Our obsession with being busy is killing leisure time. How brands can help
Do Americans need to free up their free time? Professor Selin Malkoc explains how productivity mindsets shape (and constrain) leisure time.
For many Americans, leisure time isn’t just about relaxation. We're increasingly focused on being productive, avoiding FOMO and collecting experiences to share on social media. Selin Malkoc, distinguished professor of marketing at Ohio State University who studies leisure time, says our tech-driven, productivity-oriented mindset is making leisure more stressful and less enjoyable. When she thinks of the future, she says businesses can offer consumers more immersive virtual experiences, chances to disconnect and remind them of the art of idleness.
Kate MacArthur: How do you define leisure?
Selin Malkoc: First, leisure does not equal free time, because we do things with our free time that we do not always consider leisurely. I would divide leisure into two big pieces: What we call passive leisure, which is the equivalent of watching TV or just chilling. Then active leisure is where you purposefully engage in activities like going to parks, going to museums, meeting someone, going for a walk and engaging in a hobby.
MacArthur: How will AI and digital technologies change leisure time by altering work and productivity?
Malkoc: I don't know if AI is giving us more time per se. If you ask people today, they report that they're busier than ever, something we call time famine. Some 80% of Americans endorse this belief that they are short on time. That cannot be if technology is giving us time.
MacArthur: Then what’s happening?
Malkoc: The notion that comes up — which my research looks at — is that how we define ourselves as busy or free is a bit in our heads. We create demands for our time, and then we trap ourselves into it. This doesn't mean that technology didn't give us time, but that we found other ways to fill our time with things we feel we must do.
MacArthur: I've seen various articles or essays about the need to be bored. Where do you stand on this?
Malkoc: We as humans, and especially Americans, treat time as a resource. Those serendipitous moments that you didn't plan for are sometimes the most memorable ones. But you have to have unscheduled idle time to allow for them.
MacArthur: Which technologies do you find interesting or worrying in how they affect our use of time and our perception of leisure time?
Malkoc: I've been doing research looking at what we call more of a materialistic mindset when consuming experiences. What enables that is social media. When people share their experiences using certain hashtags or words that signal [a trend], it not only hurts their well-being to some extent, it also hurts the perceptions of other people judging you. The irony is we are doing this to impress people, and maybe it's having the opposite results.
Gaming, for some populations, concerns me, especially because it disables person-to-person contact. But gaming could become more social. The technology with VR is developing in that direction to bring people together during those gaming activities and make it feel like they are playing like they are together.
“Some 80% of Americans endorse this belief that they are short on time. That cannot be if technology is giving us time.”
MacArthur: How can brands be part of the time famine solution rather than contribute to the problem?
Malkoc: As any company that creates a less packed, more relaxed enjoyment style. You could have a resort that is more a leisurely lifestyle. That was the original idea of all-inclusive resorts. You can go back to the original idea that you don't have to make decisions, you just come and chill, and we'll give you good service.
MacArthur: How might hybrid and flex employment or the four-day workweek shift leisure time?
Malkoc: A four-day workweek in theory sounds like a great idea. But a lot of white-collar jobs and, increasingly, jobs in general, are task-based, not hourly based. If your work is defined by hours, we can say a four-day workweek will work. But task-based jobs, I don't know if we can do that because we need people to finish tasks. Unless we are going to extend deadlines drastically, work will need to get done, and it will need to come from somewhere.
When you make things flexible, life bleeds into work hours, but then also work bleeds into life hours. What that means for leisure is that work bleeds into leisure sometimes if you cannot make those cutoffs.
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