Leisure vs. Free Time

[7Wannabe5]

I am in the middle of one of my periodic major overhauls of my Web of Goals/Bucket List/Daily Practices/Time and Money Budget. This time I am paying particular attention to time spent/budgeted on maintenance activities vs. new activities. So, for instance, my baseline health maintenance exercise practice is "Hike, Swim, Dance or Bike for an hour a day, 6 days/week." and that takes up 312 hours/year. I sleep 8 hrs/day, so I have 5840 hours in my budget each year. I am labeling my biggest time use line item "Leisure and Simple Maintenance Activities (stuff like showering,eating and sweeping the floor that I do on absent-minded auto-pilot and don't want to give their own line item)" and I somewhat arbitrarily decided to throw half my time budget, 2920 hours, at that line. Since I am frugal, but not financially independent, and I generally mix pleasure/fulfillment with business in my earning activities, I need to budget approximately 640 hours a year to paid work. So, after I subtract my leisure and paid work hours ,I am left with roughly 2280 hours/year to apply to specific directed, active goals. projects, studies, exercise etc.

Anyways, I am curious about how other people in this group do or would choose to allot their free time. Given your druthers, how many hours would you assign to the category "Leisure and Simple Maintenance Activities?" I guess my other question would be what makes free time free? Does un-free time come down to survival and our overt social contracts?

[almostthere]

Unfortunately, I have not quantified my time to your question to give you an exact answer; however, I can say that I was very surprised at how much time I did spend in my first year and a half of FI doing the things that you classify as 'leisure and simple maintenance'. I am now on a short term contract working and I am equally surprised how efficient I have to be to get the same things done while working. When living FI, I had to really work to carve out my true 'leisure/hobby' time. We have two small children, so those responsibilities can take all of our time as parents if we let them. Sometimes it seemed that I left work to become a full time cook and dishwasher at home

[7Wannabe5]

@almostthere:

BTDT. The project of raising kids is huge. Since I got knocked up at 22, I never really experienced the luxury of only having to take care of myself as an adult until a couple years ago when my youngest became financially independent. Let's do the math. Maybe 6 years at 16 hours/day, 6 years at 10 hrs/day, 6 years at 5 hrs/day and 4 years at 2 hrs/day. Ka-ching. Over 70,000 hours to complete that project. Of course, since parenthood is a form of self-employment, you are free to multi-task or apply Web of Goals structure, so not every child care hour need be nothing but a child care hour (unless you have infant with colic or more than 1 two year old, etc.) Most tasks expand to fill the time allotted to them. For instance, I'm sure some people could devote their whole day to nothing but personal health, fitness and appearance post-FI. There were a couple affluent women in their 60s who seemed to spend their entire morning every day at a Bikram yoga studio I attended for a while. Part of the reason I am thinking about this dichotomy is that during my recent "kept woman" phase, I had relatively more leisure and less freedom than I do now, and I am happier with more freedom and less leisure. So, I think freedom has more to do with decision making.

[GandK]

@7w5 That's where I am now. I write when I can, I take care of my body when I can, I do chores when I can... but everything gets squeezed in around the 5-year-old's physical/social/education needs and, in the evenings, the teenager's homework. I feel great that I'm able to spend so much time with them, but... I spend so much time with them!

I am looking forward to what my life will look like when the little guy goes to school next fall. Assuming we stay where we are and use public schools, he will be in half-day kindergarten then. And all day first grade the year after. Woohoo!

Once the majority of my day is self-directed - and quiet! what joy - I will read and write much more. I have an "I should read this someday" list that's a mile long, including many recommendations made here. I will also spend more time with my husband then. He likes to work from home when he has no meetings, but hesitates to do it now because the little guy is so active.

[OldPro]

The saying, 'work expands to fill time available' is as applicable to someone who has FIREd as to someone who still needs to work for a living. I always chuckle to myself when people say something like, 'I wouldn't know what to do with my time if I retired.'

How you spend your time is of course an individual thing which depends on many factors. Some people seem to think that if they aren't spending their time 'productively' then they are wasting their time. What they of course do is make assumptions about what that word 'productive' actually means.

