“Don’t confuse having a career with having a life.”
- Hillary Rodham Clinton
How does one measure success?
The classic conception is tied to accomplishments in the work environment: how good you are at your job used to define how successful you are and your social status (usually based on money, coming from a successful work…. round and round we go). This view is still very much alive, a lot of people defining themselves by their job and living for their job. But alongside this traditional view, another emerged in the last 25 years or so.
As the society faced major changes (e.g., women having careers, age of retirement being pushed back), the definition of “success” had to adapt and the concept of “sustainable career” emerged. That is a career in which employees are productive (the remains the core element), employable throughout their life (as we also moved from the traditional one-company-for-life career), but also healthy, happy, and whose career fits into a broader life context. “Healthy” is easy to understand: a healthy employee is able to work, an employee with health issues can be costly for the company (need to temporary replace the person while covering for sick leave/insurance). However, “happy” and “fitting into a broader life context” are quite new concepts taking into account time spent outside of the workplace. This probably stems from the increase amount of research done on quality of life and well-being and the acceptation that a person’s personal life will impact their work efficacy. And it’s not all about family time.
Another recent societal change is the fact that younger generation spend more time outside long-term relationships and tend to wait longer to start a family. As a result, their time off work is easily “me-time” when they can focus on doing what they like, without worrying about childcare (do pets count?) or extensive household responsibilities. The impact on the quality of that time, thus, seems more important than the quality of family life. Or it’s at least something to add to the well-being equation. Rather than talking about the “work-life balance”, I want to talk about the “work-leisure balance”. First because I always find it weird to dissociate work and life, as if when you’re working, you’re not living (?!) but also because how we spend our leisure time has been recently shown to have an impact on our work achievements.
Leisure is the time free from the demands of work or duty, when one can rest, enjoy hobbies, etc. Hobby is defined as an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation. Hobbies can be defined based on the likeness between the hobby and one’s work and the seriousness with one engages in the hobby.
The similarity between work and leisure is the extent to which they involve similar demands and skills; for instance, a journalist whose hobby is creative writing – that’s high similarity because both work and hobby involve writing, creating “stories” (the way you report a news can be seen as a story), spending time in front of a computer. On the contrary, a journalist whose hobby is rock climbing – that’s low similarity because the hobby is a physical activity requiring different skills than the ones required for writing.
The level of seriousness of a hobby is the extent to which people identify with and persevere in their activity. That involves the time spent doing the activity, your goals in said activity (wanting to be good/accomplished vs. enjoying it for fun), and how you think the hobby reflects who you are and how good you believe you can become.
A new study followed over 120 people over the course of 7 months and looked at how the time spent on their hobby, but also the type of hobbies they pursuit, shaped their work efficacy and resilience (the ability to bounce back in the face of adversity or recover quickly from difficulties). At the beginning of the study, the researchers measured how serious participants were about their hobby and the degree of similarity between the hobbies and participants’ job. From there, they followed them every month, recording how many hours participants dedicated to their hobbies and how they felt about their job, in term of both efficiency and resilience. The results speak for themselves.
The longer people spend doing their leisure activities (looking at the difference between the average time spent and the time spent during a given week), the better people thought they did at work… when their leisure time was spent on a serious hobby dissimilar to their job, or when they had a casual hobby similar to their work. A serious hobby similar to their job seemed to be negatively impacting their efficacy at work. Strange results, you might think. Maybe not that much.
The researchers explained the results based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. This theory is based on the fact that working is cognitively demanding (usually), that is, it requires your brain to work a lot and working drains your brain. At the end of an intense day, it is common to feel drained, because your brain exhausted all its resources at work. Then, the last thing you want is to do something remotely work-related.
Moreover, investing yourself in a serious hobby is also cognitively demanding. It can require focus, physical strength, creativity… and many other cognitive abilities that also work your brain. If your hobby is similar to your work, you always use the same resources of your brain, at work and during your leisure time. If, on the contrary, your hobby is dissimilar to your work, you use different resources during your leisure time, giving time to your brain to recharge the resources used at work. And then at work you recharge the resources used for your hobby. See? It makes sense! On top of that, a dissimilar hobby might give you the chance to develop different abilities and build your self-confidence, which will reflect at work as by feeling better about yourself, you boost your confidence and efficacy at work.
This new study doesn’t say it all though. It is unclear whether how you feel at work influences how you do in your leisure time, or that how good you are at your hobby impacts how good you do at work. There was no investigation regarding the type of hobby best suited for the type of job you have. Is it better to have several, diverse, hobbies between which you dedicate your leisure time or one very serious to which you dedicate all your off-work time? Finally, is having a serious hobby similar to work worst or better than having no hobby at all? Food for thoughts and future research…
To sum up, loving your job is great. We spend a fair amount of our time doing it, so enjoying it makes life more bearable. However, it is important to keep time to do things outside of work that will challenge different areas of your brain. Diversity is good for you, your well-being, and your brain. Take a risk, try something new. You might enjoy it and your brain will thank you.
_____________________________________
References:
コメント