure—you go all out (or, more precisely, at your anaerobic threshold). But how long do you stay on the front? That’s the tricky part. If everybody’s pulls are too short, there are too many transitions, too many efforts spent latching on to the back of the line, too many opportunities for tiny losses of efficiency. But pulls that are too long don’t allow enough recovery and riders will grind themselves down. There’s no pre-established pattern, such as everybody leading for 20 seconds. It’s up to each rider to decide how long to be on the front each time before dropping back.

This will vary by rider, by race, and by how the rider is feeling at any point in the TTT. The only rule is, if the team is going, say, 30 mph on a flat road, you better keep up 30 mph when you’re on the front. If your pulls are only half as long as the next guy’s, that’s fine—but don’t you dare take a slow pull. Your team will never get that time back, and what’s more you screw up the rhythm and thus the morale of the whole team. When you take the front, everything and everyone depends on you. To pace yourself accurately means being completely honest with yourself about how long you can pull, per rotation, at the group’s speed. This isn’t a one-time assessment, of course; you must always be ready to adjust the length of your pulls (because your stamina erodes, or conversely if you start poorly but begin to feel better). In short, you are on high alert the entire time (which is part of why I always found these races terrifying).

Needless to say, pacing is important in the workplace too. And yet, I have known plenty of people (over my decades in the working world) who don’t seem attuned to this. They take on too much responsibility and let their workdays drag out too long—which is like taking too long a pull. Eventually they start to get overwhelmed and, for all their workaholism, start dropping this or that ball, or turning out poor quality work—which is like taking a slow pull. Of course it’s hard to admit you took on too much, which can lead to blaming others, making excuses, and so on.

So what does pacing look like in the workplace? Sometimes it’s not always putting your hand up to lead a big project, but more often it’s pushing back a bit on your boss if you’re getting overloaded. I’m routinely surprised how few people do this—they’ll volunteer to work on something over the weekend, for example. (I would never do this; I figure once you’ve demonstrated that your personal time isn’t sacred, a boss would have to be crazy not to take advantage of that. Today’s stretch becomes tomorrow’s job description.)

Another corporate equivalent of a shorter pull is delegation. I’m talking about handing off a task not because you’re too slammed to do it, but because it might be a nice challenge for a colleague, who may appreciate the opportunity. I used to think delegation was just for managers, but it’s not. If you’ve coached a colleague a number of times and thus built up goodwill, why not offer him or her an interesting task? In my experience, a manager won’t fault you for this, as long as the work gets done.

In a TTT, if you pace yourself poorly, you could slow down the team by taking slow pulls or blowing up and going off the back, unable to contribute anymore. This can ruin the race for your whole team. When we consider what’s at stake in the workplace, the analogy falls down a bit because if you don’t pace yourself well in your job, it’s not just a project or campaign that suffers. It’s your whole career.

Lesson 3: Get help when you need it

We can’t all be “on” 100% of the time, but we’re taught not to make excuses, and to deliver on time, every time. Individual ambition drives us to just dig deeper when we’re struggling. This is fine here and there, but if it becomes a habit, it stops being sustainable. Our mental health suffers, probably our work/life balance, and the collateral damage to our personal lives can eventually become a serious distraction. (My father was a hopeless workaholic, and during his divorce, he couldn’t sleep at night and would often fall asleep on the job—the workplace equivalent of crashing out of a TTT.)

Why don’t we ask for help? Surely somebody could pitch in on a project, revise the scope, or relax a deadline, if we ask? I think the problem is often lack of humility … it’s hard to admit you’re not up to the demand. This is easier to spot in a TTT than the workplace because a rider who doesn’t ask for help is just suddenly gone. It’s a disaster and I’ve seen it too many times, usually in the first few miles of a TTT. In the photo below, we lost two guys in the first mile or so … and needless to say didn’t go on to have a great race.

What does asking for help look like? In a TTT, it’s yelling like crazy if you get gapped, or sitting out a pull if you’re feeling crappy. When you’re on the back and a teammate finishes his pull and drops back, you wait until he’s just ahead of you and tell him, “Take it.” You let a gap open for him and joins the line early. Granted, he won’t be stoked about this, as it gives him less time to recover before his next pull, but tagging him in like this is way better than slowing down the group or getting dropped, thus abruptly leaving the team without your services. I’ve had TTTs where I started badly, got some help, and then went on to fully contribute.

