Free Time

For some of us, certain questions are more difficult than they are for others. For me one of those is, “What do you do with your free time?” I've been asked this before, and I find it foreign to my normal thinking. Free time is something to be filled, and my backlog of activities is usually long and seldom thoroughly tapped.

A friend of mine and I observed recently that one of the reasons he and I get along so well is because neither one of us really has any idea what free time is.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport tells about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who developed an approach to studying people's quality of life called the experience sampling method (ESM). He found some interesting results..

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.

Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed (p. 84).

Work is structured and free time is not. Therefore, I find work more useful and more comfortable. Sometimes I spend my free time building structure for my time.