Via Dr. Arthur Brooks

“We need to have time that’s not working, that’s equally satisfying, that’s equally deep, that’s equally meaningful. […] we need to be as excellent at our leisure as we are at our work. Leisure is not just not work. Leisure is a different skill.”

— Arthur Brooks | The Science Behind Being Good at Leisure, watch at 12:22

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You plan your workouts. You block time for deep work. You track progress toward professional goals. But leisure? Most of us just wing it.

For Dr. Arthur Brooks, this asymmetry is a problem, because leisure is a skill that thrives in structure and atrophies without it.

Leisure is not recovery from or the absence of work.

Most ambitious people treat leisure as whatever’s left after work – a way to gasp for air before the next push. Brooks describes the extreme version as “homo economicus”: a person defined entirely by work and productivity.

That mindset has a cost. Treating leisure as passive recovery means never developing it as a skill. And like any skill, undeveloped leisure delivers diminishing returns. The cautionary example: a hedge fund manager who closed his fund and wanted to “go to a beach someplace and do nothing.” Years of 100-hour weeks with no real leisure proved unsustainable. Burnout and collapse followed.

Before you can structure leisure, you need to know what you’re structuring toward.

Not all non-work time qualifies. Brooks draws on philosopher Josef Pieper’s standard: true leisure must be both contemplative and mentally or spiritually productive. That rules out mindless scrolling, binge-streaming, and most phone use – activities that feel like rest but leave you depleted.

Five categories meet Pieper’s standard:

• Deep reading and reflection — not consuming information, but reflecting on it, engaging with it, peeling back its layers.
• Experiencing art — music, museums, or literature that creates emotional resonance.
• Time in nature — admiring it or experiencing it contemplatively, not just as an exercise backdrop.
• Learning for intrinsic reasons — studying what fascinates you, not what advances your career.
• Deepening personal relationships — conversations that go somewhere.

Three protocols for getting leisure right:

1. Structure it.
   Schedule specific blocks. Prepare everything in advance — book open to the right page, route mapped, instrument out. Mute devices or leave them behind. Treat the appointment like a client meeting you’d never cancel. Brooks practices a version of the Catholic “Holy Hour”: one hour daily, no devices, just reading and contemplating. The Dalai Lama structures two hours each morning for contemplative practice. Such structure ensures leisure actually happens instead of getting crowded out by urgent work tasks.
2. Don’t waste it.
   Brooks’s dog Chucho used to walk in circles before lying down – charming in a dog, costly in a person. Yet many people fritter away leisure time checking notifications, scrolling “just for a minute,” or taking twenty minutes to get ready to start. It’s a waste of “precious, precious time.” The fix is preparation: if everything is ready when you arrive, you start immediately.
3. Set goals within it.
   Ambitious people are motivated by progress — so give leisure its own progress track. Read the entire Bible in a year. Work up to a week-long meditation retreat. Learn to love Bach and attend a performance of the B Minor Mass. These goals create an overarching theme for the smaller sessions that lead to them, and deliver the satisfaction of forward movement inside leisure itself.

If you’re not sure where to start, go outside.

At the beginning of the 19th century, 90 percent of Americans spent significant daily time in nature. By the end of the 20th century, that number had fallen below 20 percent. This loss matters: time in nature reduces anxiety, improves mood and working memory, enhances creativity and concentration, and produces a sense of awe that’s difficult to manufacture elsewhere.

Nature also makes the protocols easy to practice. Schedule a 30-minute walk. Be ready to go when the time block starts. Use that stroll to think through a non-work question you’ve been noodling on. That’s all three protocols in one session.

The same skills that make you good at work make you good at leisure, but only if you apply them.

Planning ahead, showing up on time, measuring progress — use these skills to get good at leisure. The protocols aren’t complicated. What they require is deciding that leisure deserves the time and space. Make that decision, and the rest follows.

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Things to Try

Structuring your leisure:

• Block one leisure session this week as a calendar appointment.
• Decide in advance which category it falls into (reading, art, nature, learning, or relationships) and prepare accordingly.
• Leave your phone behind — or set it to Do Not Disturb in another room.
• Show up on time.

Not wasting it:

• Identify one setup task you can do in advance to eliminate pillow-walking (book open to the right page, route mapped, instrument out).
• Set a start-immediately rule: the leisure activity begins when the block begins, not when you feel ready.

Setting leisure goals:

• Pick one meaningful leisure goal, something that requires sustained effort over weeks or months.
• Work backward to identify what a single weekly session toward that goal looks like.
• Put the first session on your calendar.

Starting with nature:

• Take a 30-minute walk this week with no devices and no music — just observation and thought.
• Bring one question with you and see where your thinking goes.