So how do we ask for help in our corporate jobs? That’s more complicated, of course, but it starts with humility, trust that your colleagues won’t resent you for reaching out, and a focus on team results vs. worrying about your reputation.

Lesson 4: be grateful you’re in the race

The team time trial was definitely my best event as a bike racer. I recover quickly from deep efforts so the repeated hard pulls on the front, followed by rest periods in the line, suited me perfectly. Unluckily for me, the team time trial is a somewhat rare event. I did my first one in 1982, but didn’t have another opportunity until 1985 when a TTT featured in the Red Zinger Mini Classic stage race. My next chance wasn’t until 1988 when I started collegiate racing. Happily, in college there were several of these races during each season, followed by the conference championship TTT and—since my teams qualified—the national championship. I was so grateful to ride so many of these TTTS during my college racing years, and bummed that there hasn’t been an opportunity for me since.

Meanwhile, I was blessed to be on that UC Santa Barbara team that was loaded with amazing talent. It has certainly helped shape my worldview that my greatest success in the sport came not so much from my own ability, but from having been on the right team at the right time. I can never forget how lucky I was just to get to race those TTTs when I did, so I am always grateful for the opportunities I have in my career, even if it can be difficult and frustrating trying to make the most of them.

Moreover, to even have a career in corporate America requires a lot of luck. You were born in this country; you had the educational opportunities needed to be qualified for a white collar job; and, you had enough opportunity to secure a position. This is a really big deal. There are something like 65 million Americans employed in the professional and technical workforce, and while this is about 41% of US workers, it’s only about 1.4% of the world’s adult population. Think of all the things that had to be true for you even to have your job.

Why does this matter? It’s because being talented and educated enough to get and keep a job isn’t the whole battle. You have your own contentment to deal with, and I suspect lots of corporate employees have a bloated sense of entitlement—which can make them disgruntled, or bored, or restless. This in turn can a) affect their performance such that they don’t survive the next round of layoffs, or b) cause them to job-hop too often (like hitting the Hyperspace button on their careers) because they blame their employer for a dissatisfaction that has its roots in lack of gratitude.

I’ve outlasted colleagues who spent far too much energy fretting over the golden parachutes the executives get, or the fact of younger people passing them up on the way up the ladder, or the apparent lack of advancement opportunities given to them. I find it a shame when someone lacks the humility to just knuckle down, do their job, and be happy to be there. In this country we are all pressured to pursue and gratify our individual ambitions, but I’d like to point out that where life balance is concerned, contentment isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Instead of worrying about your rise through the ranks, just be glad you’re on a team.

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In Defense of Fun

Before we begin

Before you begin reading this post, grab a pen and paper and quickly jot down twenty things you do for fun. The order isn’t important. I’m not talking about things that are necessarily good for you or make you a better person, or that eventually lead to success or overall life satisfaction; just things you enjoy doing. You know, fun.

Done? Okay, great. Now, look at this photo of my daughter:

You know why Lindsay is so happy in this picture? It’s because she’s just been chasing pigeons, one of her favorite fun things to do. 

Of all the people you see, does it ever seem like the children are the only ones having any fun? Whatever your answer, I think we can all agree that kids are instinctively good at this. Adults are much less so, and yet we were all kids once. Perhaps as we grow and mature and take on responsibility we just lose the knack. In this blog I will look at the things we can learn from children about having fun.

So, this will be a kind of didactic blog—but I’ll try not to come off like a motivational speaker. I’ve seen a few of these, and they can actually be a real downer. I think their main problem is they try to inspire you to be successful, as a way to increase your happiness. This has two problems:

• First, I don’t believe success can be taught—you either have it in you or you don’t. If I knew how to be hugely successful, I’d be off doing it instead of sitting here blogging.
• Second, I don’t believe happiness, or even satisfaction, comes directly from success. As far as I can tell, the most successful people tend to be the opposite of satisfied. The highest achievement invariably goes to the insatiable types. Look at Lance Armstrong: how many Tours de France does he need to win before he’s satisfied? It’s a rhetorical question, with no answer. Show me a world-beater, and I’ll show you infinite hunger and ambition.

