Spring is almost here, and it’s not just our homes and professional lives that need a bit of sorting - your personal life needs a sift through too.
If you’re feeling cluttered and busy, we’ve compiled the best 6 ways to spend your leisure time more effectively!
1) Be Aware of What You Spend Your Time on Now
Before you can begin improving your free time, it’s vital to thoroughly sift through what you spend your current free time on. When work, school or university ends, what do you do? Do you meet up with friends, cook dinner, or log on to Netflix for 6 hours and proceed to call it a night?
There are no right answers here, but it’s important to be as truthful as possible (have you just realised you spend an average of 2 hours on social media as soon as you close your work laptop? Write it down, as embarrassing as that may be. We’ve all been there.).
2) Make a List of What You Want to Achieve
After you’ve listed what you currently spend your free time on, write down what you really care about and want to work on - are there discrepancies between what you’re doing and what you want to do? Make a conscious effort to invest your free time on what you want to be doing, and cull what’s left over.
For example; do you currently exude all the grace of a sedated elephant when it comes to yoga, and you’d like to improve, but you spend all your free time going out? Drinking wine with your best friend isn’t going to help you become graceful at yoga. Doing more yoga will help you become graceful at yoga - and understanding this will lead you to utilise your leisure time more wisely and productively.
Make a list of things you actually want to achieve and work on - and do them.
3) Maximise Your Free Time by Getting Up Early (Sorry)
On average, when factoring in sleep, time eating, and work, humans have a lousy average of 5 hours of free time during a week day - and this is typically spent catching the train home from work, watching Netflix, calling it a night and doing it all again the next day.
While we’re not here to upset you by discussing the general work/ life grind and its unnervingly large component within our lives, we are here to discuss how to make the seemingly fleeting free time you have more productive and enjoyable. A simple way to maximise your free time (and you’re probably not going to love this) is to get up early. I know, I know, you’d rather be snuggled up in bed at 5.30am and not hear your alarm blaring at you during the midst of your deepest sleep stage, but waking up even two hours before you need to begin getting ready for work has scientifically been proven to increase happiness and amplify the feeling of having a well rounded life.
Allow yourself to enjoy your early morning time; go for a walk and a coffee, write in your journal, read a book, FaceTime your international friend whose waking hours would normally conflict with your sleep schedule - all these things will amplify the sense that you've achieved something before your professional day has even began, and you’ll be wildly more happy at work for it.
Think you can’t possibly purposely wake up a non sluggish mess at 5.30am? Try the gradual approach - progressively set your alarm twenty minutes earlier than the day before each morning (instead of rudely jolting your system awake), and you’ll be there in no time.
Getting up early makes you feel like you’ve had a whole day before work even starts. Plus, watching the sunrise is never a bad idea.
4) Plan Your Free Time
While it sounds counterintuitive to plan out and schedule your free time (it’s free, right? Who cares?! You. You should care.) - research indicates that wasting time on unproductive activities (we’re looking at you, endless scrolling on Instagram for ‘dinner ideas’) leads to even greater unhappiness than spending time on unenjoyable yet productive activities would. To put it simpler - our mental health takes a greater toll when realising we’ve just spent a non fulfilling Sunday afternoon on the couch doing nothing, than it would when we’re at work actually doing something.
While your free time should, inarguably, comprise of enjoyable, fun activities (as well as not so enjoyable, but very necessary chores) - you should still plan these out (at the very least in your head) to ensure you don’t waste your free time on completely unproductive activities that you didn’t really want to get caught up with in the first place.
Plan out your free time to give leisure time a purpose, and to make it more enjoyable.
5) Follow the Under 10 Minute Rule
In a perfect world, all our free time would consist of enjoyable activities. The ugly truth is that dishwashers don’t unload themselves, clean laundry doesn’t miraculously appear from thin air, and no one is going to ring the doctor for you to schedule in your unnervingly overdue check up.
There’s a remarkably easy way to cease these small, yet important tasks from combining into a large, hovering lump of chores you know you need to do but really don’t want to do - it’s called the Under 10 Minute rule. The premise of the Under 10 Minute rule is simple; if a task, no matter how unenjoyable it may be, takes under 10 minutes to complete - just do it. Immediately. No thoughts about it.
While this sounds blindingly simple, it’s in our very human nature to put off unpleasant tasks and push them forward, until a simple task has balled up into twelve small tasks and all of a sudden everything seems like too much. Hack the system, and implement the Under 10 Minute rule instead.
6) Make Unenjoyable Tasks Enjoyable with Temptation Bundling
Here’s another chore related trick; temptation bundling. Research suggests that combining something we want to do, with something we have to do, helps make our non enjoyable goals much more enjoyable, and much more likely to be completed.
For example, if you want to watch Bridgerton on Netflix but you know you have to go to the gym, download Netflix on your phone and prop it up on the treadmill while you run. Not only will the previously unenjoyable activity of running seem more pleasant, your brain will classically condition you to associate the exercise with the feeling of enjoyment in the future, leading you to exercise even more than previously. The process may sound abhorrently simple, and that is because it is abhorrently simple.
You’ll need to be strategic, however, and be aware of cognitive load while you’re bundling- if your non enjoyable task is to mark your university students’ final quantum physics assignments, don’t pair this with watching a Netflix doco. Instead, pair it with something enjoyable that demands less of your intellect and cognition, such as eating a treat (the inarguably incredible activity of eating takes up a distressingly large part of my free time, and I thus count it as a stand alone, enjoyable activity that can be utilised within temptation bundling).
Bundle things you don’t want to do, such as exercising, with something you want to do, such as listening to an audio book.
While leisure activities may vary from person to person, ensure that whatever you do, is done with intention and awareness - living in the now paves the path for a more fulfilling life, and leisure time can help you get there.
