Your life is a strange and complex web defined by the tension between choices made and choices forgone. On internetducttape, engtech has a good post about weighing the cost of your life choices and making informed decisions, including the decision to incorporate deliberately “unproductive” time in your day-to-day routine. Remember, inspiration and insight cannot strike if you’re absorbed in some activity, however seemingly productive. Downtime is, as science is discovering, critical in ways that we never imagined. Be sure to build it into your life.
Here’s what engtech says (more detail, plus exciting pie charts! over at his site):
Living such a lifestyle can have great temporary gains in the areas you focus on, but they are quickly counterbalanced by the other areas in your life that you aren’t paying attention to. Any slack time again it is immediately taken over by the need for sleep, need for exercise, or often unrecognized need for genuine human contact. What many people don’t consciously think about when they are squishing their lives to focus on one thing is the opportunity cost for the areas they are ignoring.
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
raincoaster media 
brightfeather
August 21, 2007
Engtech’s post was outstanding. It reminds me that life is a balancing act. You remind me that to live a good life fully we must factor down time into the balance.
raincoaster
August 21, 2007
It really was one of his best, and even his average is pretty darn good! Without downtime, how would we even know who we are? Surely we’re the person we are in stillness, not the one we are coping with busywork. We need to come to know that person.