So don’t think of this as the blog equivalent of a Motivational Speech. Think of it as more of a Mollificational Speech: without addressing your success, or lack thereof, I’m going to try to recommend a few tips on how to have more fun, which might just help a bit with the pleasure side of the happiness equation.

What children can teach us 

I’ve watched for years, sometimes enviously, as my kids have played, frolicked, goofed off, and otherwise perfected the art of having fun. I’ve also done some very close reading of the available literature on the subject, namely Russell Hoban’s How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen.

In this excellent book, the (inevitably) parentless Tom’s very serious and strict aunt, Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, disapproves of all his goofing off and hires Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach Tom a lesson. The captain and his sportsmen play their hearts out, like children, in various contests against Tom, and though they lose every event, Captain Najork gets the girl (Wonkham-Strong) in the end. I have to think any adult reader would rather be Najork than Wonkham-Strong; he’s clearly having more fun, whereas she’s a humorless scold. And yet, most grown-ups I know (or at least more parents) remind me more of her. 

In case you don’t have time to read Hoban’s book, and don’t have kids of your own to watch, here are the main ways I’ve noticed that kids manage to have fun so much of the time:

• They eschew dignity almost entirely;
• They find the fun in almost any circumstance by living in the moment, managing to almost never be preoccupied by anything;
• They continually cultivate new ways to have fun;
• They routinely, automatically defend their right to do fun things like playing and goofing off.

Eschewing dignity 

Kids do all kinds of fun stuff we wouldn’t be caught dead doing, and they don’t think twice about it. On a recent trip to the beach, my wife and I hadn’t brought bathing suits because we didn’t think it’d be warm enough. Within thirty seconds Lindsay had stripped down to her underwear and was running in the waves. (A typical adult, meanwhile, can’t even buy a bathing suit without fretting over which one is the least unflattering.) Obviously we adults can’t run around in our underwear, but there are plenty of other things many of us could do but don’t, like dancing around to music (or to no music), singing, popping bubble-wrap, stomping in puddles, balancing on one foot on an accelerating train, and chasing pigeons. Why don’t we do it? 

Well, some of us do, at least some of the time. Myself, I use my kids themselves as an excuse to do such things. For example, if Alexa or Lindsay asks where I’m going as I head off to work, I immediately launch into rap (Kool Moe Dee’s “I Go to Work”). My kids either roll their eyes, tell me to stop, or join in. Or, when letting our home phone go to voice-mail, I lead my kids in a happy dance to the musical ringtone. At playgrounds, I’ve been known to accompany one of my daughters on the slide. Of course, I recognize all this as abnormal grown-up behavior. 

You could say I’m a goofball; I prefer to think of myself as just highly evolved. After all, my own dad is too dignified to sing or dance or even to wear casual clothing like t-shirts or jeans. Myself, I think dignity is overrated, and I’m sure most children would agree. I ask you again: who’s having more fun, them or us?

Living in the Moment 

I’ve been amazed to watch Lindsay playing with toys in a hospital waiting room before a surgery, while her mom and I are sweating bullets. The first time, Lindsay’s waiting room play could be chalked up to lack of awareness of what lay ahead, but thereafter it was pure compartmentalization, an ability to enjoy the toys while she could. Of course no parent could ever relax at a time like that, but Lindsay’s example is still worth noting. 

In short, kids are practically impervious to preoccupation; any and every moment is an opportunity to explore, play, and have fun. Their immediate environment, whatever and wherever it may be, is like a playground. Reality is routinely thrown off in favor of fantasy. In stark contrast, adults can be so preoccupied by the MegaCorp proposal, guilt over climate change, or awareness of the property tax being due that we fail to enjoy a hike, a restaurant meal, or a train trip. 

Cultivating Fun 

Kids are always figuring out ways to cultivate new fun. When I asked Alexa to write down twenty fun things, number one on her list was “go to Noary meatings.” She looked up slyly, a twinkle in her eye, and said, “Of course you don’t know what those are.” She’s right, I have no idea. Probably some totally new fantasy game she just pioneered with Lindsay. Such things are of course routine. A couple years back, she came across some post-it pads and set about creating “Lost pig” signs, which she posted all over the neighborhood.

