How often have you put off doing something fun, like taking a trip or treating yourself, because you felt that you had too much work to do, and you had to get it all done first?
Stop Putting Off Fun for After You Finish All Your Work
It’s intuitive to think that it’s better to do work first and save leisure for later. But is this intuition correct? A series of experiments finds that people assume that engaging in leisure before finishing work will ruin their enjoyment of the fun activity — but in reality, the order has no effect on their enjoyment of leisure. The findings suggest we may be over-worrying and over-working for future rewards that could be just as pleasurable in the present. This is a problem, because, among other benefits, leisure improves our work. People often work better and are more satisfied with their jobs after returning from restful breaks. Enjoying work also helps people stick to longer-term goals. If people intuitively put leisure last—there’s always more work to do—they may fail to take advantage of such leisure opportunities and end up feeling burned out or dissatisfied at work. We may keep postponing doing something fun for “the right time,” only to realize that it never seems to come.