Top Insights from Brigid Schulte

We live in an era of Time Confetti. This is time spent where everything is happening all the time, all at once and nothing is streamlined. Yet, we are often living on Contaminated Time—time spent when you are everywhere and nowhere because you are thinking about everything constantly, all at once and not living in the moment. Neuroscience studies prove that people think that we shouldn’t have leisure time, that we always need to be busy, yet ideas often come out of those moments of pause time.

“Leisure is like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder, it’s about how you feel.”

Myth #1 Hours = Effort
The best workers don’t work all the time. Norway is the most productive country per hour, and they have 6 weeks of vacation. Your brain is wired for the best ideas to come in the moments of pause and silence, not when you’re constantly working. A Professor named John Robinson from the University of Maryland said that women had 30 hours of leisure time.

Myth #2 Maternal Instinct
Mothers know best? A majority of men and women assume that males = careers and females = family. It’s engraved in us as a subconscious bias even though men are physiologically capable of caregiving duties themselves. The ideal worker, thought to be males, without caregiving duties, doesn’t exist.

Myth #3 No Playtime
Leisure and play is a waste of time. JK Rowling was stuck on a train, where she said she looked out the window and spaced out. That is when the entire plot to Harry Potter fell into her brain.

Realities of Time
It isn’t true that the time we spend doing work is directly correlated to the quality of work. Nor is it true that the ideal worker is one who doesn’t have the task of caregiving.