A novel object placed in my kids’ midst is put almost immediately into service and runs the risk of becoming their toy, regardless of its original purpose. When I was doing physical therapy last year, the first step was always finding my elastic bands, which the kids used in a hundred different ways, combined with stuffed animals or toys in increasingly odd ways. And earlier today I was puzzling over these paper cutouts of—what? Keyholes? Fish?—that are numbered and taped up around the house. 1st and 3rd are on the fireplace; 2nd is on the piano. I’m sure there’s a whole story behind these, and I look forward to hearing it. 

Adults, on the other hand, when they’re not working, are either busy with official business, enriching themselves somehow, reading, staring at a PC, or just being bored. Or, they’re taking routine steps to forestall boredom, like having the TV on, or playing Brickbreaker on their smartphones. Are these activities really that fun? (Did they make your list?) With so little creativity involved in our daily activities, it’s no wonder we can tend to get jaded. 

Defending fun 

Any parent must deal, on a daily basis, with the trial of trying to get a kid out the door who is too busy playing to pay any attention to the matter at hand. You’re trying to get them ready for bed and they’re running all over the house, tearing off their pajamas, etc. To kids, fun is not something you get to once you’ve carried out all your responsibilities; it’s the number one priority. When this right is questioned, the parent is either ignored or directly challenged. 

When my kids are (finally) ready for bed, I usually give them five final minutes of play time. They invariably try to negotiate for more. Recently, Lindsay begged for five extra minutes. “I didn’t get to play!” she cried. “But Lindsay, you’ve been playing with that doll this whole time,” I reasoned. “That wasn’t play!” she retorted. “I was trying to put her pants on!” 

Certainly I’m not arguing that adults should behave like children. But to see kids defending their right to have fun is kind of inspirational to me. Without their constant exploration and experimentation, I’m sure they wouldn’t learn so quickly. Are we right to bury our fun under other priorities? 

Of course this isn’t an exhaustive analysis—there are surely other ways we adults spoil the fun we could be having. (Being overly competitive and/or too goal-oriented are two examples that come to mind.) But the biggest problem, I think, is that we just aren’t having enough fun. And that’s where the list comes in. 

How the list can help 

Okay, now it’s time to dig out your list. Right off the bat, let’s make sure you managed to come up with twenty items. If not, why not? Perhaps it was a failure of imagination, in which case, no worries—it happens. But if you really racked your brain and just couldn’t think of twenty things you do that are fun, maybe it’s time to reevaluate the balance of activities in your life. 

Did “work” make your list? It didn’t make mine, primarily because although my work is often fun, I wouldn’t say it’s always or even usually fun. To be completely frank, I don’t do it for fun. I do it for a living, like most people.

(I feel the need to point out here that some people work huge amounts, at the expense of their life balance, pleasure, and possibly happiness, because they’re doing very important work, like seeking vaccines for terrible diseases, growing the state of the art in some critical technology, furthering the great body of human knowledge, writing great works, or saving lives. I am glad these people exist, and if you’re one of them, please stop reading this and get back to work! But for the rest of us, let’s put work in its place.) 

At a minimum, your list can be a wake-up call if you’re not getting enough fun in your life. Beyond that, perhaps you’ll make more of an effort to make time for these activities, now that you’ve officially identified them as things you enjoy. 

My list 

I wrote up this list about two years ago, at the suggestion of my wife. She didn’t have any particular strategy in mind regarding our lists; I think the idea was to keep it as a reminder to have fun. I haven’t actually consulted my list all that often, but occasionally I do, and I’ll admit to moments of great distress when I feared I’d lost it. I present it here as an aid to the rest of my discussion. (Click picture to enlarge.)

Happily, this isn’t a list of pipe dreams; I actually do most of these fun things on a regular basis. Two items do pop out as things I don’t do so often: #15, camping, and #20, sitting in backyard. Since I made this list, I’ve managed to spend a bit more time in the backyard, lounging in the sun with a magazine and a beer and the cat on my lap. 

