How To Be Fun, Yet Productive.

Living a Life of Balance.

We now live in an age where everything is fast-paced and now more than ever, we’re pressured to get things done within the most impossible of time limits.
Our minds are always racing and to make things worse, we’re subliminally involved in the competition of who’s more productive. We’re competing with neighbours, with exes, with friends, with anyone and everyone who attempts to edge us at what we do. And most times, this is just in the bid to get validation that we don’t really need.

In the process of all these, there’s something fundamental that we loose on the altar of productivity — something essential to our existence that we just throw out the window and rarely look back to — fun.

‘I’m making money, who needs some pastime anyway?’

That is something we tell ourselves one way or the other, and it’s just to convince ourselves that it’s okay to keep being the boring arse that we are.
Well, in truth, working a 9-5, having to take care of some cute little rascals, being in a relationship, and many other things can be quite tasking.

But can we be profitably efficient and still get some time to breathe?
Yes, and here’s how:

1. Having Fun Should be Intentional, not Incidental

Fun, as defined by the Mariam Webster dictionary, is a mood for finding or making amusement and that would imply that moments of pleasure can be created.

The world today has been so stripped of smiles and euphoria, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stumble upon it.
Hence, we don’t wait for fun moments to happen, we create them!

• Take some minutes in the day to just chill. Just be.
• If it’s a holiday, treat it as such. Don’t be that fellow who scorns vacations and only sees them as times of unproductive spending.
• Have a designated and regular schedule for going out with your family or friends — It doesn’t even have to be elaborate. In fact, you’ll be surprised at how much tension and stress a single outing can douse.

2. Don’t Live in a Circle of Work – Break the Link.

Life, as we’ve seen, is full of desires. We always have something we want to accomplish. A target to meet, a car to buy, a girl to thrill, a place to see, and so on.
That means that at the verge of reaching any goal, there’s always another wish that’s ready to take it’s place.

In truth, our needs are insatiable and the entirety of our goals are unreachable. We always want more.
If we are actually going to work to reach our ever-changing goals, then we’d have to work for all eternity because there will always be something to work towards. That implies that if we don’t take out time to breathe, we’d discover that we will spend the whole of our lifetime chasing after targets we’ll never really hit.

So if at all we want to have fun and be productive also, we’d have to break that link. We shouldn’t get lost in the endless spiral of work, rather, we should fix in a bit of fun after every achievement or at least, after every trial.

A timeline of fun and work is way better than a lifetime of just work and toil.

Working endlessly won’t get you the satisfaction you need, so how about a sprinkle of fun and a dash of contentment.

3. Smart Work Over Hard Work

We usually delude ourselves into thinking that the key to more productivity is to put in more hard work — literally.
We think because we put in more time, energy, overnights, and give ourselves less rest, we are going to yield the best results. Well, that is clearly not the case.

Whatever will get the job done fastest and most efficiently is what we should always go for. We don’t need to put in excessive hours just to prove that we’re hard workers, neither do we need to skip sleep on the eve of a presentation just to convince ourselves that it’s really important — that’s a cliché that has made many people underperform eventually.

• Go for efficiency over unnecessary difficulty.
• Go for ease over needless complications.

A fun-dismissing mind-set sucks the life out of any work life and doesn’t always produce more productivity.

4. Put in Some Balance

The idea that moments of fun are in themselves unproductive and just excuses to get off our jobs can never be more wrong.
In fact, it’s been scientifically proven that taking moments of rest in between cognitive activities enhance productivity.

How? Well, it’s because these moments or intervals give the Prefrontal Cortex some time to relax and rejuvenate, and this in turn enables us to take up tasks better a little later. But what exactly is this PFC?

“The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the cerebral cortex covering the front part of the frontal lobe. This brain region has been implicated in planning complex cognitive behaviour, personality expression, decision making, and moderating social behaviour. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals” SoP, Author at The Science of Physiotherapy.

Obviously, its a lot of work assigned to this part of the brain and like any other tissue, it needs rest!
Every time we overwork it, we risk Decision Fatigue among many other things.

Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making.

In other words, when you go on a long haul without substantial moments of fun breaks, you kind of lose it.

•You make an inconclusive end to your school report
•You angrily reply a mail because you’re mentally stressed out already
•You make non-objective decisions

A detailed research by Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, which was approved by Princeton University in 2011, suggested that there was a much higher tendency for Israeli Judges to make favourable and more objectives verdicts right after breaks from work, or when they had just start out fresh.

“The plot shows that the likelihood of a ruling in favour of a prisoner spikes at the beginning of each session — the probability of a favourable ruling steadily declines from ≈65% to nearly zero and jumps back up to ≈65% after a break for a meal. From the perspective of the prisoner, there is a clear advantage to appearing at the beginning of the session (i.e., either at the beginning of the day or immediately following the break)”

Conclusion

Having fun is essential to our daily lives and breaks are definitely much-deserved tools for more efficiency.

Breaks are great, but fun breaks are even better.