If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t get a lot of free time. So when you do, you want to spent it as efficiently as possible. (I don’t like calling time off ‘productive’, since the word ‘productive’ is–in my opinion–too output oriented. Instead I choose ‘efficient’, which I view as more focused on input.)
Yet as much as I enjoy some time off, I have recently been running into a problem. Even when I sat at the metaphorical charging station for hours, I always left with an empty battery.
Looking for possible solutions I remembered a video by Joey Schweitzer on passive and active engagement (Better Ideas on YouTube). In this video Joey describes these different types of engagement by comparing it to how we watch movies.
How do you watch a movie?
Broadly speaking there are two ways to watch a movie: passively and actively.
Some of us may come home on a friday after a long week of work and put on a movie. You may proceed to watch this movie while on your phone, maybe texting a friend about MGK’s new album (which is solid), or just scrolling through Instagram. These people are the ‘passive movie-watchers’.
The other group of people, called ‘active movie-watchers’, approach movie night a little differently. These are the people that watch movies with their full attention, wishing to pick up every detail; every line of dialogue. These are also the people who leave the social internet for those 2 hours or so every time they put on a movie (which they only decided upon after reading reviews on IMDb for an hour).
Both groups of people enjoy watching movies, albeit for different reasons. Passive movie-watchers may enjoy movie night because they got a chance to relax and refuel their mental energy for the upcoming week. Whereas the active movie-watchers may enjoy a movie because it was a cinematic masterpiece.
There is a time and place for both active and passive engagement. But when we have too much of one or the other we can start to run into problems. We cannot be actively engaged with everything we do, since active engagement requires willpower. And willpower is a finite resource. Yet we also cannot solely be passively engaged with everything in our life. Once we’ve fully charged our mental batteries we have to use them. They can’t keep charging forever.
The thing is, we need to choose our engagement. Things like studying or basketball practice require my full, undivided attention. Whereas other tasks, like cleaning the house or watching YouTube don’t. It wouldn’t make sense for me to be passively engaged with my studies while I’m using all of my willpower on mundane tasks.
The mistake I made is that I was trying to be actively engaged to everything I did. So even when I wanted to recharge, all I did was drain my batteries even further. Instead, I should have chosen something to be passively engaged with during my breaks. Good examples are taking a walk, meditating or doing breathing exercises. This way I can really give my mind a break, and allow it to recharge.
Mark.
The video I refer to in this post can be found here.