Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Work/Play: PASTIME

Last but not least, play that is play is something that is done as an end in itself that is an end in itself.

And we will call this PASTIME.

A reader (ha ha) asks:

the work-play quadrants remind me of covey’s. there are a lot of similarities, don’t you think? you’ve probably thought of this already. even the way you laid them out, it matches up to what i think the closest matches are. have we talked about this before? in case you can’t remember covey’s, you can look here: http://www.brefigroup.co.uk/acrobat/quadrnts.pdf
To which I said...
i wasn't thinking that, but i can definitely see that & can definitely see how it got like that. having been forged the the fires of covey :|
so what, WORK=Q1 (urgent, important), HOBBY=Q2 (not urgent, important), PLAY=Q3 (urgent, not important), PASTIME=Q4 (not urgent, not important)? i guess i'd say that WORK and PASTIME map pretty well, but HOBBY and PLAY could be moved around. those two are the tricky ones, though.
Hm well, the rest of this is unprintable. I'm trying not to swear on this blog, if you haven't noticed. But to paraphrase, I think that Covey is a little bit of a puritan about this stuff. I think he says that you should cut out Q4, which is such bumble fish. You get the feeling that he doesn't trust people not to be all in Q4, so you get none. This is something I was thinking this weekend: waste happens. Any good system --like your body, right?-- has to admit that it produces waste, and then deal with that. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I feel like Covey's position is that highly efficient people don't produce waste. Not that waste reduction isn't an okay strategy, and maybe that's what he's talking about. I just get the feeling that Stephen Covey's idea of heaven is where nobody poops at all.

(For the record, I did say "waste" and "poops" in the original version. I don't want you to think that my swearing is worse than it is.)

Yesterday I said that I would have liked play that is play to be called PLAY, but in the end PASTIME felt more right. It's something that you do to pass the time, and that isn't a sin. Probably a little bit goes a long way, but you do need that little bit.