Photo by Reza Madani on Unsplash
A few weeks ago, Andrew and I celebrated 11 years married, and almost 13 years together. In the past, we’ve traveled to different places for our anniversary. Over the years we've gone to Niagara Falls a few times, New Hope PA, and last year we returned to Grand Cayman, where we had our honeymoon. But this year, since we had already been traveling a lot recently, we decided to take the day off work, but not make any plans. Instead, we wanted to stay local and see where the day took us.
Over the course of the weekend, we crossed another hike off our 50 Hikes in New Jersey book, had a beer on the patio at Peddler’s Village, tried a new coffee shop, and headed to a local farm for all the things you’re supposed to do in the fall: apple picking, pumpkin picking, cider donuts. Unfortunately, when we got to the farm, there was a long line of cars waiting to park. We could have waited, but since we didn’t have an itinerary telling us that this was what we were doing next, we simply changed our minds. We parked at the nearly empty farm store instead, bought some cider donuts and snacks, and drove to a cider mill.
We sat outside with our cider, snacks, and books and stayed there the entire afternoon. It was a perfect 4 hours that I would have never thought to plan.
If I’d mapped out four empty hours of any given weekend, going to a place like this would have likely made the cut, but I would have never planned to go alone. I would have texted other friends to see who was around; I would have never left it with just me, Andrew, and the two camping chairs we keep in our car. But this unstructured impromptu activity ended up being my favorite part of the weekend and there’s some stats behind why that might be.
Researchers Gabriela Tonietto and Selin Malkoc reviewed 13 studies looking at what happens when we schedule our leisure time. They found that putting leisure activities on a specific schedule can make them feel more like work and actually decrease how much we enjoy them. But when people roughly planned what they wanted to do without assigning specific times, that negative effect disappeared.
“People associate schedules with work. We want our leisure time to be free-flowing," said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. "Time is supposed to fly when you're having fun. Anything that limits and constrains our leisure chips away at the enjoyment."
In other words, there may be a sweet spot between having no idea what you want to do and planning every hour of your free time.
We spend our workweeks living by calendars and to-do lists, then sometimes bring that same mentality into our downtime. We plan the weekend, optimize the vacation, make the reservations, and figure out how much we can squeeze into the time we have. Even leisure can become something we're trying to accomplish.
Leaving time unstructured doesn't mean wasting it; sometimes it gives us permission to pay attention to what we actually want in the moment. We could skip the crowded farm instead of enduring it. We could stay at the cider mill because we were happy there instead of rushing off to whatever was next.
I still love a good trip, and I don't think our anniversary travels are over, but I'm starting to think not every open space on the calendar needs to be filled before we get to it. Four relaxing hours with a good book rarely happens because you schedule it; it happens when you have enough space to accidentally stumble into it.
