Business

Serious Play: A Leisure Wellness Guidebook

Without play, both work and leisure become impoverished

Published

11 months ago

August 11, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Late August beckons — a time when and many people will take their longest vacation of the year. Martin Kimeldorf’s book Serious Play: A Leisure Wellness Guidebook (Ten Speed Press) has some choice things to say about leisure, work, and life. Here are my notes and some selected excerpts from the book:

Work, Learning, and Leisure

People have great interest these days in leading a more balanced life, instead of the workaholic existence we are all too familiar with. A balanced life includes work, learning, and leisure. However, it is not easy to find help with the leisure component of a balanced life. There are comparatively few books about leisure.

It seems contradictory to have a serious book about leisure, but if you view time as the most precious renewable resource, then it makes sense to think seriously about the issues of time and money, interests, community, education and retirement.

As we age we often mourn the loss of our playful attitude, and mistakenly call it a loss of leisure time. In his book Waiting for the Weekend, Witold Ribczynski says that the language we use to describe our play sounds more like work. People talk about working out or working at one’s game rather than using phrases which emphasize enjoyment or experimentation.

A substance abuse illness often goes hand-in-hand with a diseased leisure. In fact, most people who abuse drugs do so during their leisure time.

One Telling Hour of Play

Plato said, “You learn more about a person in an hour of play than a lifetime of conversation.” Despite a centuries long tradition of integrating and emphasizing leisure, Western civilization ended up saddled with the work ethic that often overpowers our basic need to recreate and relax in equal measure to our labor.

Inexorably, Westerners accepted the notion that one’s fullest potential could only be achieved through meaningful work. Too true! Without play, both work and leisure become impoverished.

People can find ways to balance their work and leisure values by using inventories, worksheets, reflective riddles, journal assignments, and guides for community explorations. These tools help one to rejuvenate the lost art of play and to find a better balance between work and leisure roles.

Small Shifts, Big Rewards

When you take a serious look at how you use your time, both your attitude and the actual experience of time are bound to change. This change might embrace small shifts in your daily routines, or it can include large direction-changing decisions to live your life in new and more fulfilling ways.

By engaging in fun, the playfulness you once experienced as a child could gradually wind it’s way back into your adult life. You can (re)ignite a passionate interest in the quality of your leisure life by investigating your leisure values, preferences, and interests though an exercise called the leisure search, a simple method of applying proven job-hunting techniques to the search for rewarding leisure opportunities.

It is also possible to help develop a more flexible attitudes toward the wide range of leisure choices available today.

Parting Words

“People do not cease to play because they grow old, people grow old because they cease to play.” ~ George Bernard Shaw. …Well said!

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Jeff Davidson is the world's only holder of the title "The Work-Life Balance Expert®" as awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is the premier thought leader on work-life balance, integration, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management. Visit www.BreathingSpace.com for more information on Jeff's keynote speeches and seminars, including: Managing the Pace with Grace® * Achieving Work-Life Balance™ * Managing Information and Communication Overload®

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Delegation: An Ongoing Phenomena

Failure to delegate effectively often happens because team leader don’t trust the people with whom they’re working

Published

4 days ago

June 29, 2022

Jeff Davidson

For most of your career, you’ve read or heard that one of the key approaches to getting things done is to delegate effectively. This presumes that you have others to whom you can delegate. In my contact with more than 950 organizations over the last two and a half decades, I’ve found increasingly that people have fewer resources, a lower budget, and less staff people. If they want to get something done, often they have to do it themselves!

Assuming you have others to whom you can delegate, the first or second time you personally tackle a particular task yields useful information. You learn more about the nature of the task, how long it takes, and whether or not you enjoy doing it.

By the third time, a task of the same ilk as those you’ve handled before often becomes best handled by someone reporting to you. Such tasks could involve updating a database, completing an interim report, or assembling meeting notes.

All that You Can

On the path to getting things done, your quest is to identify all those things that you can possibly delegate to others and then prepare those others so that they have a high probability of succeeding. In the course of your workday there may be only a handful of things that you alone need to do because of your experience, insight or specialized knowledge. Everything else that can be delegated should be.

Some people feel they have to take care of everything themselves and to this day haven’t been able to break the habit of “doing it all.” If this someone is in your seat right now, recognize that as a category of one, you can only get so much done.

Many managers and supervisors fail to delegate effectively because either they don’t fully trust the people with whom they’re working, or they’ve always been get-it-all-done-by-myself types.

Take Time before You Assign

Prior to delegating anything to anyone, take the time to actually prepare your staff for delegation. This would involve assessing an employee’s skills, interests, and needs. You could even ask people what new tasks and responsibilities they would like to assume. You might be surprised at the wide variety of responses you receive. There may be people on your staff right now who can help you with tasks you’ve been dying to hand off to someone but didn’t see how or when you could put them into play.

While you want to delegate to staff people who show enthusiasm, initiative and interest, or have otherwise previously demonstrated the ability to handle and balance several tasks at once, sometimes you have to delegate to someone who has not exhibited any of the above. In that case, delegate on a piece-meal basis.

Ensure that the staff person is able to effectively handle the small task or tasks he’s been assigned and does not feel swamped or overloaded. When the staff person demonstrates competence, you can increase the complexity of assignments and even the frequency with which you delegate.

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Business

Multi-tasking: More Harm than Good

In this day and age, where so much competes for our attention, it is easy to stray!

Published

2 weeks ago

June 16, 2022

Jeff Davidson

I belong to a local health club, and while I was there one day, I saw a woman get on the Stairmaster. I watched as she whipped out an mp3 player and started listening to music. Then, to my surprise, she reached into her gym bag, pulled out a book, and placed it on that ledge to read. I almost asked her if she would like a piece of gum!

Today, when so much competes for our attention, it is easy to stray! More often than we care to pretend, in the office and at home, we invite more than we can handle, and then act as though we didn’t. As individuals, throughout society, we are trained to believe that the ability to multi-task is a great attribute. Unfortunately, that’s a big mistake. Here’s why, and how to avoid multi-tasking in the future.

First Things First

What’s the fastest and easiest way to handle six tasks competing for our attention? Identify the most important task, second most important, third most important, and so on, then tackle the first and finish it all the way, move on to the second and complete it, then move all the way down the list.

Any other way of tackling those items, whether they are tasks for home or work, is simply not as efficient. The catch is, any other way is more psychologically satisfying. Why? It’s almost as if juggling projects, switching gears unnecessarily or abruptly, or leaving a job unfinished to start a new project gives you the opportunity to say to other people, “Hey, look at me! Look how involved I am! Look at how busy I am! I’m great at multi-tasking.” A multi-tasker, however, can’t compete with others who tackle their to-do list, one item at a time.

What about doubling up as a procedure for tackling a number of routine items or very simple tasks? You can eat dinner and read a book at the same time. Eating and reading at the same time is relatively harmless.

How about driving and talking on the cell phone at the same time? Driving requires your sharp attention, as does carrying on an intelligent conversation with someone else who is not present; doing both at the same time spreads your attention too thin, with often disastrous results. The same is true for projects you’re working on that require your best thinking.

Tips:
* give yourself 5 to 10 minute intervals to focus on the task at hand
* safe-guard your immediate environment to avoid interruptions
* acknowledge yourself whenever you stick to one task and finish it
* repeat all the above, often, knowing that ‘more often’ is better!

Your Undivided Attention

When you’re working on a new task, brainstorming, engaging in first-time thinking, or doing creative work, it’s vital to offer your complete and undivided attention to that one task before you. To dissipate your attention or otherwise stray means you are not going to do your best work.

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