Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    What is leisure?

    The other day somebody asked me "Ok so how do you define leisure?" ... how do you define leisure?

    Intuitively everyone understands what leisure is - it's that time you spend not working. But then what is work? Are you working only when you're making money (a popular definition with parent figures)? Or is doing the dishes and cleaning up your home and so on work as well ... because it certainly doesn't feel like leisure.

    Ok, so maybe leisure is that time when you aren't productive in some way.

    But when are you productive?

    Are you productive only when you're pumping out results? What about when you're doing sports? Sports are relaxing, so they look a lot like leisure. But at the same time, a lot of people get paid good money to do sports under the pretense of physical labour. Plus sports is a godo way to keep your energy levels up and make you generally more productive.

    Let's not forget sports keep you healthy and healthy people output more "work".

    So let's take sports out of the leisure bag for now - they're too generally useful.

    What about something far more innocent - a nice walk in the park? That's leisure! That is most definitely leisure, right!? Then again ... Stephen King is known for taking a walk every day at the same time, with the specific purpose of being alone to think. So he can write better stories.

    Story writing, for him, is work. So is that walk a leisure activity, or a work activity?

    And let's not forget most of us get really good ideas when doing nothing in particular. When we're just taking a shower or something ... so should we start identifying all bits of the day as work?

    bah ne, ne to je glup post ... I don't have anything to say here

    Published on July 3rd, 2012 in Uncategorized

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about What is leisure?

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️