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Globe and Mail
5 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Protect the sacred space of leisure from being contaminated by work
Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon. 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.
Observer
18-05-2025
- General
- Observer
Negotiating the challenges of education at a crossroad
There is no doubt that education at every level is seeing unprecedented levels of challenges. They are facing us in many forms: challenges in technology, changing employment opportunities, shifts in learning styles and resulting shifts in motivation levels among learners. How we cope with these challenges will determine how we think of education in the future. This may sound like an exaggeration, but consider this: almost 49 per cent of respondents in the United States said that a university degree was not important for a good career, according to a PEW research. The typical attention span of an adult student in a college is proved to be 10 minutes, and more worryingly, the attention span of Generation Alpha, those between 10-15 years, on mobile devices has reduced from two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, according to research by Dr Gloria Mark of University of California, Irvine. Of course, this is not the only time that such challenges have faced society. References to the invention of the printing press, television and the Internet are often made as historically important moments when traditional forms of learning hit a boulder and had to re-invent itself. The uniqueness of today's challenge is that too many factors are coming together at an unprecedented speed. Schools and colleges are having to confront learner motivation and the challenges of AI together, along with a rapidly globalising and then, a de-globalising world. All of this required taking a long and deep look at the role of education today, its purpose and methods. Of course, we can no longer depend on traditional methods of teaching that separate teachers and students. Learning is a cooperative and collaborative process that needs continuity of purpose and method across all levels and disciplines. If there is one reality in education today, it is constant innovation. Teachers need to be constantly on the look out for new techniques, methodologies as well as strategies that will keep students engaged and motivated. Of course, that does not take away responsibility from all other stakeholders like parents, the administration or even students themselves. Placing the onus of innovative teaching on teachers alone could be daunting but there is no minimising their role in the education process. Whether it is to inculcate values and habits to a young child, or motivate learning and encourage curiosity in an adult learner, teachers are front and centre in education. But none of this is possible without a clear outlook on what the future of education could be. If the goal of education is shifting from knowledge seeking to critical and creative thinking, these changes need to be implemented from early stages. For example, integrating AI in education is a good idea but the implementation requires continuous professional development. It is clear that the future of education is not in actually knowing facts and figures that are easily accessible in the palm of one's hand. It is more important for learners to know what to do with these facts. This requires a kind of classroom experience which is still at a nascent stage.