Analyzing the list 

Beyond simple awareness of the fun you could be having, your list provides an opportunity to see how well your fun can be aligned with the rest of your life. I suggest categorizing your activities as follows:

• Incidental – this activity can be sneaked in among other humdrum activities
• Solitude – logistically uncomplicated, but takes you away from your family and friends
• Other people – this activity requires the participation of others, presenting a specific logistical challenge to its frequency
• Expensive – the frequency of this activity may be limited due to its cost
• Buy-in challenge – the activity is so frivolous and/or time-intensive you and/or your spouse has trouble buying into it
• Logistical challenge – this category comprises all other logistical challenges

Here is a breakdown of my fun list based on these categories. (You may want to open my fun list in another browser window for reference.)

I’ve arranged the columns in order from least to most feasible. Looking at this chart, I’m pleased to see that there’s a greater concentration of activities on the right side of the chart (feasible) than the left (less feasible). 

I think in general it’s good if your activities are well represented throughout the chart. With some activities (e.g., camping), the logistical challenge is what makes it fun. Meanwhile, if an activity requires the buy-in of your spouse/other, it may feel more special (e.g., my wife’s pedicures or ladies’ nights). Expensive activities have their place—sometimes there’s no substitute for spending some money. And depending on whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you can tweak the balance between other people and solitude. On the far right of the chart, incidental fun is pretty easy to get, though this fun comes in micro-doses.

What if your list looks nothing like this? What if your activities are over-represented in some categories, while other columns are totally blank? Well, if you’re satisfied with the amount of fun in your life anyway, great! In fact, I’d like to see what your list looks like. I’m a student of all this myself, with only two lists to look at (mine and Alexa’s), so I welcome any input. 

Not enough fun? 

But what if your list is too short, or comprises only your good intentions, or is otherwise completely whacked? What if you crave more fun in your life? Maybe analyzing your list can help. Let’s go through the categories of fun and examine how they might fit in the overall puzzle.

Logistical challenge: 

If you have a lot of items in this category, but have a complicated life with lots of moving parts and/or don’t enjoy planning and organizing, maybe you should devote more energy to enjoying, or cultivating, simpler pleasures. Or if you enjoy complex activities but seldom manage to do them, maybe you could figure out simpler versions. For example, if you love backpacking, but have young children and/or a bad back, maybe car camping is a good compromise.

Buy-in challenge: 

If something is fun, why wouldn’t we automatically buy into it? In my case, it’s generally because the activity either seems to take a lot longer than it should (e.g., working on my bike, or blogging—which in my list above is represented by #6, “personal e-mail,” which it has morphed into), or just seems pointless (e.g. #11, by definition). In some cases the buy-in needs to come from your spouse/other; if he or she is feeling overworked, your doing routine eight-hour bike rides probably wouldn’t strike the right balance between your right to have fun and your responsibility to your family. 

So what is to be done? Here’s where multitasking comes in. Now, before you get on your high-horse about the evils of multitasking, let me be the first to acknowledge that if you try to do two difficult things at once—say, drive and talk on the phone—you’ll probably do neither well. But if at least one of the things is brainless—say, washing dishes—it’s perfect for multitasking. So when I have a BS pointless phone conversation with a friend, I often do dishes while I talk. Then I don’t even have to wonder if I’m consuming my wife’s goodwill. Or, when I want to work on my bike, I enlist support from a daughter or two, and suddenly my selfish activity becomes Child Care and Quality Time. Voilà!

Another way to use multitasking to maximum advantage is to layer fun activities on top of one another. For example, item #2 on my list, cycling (which isn’t actually much of a logistical or buy-in challenge because I do it so early in the morning), can be combined with item #11, BS pointless conversations, if I do a group ride. Or if I ride by myself, my ride can be combined with #6, blogging, because I can work out my ideas as I pedal up hills. (This blog post took about three rides.) 

Meanwhile, as our children so effectively demonstrate, sometimes buy-in is simply a matter of defending our right to have fun. If an item is on your fun list, and really adds a lot to your general happiness, it’s worth building a case for with yourself and with your spouse/other. Referring once again to my cycling example, I’ve focused a lot of energy justifying the time and energy this takes. I’ve explained to my wife—and often remind myself—that cycling is my stress release, my shrink, my spa, and my social club all in one.

Of course there are other possible buy-in challenges. For example, if “looking at unclean imagines on the web” is on your list, or “chatting with strangers online while ignoring my family,” you probably don’t deserve buy-in.

