The Article Club – Take a Break
April 16, 2010 by Marci
Welcome to The Article Club! This is the Overcoming Busy version of a book club. I’m not asking you to carve out time to read 400 pages (that you may or may not like) then find the time to summarize it all for me in a sentence or two . Once a week, I link to an article that I think the Overcoming Busy audience would find useful or at least interesting. You read it. We discuss it in the comments. Easy!
This week’s article is Take a Break From Your Adventures (And Enjoy Life More) from the blog Aliventures. The title caught my eye because the topic of taking a break has been on my mind for the past month or so. And, around here, we always say we are on an adventure.
Several quotes from the article stood out to me.
“I’m more productive when I’m happy”
“You should never feel guilty about spending your time on something you genuinely want to do and enjoy doing.”
“When I focus too much on doing more and more, I find myself waking up in the morning with no sense of adventure.”
That last quote really sums up how I feel when I have too much on my plate. When we were on our vacation a couple weeks ago, my hubby and I practically jumped out of bed in the morning ready for adventure. We don’t do that when we are so far entrenched in the grind that we forget what adventure is.
What spoke to you in this article? Do you agree with the author? How do you take a break? How often do you need breaks? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Do you remember what breaks are?
Comments (3)
I really liked her financial analogy when she was comparing procrastination versus conscious leisure. It made it very clear.
I do agree with the author; however, I’m not very good at taking breaks. Honestly, I’d say I could benefit from mini-breaks on a daily basis, but every once in a while (monthly maybe?) I really need one whole day to myself. That would be such a gift.
Love the Article Club, btw!
Kirwin – I am with you… I would love having an entire day to myself. Just once a month would be so awesome.
Hi Marci. I’ve long held the romantic idea of joining a Book Club so your Article Club really appealed to me. I try and limit my blog-reading to a few selected favorites but it will be a pleasure to branch out once a week to both read and carefully consider a well chosen article.
Rather than something speaking to me in this article it was more like something slapped me in the face! Procrastination incapacitates my ability to progress forward and achieve goals on a regular basis. Here I was drifting along thinking that playing hours and hours of mindless Facebook games nicely fitted the criteria of ‘conscious leisure’ when, WHAM!!! ‘…ask yourself how you’re going to feel after engaging in a particular activity. Will you be cheered up and refreshed? Or will you feel fed up about “wasted” time which you’d rather have spent on something else?’ I have read many books and articles about overcoming procrastination but I do not recall reading anything quite as succinct as this paragraph – it nails it! So now it is perfectly clear to me how to differentiate between conscious leisure and procrastination, having the strength to allow this knowledge to change my future actions is the challenge.