Hobbies: How Business Leaders Spend Time Away from Work

July 13, 2018 | Uplifting downtime Rowena Crosbie, President, Tero International, rcrosbie@tero.com

How much time do you devote to hobbies that renew and refresh you?

Research shows that 61 percent of us worry about our work-life balance, 70 percent of us have had our health affected by it, 59 percent of us feel it affects our interpersonal relationships in the form of stress, and it is a leading cause of workplace violence and absenteeism.

How do we balance work and life in a way that everything receives its due and we feel successful in all our roles? How do we find the time for hobbies?

Maybe we’re not asking the right question.

Too often people picture success as balancing work and life perfectly at all times — always the right amount of time for family, work, community and hobbies. This is not only impossible, it is impractical. There are times in life when we need to devote more to one aspect of our existence than another.

Rather than seek balance, perhaps we should be asking ourselves a different question. What is most important? When we feel fulfilled in all the important contexts of our lives, we have achieved that balance.

Too many business leaders procrastinate on fun, leisure and hobbies. Yet they know these activities are important. They think that they will relax after they finish the next project. Of course, there are an endless number of projects, and leisure time seldom comes.

When we can identify what’s important in all aspects of our lives and be fully present in the moment instead of thinking about work pressures when we’re at home and home issues when at work, we not only find the time for hobbies, we may also discover that we have more energy for all activities.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences." – Jack Welch