Expense

I think this would only be a problem if a) the majority of activities on your list fall into this category, or b) you don’t have much money. Perhaps it’s worth pointing out here that spending money on fun could be considered an investment in your mental health. (For example, my fun-related cost centers—dining and camping—are a lot cheaper than counseling.) 

Other people vs. Solitude 

Activities that require other people can be difficult logistically, but are crucial to our well being. Solitude, meanwhile, can be tough for working stiffs and parents; we spend so much time working or chasing after our kids, we don’t have much time for ourselves. A balance between these two categories is, I think, really important. 

Incidental 

Perhaps here is where the children have the most to teach us, because the vast majority of their fun is incidental. In other words, as much fun stuff as we try to arrange for them, it’s eclipsed by the sheer amount of screwing off they manage to fit in the rest of the time. 

Obviously, we adults will have a harder time finding the fun in random situations. For kids, everything is new and exciting. As I sit writing this, there is a giant tub of holiday ornaments sitting in the middle of the floor behind me as my wife prepares for a birthday party. I see a mess, but Lindsay is enchanted. She’s pretending a bouquet of fake flowers is a tornado. And this tornado talks, in a little high-pitched voice, I have just observed. I can’t compete with that. But I do okay. 

Consider item #3 on my list: crushing leaves. Make fun of me if you want—I just love this activity. This is the perfect time of year for it: the sidewalk and street are littered with leaves and on a warm afternoon they’re perfectly crisp and ready for crunching. The sound is almost identical to a cat eating a potato chip, which I’ve been lucky enough to witness. The wind blows the leaves into big piles I can ride through on my bike. I can even feel the crunching, as light as it is. My kids and I dance all over the sidewalk, vying for the perfect leaf. The kids fight occasionally, like two surfers claiming the same wave. Then there is a kind of larger leaf that isn’t crunchable, but rattles along the sidewalk when kicked, like a big weird crustacean. 

If you can’t enjoy random, incidental acts like crushing leaves, perhaps it’s because you’re just too preoccupied. If you’re out and about in autumn, turn off the NPR or Fox News in your head, stop thinking about work, quit checking your watch every minute, and do as the kids do: enjoy your surroundings. 

It also helps to be realistic about what activities you can and can’t mix. I had an epiphany about this a couple years ago while watching one of my kids. I was trying to read, and my daughter kept interrupting me. This became more and more frustrating, until I was on the verge of yelling at her to go away. Then I took a step back and looked at my situation: I wasn’t getting any reading done, I was angry, she was frustrated—in short, neither of us was having any fun. 

Once I gave up on the idea of reading and focused on the world I was in, instead of the (albeit legitimate) world in my book, everything was great. My daughter’s spirits improved, and mine followed; really, I’d just exchanged a temporarily unattainable pleasure for a simple one. Since then, I’ve become more realistic about which activities are compatible with child-watching (2-5, 7-10, 12-21) and which are not (1, 6, and 11). Multitasking is fine; you just have to combine your activities wisely. (By riding my kids to school on my bike and running over leaves in the process, I can hit the trifecta—#2, #3, and #4!) 

Cultivating incidental fun can help you replace drudgery with modest pleasures. For example, as an adult I’m not exactly wild about kid-oriented amusement parks like Gilroy Gardens. If I didn’t have kids, I certainly wouldn’t go. But we went as a family in August and I had found ways to enjoy myself. We went to a great taqueria for brunch beforehand (#12); I resisted the urge to be preoccupied by work worries and instead focused on my kids’ delight (#4); I took loads of photos (#7); and I did some people-watching (#21). Maybe it wasn’t as fun as a kid-free night out, walking (#17) to Lalime’s with my wife to meet friends, crushing leaves along the way (#3), having a great meal (#12) and some Belgian beer (#10) , and enjoying conversation that varied from pointless (#11) to deep (#19), but I did come away from Gilroy Gardens with the satisfaction of showing my kids a good time (“swing on Mushroom ride at gilroy gardens” being item #4 on Alexa’s list).

So, next time you’re running late in rush hour traffic, stuck at a long red light: instead of just fuming and willing the light to change, try to relax and enjoy some people-watching. The traffic crossing in front of you is like a great random menagerie. That driver looks like Mr. Potato Head. That one seems really stressed. That on is picking her nose. And look at that one, singing along with her car stereo and swaying to the beat—she looks like she might actually be having some fun.

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