I've wrote here before about learning how to spend 3 hours having a cup of coffee at my local kafenion when I lived in Greece vs. the likely average in N. America of about 10 minutes. And that 10 minutes is ONLY referring to the people who actually sit down in a coffee shop to have that coffee rather than using the drive-through window and drinking their coffee in their car.

Think about it, how sad is it that someone doesn't even have 10 minutes to sit down and drink a cup of coffee. There is something seriously wrong with that picture I'd say.

One thing I would say 7wannabe5, is you are still scheduling your time it seems. That to me is a sign of not having let go yet of the 9-5 mentality. No time is 'wasted' if it is spent doing something you enjoy. To me, what makes 'free time free' is not having it allocated to anything at all. Being able to get up in the morning and say, 'so what do I feel like doing this morning?' Depending on what it is I decide I want to do, is what determines how long I will spend doing it. That means it is absolutely impossible for me to figure out how many hours I will spend on any given thing in a day, week, month or year.

[steveo73]

I don't plan my life like that. I just tend to do whatever makes sense to me at the time.

I do find that too much work kills me.

[7Wannabe5]

@GandK: Do you have your own office or similar space at home? Didn't stop people from yelling for me from the bottom of the stairs, but still I highly recommend. "A woman must have money AND a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Virginia Woolf (emphasis mine.)

OldPro said: One thing I would say 7wannabe5, is you are still scheduling your time it seems. That to me is a sign of not having let go yet of the 9-5 mentality.

I don't think I ever adopted the 9-5 mentality. I first attempted to drop out of school when I was 14, and I only worked full-time for somebody else (large chain of bookstores) a scant 6 of my 50 years. I should note that I'm not rigidly block scheduling my time or anything like that. I am attempting to make decisions about how to spend it in the best interest of my own happiness and fulfillment. I have no difficulty spending many of my days wandering around the house in my bathrobe, with my hair clumped up in a messy bun, drinking coffee, eating pickled herring out of the jar and cookies, just doing or reading this or that and engaging in idle chit-chat. It is my intention to continue to spend some of my days in that manner. However, it has been my own observation that it does not make me feel most happy or fulfilled to spend all of my time in that manner. I am happier if I sometimes make the effort to overcome inertia and brush all the tangles out of my hair and go out in the world of people and places and/or hit myself with a tiny little stick so that I can experience the pleasure of tackling and completing a piece of creative work.

Perhaps this would be best illustrated by some examples of the types of goals I set for myself:

#16- I will evaluate and possibly expand the effect of my daffodil display and design/create at least one more major aesthetic element on my property.(40 hours)
#25- I will take a bike camping trip.(100 hours)
#33-I will scout/scavenge/map 300 items/elements in my habitat each month.(90 hours/year)
#35-I will attempt to gain basic familiarity with the cuisine and literature of a different world culture/region/era each month by preparing 5 recipes and reading 1 book.(96 hours/year)
#40- I will attempt to achieve and maintain sexual health and fulfillment through the practice of ethical polyamory.(200 hours/year)

Less like I am attempting to be efficient towards production. More like I am attempting to better organize all the little interest centers in my smorgasbord playroom lifestyle because there are too many fun things that I want to do, and I will likely only live another 40 years or so.

[Dragline]

Anyways, I am curious about how other people in this group do or would choose to allot their free time. Given your druthers, how many hours would you assign to the category "Leisure and Simple Maintenance Activities?" I guess my other question would be what makes free time free? Does un-free time come down to survival and our overt social contracts?

I think of this is terms of seasons of life. Since we still have kids at home, most of my free time is taken up with activities relating to them. (Last weekend was "Backpacking in Shenandoah National Forest.") This will change when they are gone.

I don't enjoy simple maintenance activities for the most part, so tend to minimize the time spent. Except for those along the lines of "long Epsom salt bath recovering from backpacking in Shenandoah National Forest."

[almostthere]

@7W5 I am glad to see the child raising time declines over time. Also I like your style of goal setting, I dropped goal setting a while ago setting up daily habits instead in intellectual areas I wanted to deepen. I think I like your goals because they might force more variety in life. My FI life could use a bit more variety.

@GandK When our oldest started school, there was a marked difference in the stress level at home. The second will start in one year. I day dream regularly of those quiet mornings to come.

