And just like that…it’s December. Welcome to the end of the year! As we push to make our quotas, thank our customers for their business, and prepare for holiday celebrations, let’s schedule time in our calendars for play. You read me. I wrote p-l-a-y. There are plenty of opportunities this month for frivolity and we should take advantage of them for a very practical reason. Play helps us work.
Lynn Barnett, a professor of recreation, sports and tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says, “At work, play has been found to speed up learning, enhance productivity and increase job satisfaction.” In this article, she also says, “Highly playful adults feel the same stressors as anyone else, but they appear to experience and react to them differently, allowing stressors to roll off more easily than those who are less playful.” In his book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Dr. Stuart Brown says, “Respecting our biologically programmed need for play can transform work. It can bring back excitement and newness to our job…work does not work without play.”
For example, when we concentrate on figuring out a problem, our minds can get stuck in an endless loop going over the same details. If we take a break and focus on something else, we get new data to process. Although it’s counterintuitive; the more stress we’re under, the more we need play in order to function. When we get up from our desks and move around, blood flow to our brains increases and we think better. If we walk to the break room and enter a conversation, we foster teamwork. These activities refresh our energy and can prevent burnout by letting our brains reboot and receive input that has nothing to do with our problem. We naturally apply this new data to our challenge. We start to think creatively. We stop thinking about how we’ve solved problems in the past. We stop worrying about the consequences for a minute and imagine what would happen if anything goes. This permits us to relax and look at it from another angle. The situation looks totally different if we’re standing on our heads instead of our feet. When we see something differently and present it in a new light, that’s innovation and it might just trigger a solution. Gymnastics anyone?
For play to have a positive effect on our work we should do it everyday, so we need to schedule it and give it priority. Play is an activity that has no purpose and is considered non-productive. We can do it alone or with others. Here are some examples of play that don’t necessarily cost money:
Read a book
Pet your pet
Watch your favorite artist’s concert footage on YouTube
Drive around looking at neighborhood Christmas lights
Toss a football
Crossword puzzles
Board games
George Bernard Shaw said, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” This holiday season when kids are defined as from one to ninety-two, let’s make time to play.
Please share how you’re going to incorporate play into your seasonal celebration in the comments section.
Mardi, When Allen was in the Air Force, there wasn’t a maternity department at Chanute, so Joel was born in Urbana.
This article is so true. Years ago I couldn’t figure how why my buyers didn’t want to submit an offer on a home that was perfect for them – it had everything that was on their list. So I went outside and started working in my flower bed. My head cleared and I had an idea to fill out the offer to purchase paperwork, (2 pages instead of the now 8), and I mailed it to them. (This was years ago before Al Gore invented the Internet, so no email as yet). I attached a note that said I thought they’d regret it if they didn’t purchase the home. It worked! They called me and asked me to come to their apartment and they would sign the offer.
Thanks for sharing these interesting articles!