The time you enjoy

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time Bertrand Russell*

In my last Reflections I asked: useful to whom? The question behind the question was really about measurement, and who gets to do it.

Russell’s observation takes that somewhere else. It doesn’t ask whether time is useful. Rather it asks whether it is enjoyed. Which is a rather different standard.

For most of us who have spent long careers in professional services, enjoyment has rarely been the primary measure of anything. Time belonged to clients, to transactions, to the firm. The idea that time might simply be enjoyed - without output, without justification - sits uneasily with that conditioning. It feels, if I’m honest, faintly irresponsible.

And yet Russell was not an idle man. He wrote prolifically, engaged ferociously with the public questions of his age, and lived to 97. He was certainly not counselling indolence. He was making a more subtle point: that the value of time is not always, or only, to be found in what it produces.

I think what he was pushing back against was the confusion between enjoyment and waste. We tend to treat them as synonyms. Time not visibly producing something must, by definition, be wasted. But that is the professional services mindset talking. The billable hour colonising territory it was never meant to occupy.

The people I have seen navigate the shift away from full-time work most successfully share something in common. They stopped treating enjoyment as something that had to be earned by productivity. They allowed themselves, sometimes for the first time, to ask what they actually liked doing. And then they went out and did it, without the footnote.

That sounds straightforward. It isn’t, particularly if you have spent several decades being told what useful looked like.

But it is, I think, where the answer to my earlier question eventually leads. Not useful to whom - but enjoyable to me. And whether, after all this time, that is permission enough.

*The morning after I wrote Useful to whom? the Russell quote was John Naughton’s Quote of the Day in his online diary, Memex 1.1 (always worth reading – here is a link)