[George the original one]

My leisure activities are nearly all opportunistic. I don't particularly allocate time for them, though I could. Visiting the local library will become an allocated item (unmetered Internet access!) and we'll likely start soon, probably as part of a weekly shopping trip. I do make a point of walking around the property at least once per day (15-60 minutes per trip depending on what I see).

Woodcutting & splitting is done in spring/summer on dry days and restacking happens in fall before it rains. Gardening is primarily done on dry days and anytime the weeds annoy me enough to do something about them; mowing is the only bit that has a more scheduled/allocated nature. Fishing is nearly year-round and fish-watching is primarily fall/winter; fall/winter fishing mainly happens during/after a rainfall while the spring/summer is whenever the mood/opportunity strikes. Jaunts, beachcombing, and breathing the atmosphere of coastal towns are somewhat whim-based. Computer games & internet & television & reading fill in the gaps in the proportions that meet my interests.

I do allocate a couple days per year to specific events: 1 day after Memorial Day weekend for annual climb of Saddle Mountain, 1 late September day for beach campfire & fish-watching, 2-3 days for Thanksgiving, similar for Christmas. I'm expecting to create a couple more specific events, like razor-clamming days, but at this time do not know what they'll be.

[GandK]

@GandK: Do you have your own office or similar space at home? Didn't stop people from yelling for me from the bottom of the stairs, but still I highly recommend. "A woman must have money AND a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Virginia Woolf (emphasis mine.)

Alas, no. I have no room of my own yet. When my oldest moves out I will gain such a space. I'm eagerly looking forward to that day. I haven't had my own room in decades.

@GandK When our oldest started school, there was a marked difference in the stress level at home. The second will start in one year. I day dream regularly of those quiet mornings to come.

Oh, me too. Me. Too. I fantasize about crazy things when he goes off to Kindergarten. Just imagine... I could go to the bathroom - start to finish - without anyone yelling "Mom!" through the closed bathroom door. I could take a shower without rushing to be out again, dressed and ready, in exactly 22 minutes because that's the length of a Peg + Cat episode. (Hell, I may not even need to know anymore how long a Peg + Cat episode is!) I could fix tuna for lunch without hearing the nasally whine of "But I wanted peanut butter and jelly!" Best of all, I could probably drink an entire cup of tea without someone interrupting me to tell me how he just spilled bubble solution on the bedroom floor (!) or asking me to put Optimus Prime's head back on for the eighth time that morning. Tea and quiet... wow. If that's not nirvana, I don't know what is.

[OldPro]

Hmmm, why don't you have a nanny to deal with all those things GandK? That's what nannys were invented for.

[GandK]

That's what nannys were invented for.

Because I don't want to be one of THOSE PEOPLE.

[7Wannabe5]

Oh, you may find that you miss having a little one around after a number of years of tea and quiet. That's why I enjoy substitute teaching for kindergarten. It's like being paid to be a community grandma. OTOH, I think maybe 16 hours/week might be the tipping point for enjoyment of reading picture books, jumping rope and singing "Where is thumbkin?" when combined with cleaning up spills, breaking up squabbles and constantly tying shoelaces.-lol.

[Peanut]

To me leisure is about living outside the necessity of work, while free time is whatever you can scrape together outside of having to work and attend to other fixed responsibilities.

In the past I found that I will sacrifice sleep to meet a minimum of 2 hrs/day of free time, then mostly defined as snacking while reading the NYT. I think my ideal is maybe up to 3.5 hrs/day of that kind of free time, spent in diverse ways. More than that and I'd have to figure out something more productive to do. Simple maintenance I try to spend as little time as possible doing. So I like things like brushing my teeth while showering, or giving my kid the duster to 'play' with all around the house.

[7Wannabe5]

almostthere said: I think I like your goals because they might force more variety in life. My FI life could use a bit more variety.

