What’s the difference between work and play?

I’m writing this post in Hawaii, also known as paradise. It’s awesome. I’m only here for a week and I’ve been encouraged by my good boss to work as little as possible. But not working is sort of impossible for me. I love my work.

This is a lovely place to be, since there have been times in the past when I didn’t love my work, but couldn’t not work because I had to support my kid and I was still struggling to get my writing on the map. Now I’m in this delightful position where I get paid well to do what I love. And if I wanted to, I could take time off.

This morning, I did the same thing I do when I’m home and not on vacation. I read the New York Times. Reading the Times is a great metaphor for how my work life and leisure time intersect very regularly these days. I read the paper first and foremost because I am a news junkie/journalist. But it also happens that reading the paper yields great ideas for the work I do.

For example, today I found a piece about a woman named Alison Link, who is — no kidding — an expert on leisure. More interesting still, she works with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks. Sounds a little odd unless you think about it for a minute — imagine getting out of the big house and suddenly having lots of time on your hands and plenty of freedom but no work. Idle hands do the devil’s work and all that. The article reports, “Though Ms. Link works primarily with at-risk populations, she says that we can all improve our quality of life by paying more attention to leisure habits.”

Link offered up the story of a busy executive who found that if she could just work in a few minutes here and there of leisure time even during her busiest days, her overall happiness was going to improve. We’re talking really little things like walk to work, or call a friend who makes her laugh, or just go to a coffee shop for fifteen minutes here and there.

I flipped this scenario on its head for my own purposes. For me, the majority of vacations I’ve taken have either involved visiting family (which can be hard work) or being on a working vacation. The latter is nothing I’ll complain about — National Geographic Traveler has sent me on some pretty wild adventures. But in the end, I do have to pay really close attention, take notes, and report back.

So now, here I sit, on a vacation vacation, and what am I doing? Work. But just a little. I squeeze in an hour or two a day to think about coworking, or redraft an essay I wrote months ago in hopes of sending it to an editor to consider. I make some notes for a novel I want to start writing this fall. And I come up with to do lists for when I get back.

Does this make me an uptight workaholic incapable of ever truly relaxing? Maybe I’m in denial, but I don’t think so. Doing a little work keeps me grounded and connected. (And also gives my boyfriend, with whom I am spending eight days in 24/7 close contact with, a nice break.) Doing work settles me, so that I can fully enjoy myself when I am doing leisure activities (today I sat on the beach, my legs buried in black lava sand, and played with rocks for hours on end).

I think this relates, at least in part, to being an independent worker. Those of us who make it working on our own might appear to have slack schedules and limited discipline. That, I promise you, is smoke and mirrors. Yes, you might see me out walking in the middle of the day when other people are heading into their fifth meeting at the office. And it’s true I can go to the grocery store while a lot of others are sitting in rush hour traffic. But really, I have to figure out not only how to get all my work done, but to balance it with the leisure stuff, too.

When I first started writing for LaunchPad Coworking six months ago, a lot of things made me very, very happy about the gig. One is that Julie, like me, doesn’t spend much time differentiating between work and play. As with my newspaper reading, there can be a healthy overlap — maybe one of us meets someone at a party who would make a good interview or maybe one of us, as I did recently, came across an item while I was out on a personal errand that we might be able to use in the café.

I remember, when I started, how Julie and I were discussing that book, The 4-Hour work Week, which was selling like hotcakes, apparently being snapped up by overworked corporate types fantasizing about cutting back. We ascertained that this was just it — a fantasy — and that a lot of those folks interested in the book probably didn’t really want to cut back, or at least not to four hours a week. They’d be lost without their work. And even the book’s author apparently works an awful lot, but he refers to preparing for lectures and other work related activities as non-work.

So while real work and real leisure probably can be separated out by some people, and while surely both are important, I hold that a lot of how we perceive what we do lies in the framing. Technically, it’s work for me to sit here and write this post. Only really, it’s not. I’m taking a breather from hiking into canyons to see waterfalls and drinking fresh juice from a coconut with a hole poked in it. But I’m also having fun with it so it doesn’t sully my vacation.

Maybe I can start coworking with Alison Link — she can keep helping out folks who want to use their leisure time right. And I can help the folks who need to rethink when and where to work, and even how they define that word.