Protect the sacred space of leisure from being contaminated by work

Globe and Mail

05-06-2025

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Gloria Mark, a leading researcher on attention and distraction and University of California informatics professor, warns us to beware of leisure contamination: The tendency while taking a break to still be wrestling with work and family responsibilities. It's a mental spillover of stress into those rare moments that are meant to be restful.
'Psychological detachment – fully detaching from stressors during leisure time – is crucial for recovery from stress. But achieving it in our always-connected, always-on, busy culture is getting harder and harder to do,' she writes on her Substack blog.
Most of us believe leisure time has been shrinking. But she says the quantity has remained constant over the past 20 years; what has changed is how we spend it, with an extra two hours spent watching screens – smartphones, other personal devices and television. Despite leisure time remaining consistent, however, stress levels have risen sharply.
'Even when we set aside time to relax, we often don't take full advantage of it, allowing our minds to remain tethered to screens, work or other responsibilities. It's like a faucet that never fully turns off – a steady drip, drip, drip of stress that contaminates our leisure time. All kinds of external pressures like demanding jobs, financial concerns, social expectations and disturbing world events in the news intrude on our rest, preventing the mental and emotional recovery that leisure time is meant to provide,' she says.
To reduce leisure contamination, she advises us to consciously separate work from leisure. That means no emails or messages and no thinking about your next report during downtime. 'Leisure must be protected as a distinct and sacred space,' she says.
Approach leisure time with intention. Consider it a valuable resource, not just filler time. Choose activities that rejuvenate you. 'Despite having the time to unwind, many of us squander it – not by choice, but because of ingrained habits and external intrusions,' she writes.
For many people, the biggest block of continuous leisure time is our vacations. It can be hard to avoid contamination and in some cases nearly impossible. Maybe you're a sole entrepreneur or a lawyer prepping for a big trial or someone else with an important, upcoming critical deadline. It may be even more important in those situations to ensure refreshing time away, in essence avoiding contamination in the part of the vacation that must be contaminated.
Time management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders says that delicate balance starts with telling people you are away – on vacation. Your instinct may be the opposite but an out-of-office responder reduces your worry about what others are thinking when you don't react quickly to them.
You also want to avoid compulsively checking your messages to ensure no emergency is occurring. 'For any days where you're not working the full day, have a designated person who can field most items and contact you if a true emergency comes up. Prep them on exactly when you want to be contacted,' she writes in Harvard Business Review.
Don't leave your work hours undefined on the break. To the extent that you can, determine your work start and stop times in advance for your own sake and those of people travelling with you.
'I recommend frontloading any longer stretches of work while you have momentum from having just left the office, then tapering down so you feel like you can get more and more relaxed throughout your travels,' she says.
If you need to commit to fixed meeting times, arrange them for the start of the day because you will have less control of what happens as the day unfolds and delays occur or plans change with the weather or impulse.
Finally, resist opening messages on non-urgent, non-critical items. 'To have space in your schedule to relax, you need to do less than you would if you were in the office. If you're travelling but still doing some work, it's tempting to answer a random question, help someone out or otherwise participate in non-urgent work items 'real quick.' But if you want to feel like you took some real time off, you can't engage in everything you typically would in the office,' she warns.
Quick Hits
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn't Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.