To lead better, make time for data-free leisure

If we added up all the hours we spend eating, sleeping, commuting, working and on leisure, it might well amount to 36 hours a day. That’s because we’re always multitasking: checking emails or sending texts while watching TV; commuting or doing household chores while listening to an educational podcast. We live in a so-called performance society, where our worth is defined by how productive we are, where the quest for self-optimization is relentless. In such a world, there’s never an end point, a moment when we can finally say, “I have arrived, and now I can rest.” And so we feel endlessly restless.

Yet leisure, rest and the right to be unproductive are essential for human flourishing. And while many companies would agree with this in theory — adopting measures like flextime and teleworking, which are meant to support work-life balance — the reality is far different.

At IESE’s Dignity at Work Conference, professor Santiago Alvarez de Mon moderated a panel on this topic with a leading business practitioner, Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, former CEO and Chair of Telefonica, and with a philosophy professor, R.J. Snell, director of academic programs and editor-in-chief of Public Discourse for the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

We’re generally not very good at disconnecting, they agreed, but perhaps total disconnection is impossible in today’s world; rather, it’s about connecting in better ways, as they explain.

Santiago Alvarez de Mon: In speaking about work and leisure, let’s discuss what we actually mean by the word leisure. What is it?

R.J. Snell: At least in the United States, there’s a view that leisure is what happens when you take a break. It’s about not doing something, as opposed to doing something. But in the broader philosophical tradition, leisure isn’t just stopping work or the cessation of all activity. It is a specific kind of activity, one that is intrinsically worthwhile, practiced for its own sake.

So, playing with children, sports, art and music fit the bill. So do studying and reading, but again, done for their own sake. Studying to pass an exam is not leisure. But contemplation, for the love of knowledge, is leisure. This is different from rest or entertainment, though those are important, too.

Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete: In addition to having value for its own sake, leisure is necessary for being able to face work and life calmly and competently. Personally, I have needed to strike a balance between a professional life and a contemplative life, in order to come back refreshed and do my job to the best of my ability.

SAM: Do we have a right to leisure? And if not, what’s stopping us?

JMAP: We should have a right to it, but much of our current cultural context strips it away. The loss of our leisure time, and our relationship with work and technology more generally, became more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were all forced to work remotely. COVID changed the relationship of the workforce with the company. The social contract changed, and technology has become omnipresent in our lives in ways not contemplated by labor law.

RJS: In the U.S. context, most people don’t feel they truly have the right to disconnect, even if a labor agreement formally acknowledges it. It’s not part of our lived experience. There’s a deep-seated habit of checking email. I’ve known people working for high-powered firms who are at the firm the day before delivering a baby, and they’re back at the firm not long after delivering the baby, and they’re checking email and dictating notes while in the hospital. As a culture, we’re not very good at rest.

SAM: Beyond leisure is the right to be unproductive. Do we have a right to that?

RJS: To be clear, this isn’t a call to down tools and stop working altogether. As Plato said, “Fine things are difficult.” In other words, things that are beautiful or good are hard to achieve and maintain without some effort. There is drudgery in life: late nights, early mornings, working overtime. So, we do have a duty to be productive. However, we cannot flourish as human beings if we don’t also make time for reflection. Nor can we ever achieve focus. When we are forever distracted, we end up in a frenzy of activity that achieves little. So, we have a commensurate need to contemplate, and in that sense we have a right to be unproductive, too.

JMAP: Company culture is essential in framing our downtime as a right. This can include workplace policies around after-hours communication and flexibility, for example. Decisions made by individuals and families are also important. For example, my wife and I have an agreement to put our smartphones away at 8 p.m. We’re also active in parent groups that advocate for children not to be given smartphones too early. Technology feels inevitable, but it isn’t invincible. You can actively choose to reduce its impact.

SAM: How has technology changed our concept of leisure, and what does it mean for rest and disconnection?

RJS: I recently asked a group of high-achievers at Princeton, “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?” All of them said they checked their phones. Then I asked them, “What’s the last thing you do at night?” They all said the same thing.

One thing we see with the internet and social media is that they contribute to disenchantment of the world, stripping away mystery, wonder and meaning. Our modern tech creates a world that is horizontal: You read a document with five or six links, and every time you click on a link, it doesn’t take you deeper, it takes you sideways. You open a second document, then a third, and your attention moves laterally. It becomes very difficult for our attention to go deeper into an idea, or vertically, toward transcendent or sacred thoughts, because the technology keeps our world flat and our attention disperse and distracted, by design.

JMAP: The other aspect to this is that we are generating massive amounts of data through these platforms. All the time we spend online equals millions of years of human attention, which is being constantly mined. Who owns that data? And how much is it really worth? We’re in the middle of exponential technological change, many times the size of the Industrial Revolution, and technology is moving faster than the social contracts between human beings can guide it.

That’s why, in addition to defending leisure, rest and the right to be unproductive, I am advocating for a new Digital Social Contract.