I enjoy the exercise of making new goals and plans, because like making list for Santa. This is the first time I've tried to incorporate Web of Goals into the category/list making, and I've found that it's not very difficult for me to stretch any goal into an extra category or two. For instance, my Goal #35 above, fits into 8 of my 12 different Renaissance Web categories. I finished my first attempt at making spreadsheet to track web progress, including daily subjective evaluation of how I spent my time, along the lines of subjective analysis of money spent suggested in YMOYL, and have been somewhat surprised by the results. Seems like I am happiest when I am busiest, but only if I was less busy previously on a daily, or near daily cycle. Too early to verify pattern, but if this holds true, it will prove very useful for my planning forward, because I will likely want to have something more like a 2 days on/3 days off pattern to my semi-retirement rather than a 2 months on/3 months off pattern. This makes sense for me upon reflection, because my metabolism/temperament is that I usually pop out of bed ready to go, but I usually prefer to, for instance, get everything prepared for a party in relaxed slow-mo as much as possible before the actual event. IOW, my preference is for something sort of the opposite of a "hurry up, then wait" lifestyle.

[Stahlmann]

I don't post this to feel better, but I'm thinking about next step in my "career" (or rather "job") and I need to overcome some problems.

This is not the case. Busy does not work.

If you don't take the time to regenerate, your performance decreases drastically. This has been studied in a number of different ways in various fields. For almost a hundred years! Employees of inter-war ammunition factories in the UK working 70 hours a week turned out to be almost as efficient, in total, as those who worked 55 hours. In other words, an additional 15 hours at work had virtually no effect. And we're talking about manual work. In intellectual work is even worse.

Research on American scientists from the 1950s showed that those who spent 10-20 hours a week in the office / laboratory had the highest efficiency in relation to the time spent. At 25 hours, productivity per hour was similar to 5. At 35, it dropped to half of the level from 20 hours (in other words, scientists spent 35h at work in total by one-eighth worse than those who spent 20 hours in the office!). Above 35 hours there was a slight increase - at the level of 50-55 h the efficiency increased back to efficiency from 5h / week to drop further drastically. Moreover, the authors of this study speculated that these specific results are an artifact - they seemed to relate primarily to researchers who had to constantly monitor the operation of large machines for extended periods of time. And after 55 hours, the performance went head-to-neck.



Why is this happening? There are of course different hypotheses, but the key one seems to be that we have limited capacity during the day (I wrote about how it can mechanically work in the "Short Concept of Willpower" - I am a big supporter of the serotonin model here).

That was how Ericsson's research on experts suggested that the possible range of intentional exercise for most people is about 4.5 hours a day. Considering that intentional exercise is above all a state of high concentration, it can be assumed that it is a good measure of human's ability to concentrate at all during the day. Of course, there may be some individual differences - someone will be able to focus on 4 hours, someone else on 5 hours - but the overall limit seems to be similar. (I encountered a few exceptions in this career, but they matched the general rule of 20h / week - such people worked very hard for several days, after which they regenerated intensively for the next.)

While in the short term, on a scale of 1-2 days, you can probably cross these limits and force more efficiency, in the long run it is basically impossible. (Another thing is that if you work inefficient all the time, it's very easy to lose the comparison and forget that you can do it shorter and better.) Whether you like it or not, our brain has limits that we just can't overcome.

https://blog.krolartur.com/kult-zajetosci/

[Sabaka]

@Stahlmann

That's a very interesting post, thank you for sharing it. I have found that the maximum period I can actively learn a language a day (the main way I spend my leisure time atm) to be around 4-5 hours a day, which coincides with the results of that study. Beyond that and the brain refuses to process information correctly anymore .

As a society I would be in favour if we moved away from a "total hours spent in the office" to a "achieve a set number of tasks and then you're finished" employment model. I imagine this might eventually bring about the 15 hour average working week that Keynes predicted. Some professions have increasingly moved to such a model, especially those belonging to the new industries which have emerged in the 21st century. But overall I believe that we are still a long way off this even being the dominant employment model.

On the topic of the original post, personally I struggle to clearly define what is "leisure work". For example, much of my learning languages is leisurely, such as watching tv shows and movies and talking to native speakers. Other parts, such as grammar and vocab study, feel much less leisurely. As a whole however, they all contribute towards the goal of attaining a certain level in x language. Therefore, as I still believe that this goal is beneficial to self-improvement and will serve a purpose in the future, I am not too worried if the methods I employed to reach it could not always be independently verified as a "good use of time".

Of course, some things can be definitely definitely assigned to the category of leisure and free time, such as watching some kind of tv series. In general, I think I can tell when I have done enough of this in a day, as I start to feel guilty if I continue to do it! I thing these types of entertainments probably average out at 1-2 hours a day for me, but this might be different for others.