Research Shows Pursuing Your Hobbies Benefits Your Business, Too. Here's How to Make More Time for Them. Discover the brain and business benefits of pursuing your hobbies.
By Aytekin Tank Edited by Kara McIntyre
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
A few years ago, on a family vacation, my wife and I took a cooking class. I like cooking, but I'm a novice at best — and the recipe, French macarons, wasn't a cakewalk. Lucky for us, the chef-instructor was there to guide us each step of the way.
That day I learned many things: how to beat egg whites until soft peaks form; the importance of sifting the flour; how to pipe the batter. I also learned how much work goes into one macaron, which translates to the price we pay at the bakery. I left with a new appreciation for those tiny cookies.
As CEO of Jotform, I spend a lot of my time managing and guiding others. It's nice to switch hats (or rather, toques) once in a while, and let someone else teach me. It's humbling to realize how tricky something as seemingly simple as mixing ingredients can be and helps me maintain the "beginner's mind" mentality — staying open to learning new ideas and subjects. That's why, even when I'm not on vacation, I try to make time for my hobbies — like cooking, writing and listening to old records. It turns out that I'm not alone. Many leaders make time for their leisure interests, and research shows that it's beneficial for business.
Here, a closer look at why so-called "unproductive" hobbies boost job performance and your bottom line — and how to promote time for hobbies throughout your organization.
Related: Why Successful People Engage in These 7 Types of Hobbies
The benefits of play
When we're kids, playing is as natural as breathing. Growing up in Turkey, I remember spending hours playing outside after school. My friends and I would make up games and invent imaginary worlds. We never worried about anything beyond the present moment. And I wouldn't go home until my parents called me inside for dinner.
As we get older, we construct a false dichotomy between work/productivity and play/futility. Granted, most adults can't spend their days playing hide-and-seek. However, recent research makes a strong case for regularly prioritizing time for leisure activities.
For starters, mental "play" boosts your cognitive fitness. As Harvard Business Review explains, it engages the prefrontal cortex and nourishes our highest-level cognitive functions — incentive and reward processing, goal and skill representation, mental imagery, self-knowledge, memory and more. In short: Brain development can continue well into adulthood.
It shouldn't come as any surprise that partaking in activities you enjoy reduces stress levels. A study from the Society of Behavioral Medicine found that engaging in hobbies effectively lowers your heart rate. That may explain the zen you feel when working on the Sunday crossword.
Carving out time for hobbies is critical for preventing the all-too-common phenomenon of burnout. This can be particularly important if you're lucky enough to genuinely enjoy your work — and find it hard to disconnect at the end of the day. In my case, for example, I'm not passionate about online forms per se, but I do love figuring out ways to make our users' lives easier. Before I learned to draw better boundaries, I could spend 12 hours at the office, problem-solving and troubleshooting, without even realizing it.
Eventually, I learned to schedule leisure time directly into my calendar. And when I'd return to the office, after taking a cooking class or helping my family on their olive farm, I'd feel noticeably more refreshed.
Related: How Finding a Hobby Will Make You A Better BIZ Experiences
How to promote leisure time
For some of us, choosing a hobby is easy. But for others, we've lost touch with the activities that we truly enjoy, or maybe we haven't discovered them yet. Tapping into our childhood pastimes is a great starting point for finding activities we can love as adults — putting us into a flow state.
So, ask yourself: What did you love doing as a kid? Which sports or activities would you do until your parents called you home for dinner?
Identifying your hobbies is one side of the coin. For business owners, it's also important to cultivate a work atmosphere that encourages employees to take up those fun pursuits.
Flexibility is key. At Jotform, we plan for five "core team" hours per day. Employees can arrange the rest of their time according to personal preference, as long as they're meeting the collective, collaborative goals. Personally, I try to pay attention to my peak hours — the times of day when I'm most energized and do my best creative work — and organize my schedule accordingly. That flexibility enables me to make time for my hobbies.
That's another thing: It's important to lead by example. Some leaders are vocal about working around the clock. Elon Musk famously communicated to Twitter (now X) employees that they needed to be "extremely hardcore." He wrote:
"This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."
That's not my style. I don't think exceptional performance and unsustainable hours go hand-in-hand. I've found it's easier to hire and keep the most talented people by showing them that their interests outside of work are also priorities. So I talk about my hobbies. Sometimes, I write about them. And I ask our team members about theirs, tacitly communicating that cultivating a rich and stimulating life outside of work is also important.
Here's the thing: Surveys have found that most people want more time for their hobbies. Our modern-day hustle culture, however, has disabused people of the notion that they can (and should) carve out time for those activities. Leaders are tasked with signaling to employees that hobbies are important and benefit everyone. Employees with hobbies are happier, more creative and less stressed. In my experience, they stay with your company longer — and occasionally, they bring delicious treats to share with the office.
