# Why Your Leisure Time Is in Danger

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## Metadata
- Author: [[Krzysztof Pelc]]
- Full Title: Why Your Leisure Time Is in Danger
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/stop-treating-leisure-as-a-productivity-hack/619467/

## Highlights
- Iceland recently concluded a much-publicized five-year experiment in which 2,500 workers from more than 100 different firms reduced their working hours from 40 to 35 or 36 a week. Earlier this year, the Spanish government embarked on a similar experiment, cutting work to 32 hours a week. In 2019, Microsoft Japan also tried out a shorter workweek. Companies reported improvements in efficiency and overall productivity; in Microsoft’s case, productivity rose by 40 percent.
- Leisure is useful—but only insofar as it remains leisure. Once that time is viewed as a means to improve employee morale and higher growth, then leisure loses the very quality that makes it so potent.
- Bertrand Russell, who wrote the essay “In Praise of Idleness”
- Neuroscientists speak of the “incubation period” that often precedes illumination as an absence of task-related thought. Cognitive psychologists have shown that leisure lends itself to the type of “intrinsic motivation” that is uniquely effective for learning.
    - Tags: [[learning]] [[favorite]] 
- We yearn to “make the most of” our free time, so we are constantly giving our evenings, weekends, and vacations over to our self-advancement. Labor-market precarity and the growth of the gig economy have sharpened these incentives. Pure leisure now feels like pure indulgence.
- But as individuals, we gain from preserving a space for the doing of things for their own sake, a zone free of optimization. As Pieper wrote, “Work is the means of life; leisure the end.”
    - Tags: [[favorite]]