5 February 2025

All work and no play is … how you get that bag

The Back Page

Worried about work-life balance? We’ve got the solution for you.


You’re feeling stagnant at work. Your boss doesn’t appreciate you. You always have more to do than there are hours in the workday.

Don’t worry, researchers have a new and unique solution. It’s called “leisure-work synergising”, and it involves … well, basically taking your work home with you.

“We found that employees who intentionally integrate professional growth into their free time – like listening to leadership podcasts, watching TED talks or reading engaging business books – report feeling more confident, motivated and capable at work,” says study author Assistant Professor Kate Zipay, organisational behaviour and HR expert at Purdue University. “This innovative approach allows individuals to build skills and thrive professionally without sacrificing the enjoyment of leisure activities.”

Okay, so it’s not about doing “work work” in your personal life. You would simply be engaging in activities that make you better at work, and thinking about how you can apply those skills to work, and you’d be doing it in the hopes of advancing at work.

Opportunity and interest in this kind of behaviour is increasing, according to the authors, who point to the astronomical success of products such as TED talks and Masterclass, as well as research showing two in every three Americans listened to podcasts regularly – many popular ones being about development, leadership and economics.

“This isn’t about making your free time feel like work,” Professor Zipay said in a statement. “It’s about leveraging activities you already love in a way that fuels your professional growth. Done right, it’s a game-changer for employees and employers alike.”

To find out whether we can “have [our] cake and eat it too”, Professor Zipay and colleagues tracked around 90 participants’ experiences of leisure-work synergising, its effect on thriving at work and the individual’s fatigue or self-assurance over the course of five weeks.

As the authors anticipated, an episode of leisure-work synergising was linked to more feelings of thriving via self-assurance the following day.

“Thriving is a valuable employee experience for organizations and their leaders given the critical effects on outcomes such as self-development, health and performance,” they wrote in Organization Science.

“Making progress on work and enjoying leisure activities may not be mutually exclusive.”

They did add, however, that “blurring boundaries between work and leisure activities may cannibalize the intended nature of leisure, making it resemble work compulsivity and interfering with the goals of disconnecting from work-related thoughts”.

Surprisingly, the authors found no increase in fatigue among participants when they did a little leisure-work synergising. Nevertheless, they did include some caveats to the findings.

“Employees who prefer a clear separation between work and personal life might struggle with this approach, highlighting the importance of tailoring the practice to individual preferences,” Professor Zipay said.

As someone who started her professional career amid the rise and dominance of hustle culture, I thought the world had since shifted away from praising the worker for waking at 5am to listen to their productivity podcast while pounding the home treadmill, or blowing off friends in the evening to spend time in online courses in search of inspiration for the next multi-million-dollar enterprise.

The global financial crisis, crushing economic conditions and pervasive burnout all seemed to make the culture lose its sheen a little. Instead, it sounds more like the siren song of an economic system that is voracious for each minute of our personal lives, commodifying it and exploiting it for every last drop of productivity. In fact, I haven’t seen the #grindset hashtag in years.

But maybe all it needed was a little polish up. And thankfully our friends in HR and the publishers at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) are here to help.

Interestingly, the leisure-work synergising doesn’t seem to earmark more hours of the workday to leisure … but I guess that task will be taken up by the good people at the Institute for Fun Research and the Vibe Sciences instead.

And if this is somehow unappealing to you – as if work-life balance is somehow a vital necessity to a life well-lived and a bulwark against burnout – clearly you’re just a lazy marshmellow [sic].

Send sweet but burnt and falling-apart-inside story tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.

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