Going Off the Clock
Last week, my wife and kids were out of town visiting family, which meant I had the rare experience of being home alone for several days. What struck me most was how much of my life is structured around the kids’ schedule. The need to pick up the kids by 6 pm and have them ready for bed by 8 pm governs how I approach the whole day.
With that routine temporarily paused, I found myself feeling free, and I think it was because I felt “off the clock.” It wasn’t so much that I’d gained two extra hours per day; it’s that I’d gained a sense of possibility. My workouts shifted to the evening, dinner happened later, and I finally watched all of the Mission: Impossible films and the original Star Wars trilogy.
The day my wife and kids returned, I reflected on the experience (while cleaning up the disorder I let build up during the week). It reminded me of a point one reads in the work-life balance literature—that the key inhibitor to balance isn’t always the amount of time demanded by our work. Instead, it’s that we don’t create enough time in our week for being truly off the clock—time that is free from deadlines, the feeling that we need to be productive, and outside the judgmental gaze of others.
The experience also made me think about what the journalist Catherine Price calls “true fun.” In The Power of Fun, she described it as “the feeling of being fully present and engaged, free from self-criticism and judgment. It is the thrill of losing ourselves in what we’re doing and not caring about the outcome.”
True fun is so important because it serves as an antidote to our lives of responsibility as leaders and, for some of us, as parents. As Price writes, “In the proper doses, irresponsibility and indulgence (and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones) are very good for us. [...] Having too many responsibilities makes us feel heavy and burdened. Always prioritizing other people’s needs over our own leads to resentment and burnout.”
The good news is, most of us already know our true fun activities. The first step is simple: schedule them.
However, once we prioritize these activities, we need to be wary of corrupting them. It’s easy to turn workouts into something to be tracked and shared on social media (i.e., subject to others’ judgments) or to pick hobbies based on how easily they can be justified to others (e.g., “Learning golf is good for career networking”). When we do that, we can inadvertently turn what could be true fun into an extension of our professional and productive lives—just more things keeping us on the clock.
Finally, we can give ourselves more opportunities for true fun by simply planning less. I spoke to a client on Friday about her plans for the Easter weekend. She told me that, unlike last year when she planned an Easter egg hunt for the neighborhood, this year’s holiday weekend was completely clear. She gave herself permission to be low-key and unbothered—and that made all the difference.
She was off the clock.