If your boss gave you the day off, would you know what to do with it?
If you've forgotten what you love, here's how to remember
‘If your boss suddenly gave you tomorrow off work, what would you do with your day?’
This used to be my favourite question to ask when I interviewed people for jobs at the software company I worked at in my previous life.
They had prepared for every possible question, but not that one. I’d often get some bumf about volunteering or visiting their sick Nan, assuming that was the kind of answer I was after.
But what I really wanted to know was: what were their hobbies? What did they actually enjoy doing?
When I probed further, I was often met with a blank stare.
That was over a decade ago. And I’ve since realised it’s not a recruitment problem. It’s a being a person in today’s world problem.
A writer called Eleanor Cording-Booth put it better than I could:
“I want to know myself better, understand what I like and have a few things that I do just for myself, just for pleasure. Things that don’t involve scrolling the internet or working.
I want to figure out what those things are and find the oomph to give them a go... I just don’t know how to identify what I like or how to force myself to start it.”
If that resonates with you, you are not boring. You are not aimless.
You have simply been so buried in obligation, optimisation and other people’s demands that you’ve forgotten what makes you come alive.
And that’s not a quirk. It’s a quiet emergency.
Because a person who cannot name what brings them joy is a person who has stopped asking. And a person who has stopped asking has, on some level, tapped out of life.
I’ve been on both sides of this.
During my software company years, I was directionlessly drifting so hard that beyond cooking, my hobbies extended to being slumped on the sofa watching TV.
It wasn’t until I quit the corporate world over decade ago that I began the slow process of remembering who I was when I wasn’t sleepwalking through life.
I want to share what I’ve learnt about making space for the things that light you up — and how to figure out what those things are in the first place.
Free time is not what’s left over — it’s the most important crop you grow
One of the most precious things to me is my free time and it’s something I ringfence and defend like a ferocious guard dog. This involves saying no. A lot.
But here’s the reframe that changed everything for me: free time is not the scraps that remain after work has eaten its fill. Free time is a high value crop that needs conscious cultivation.
Seeds are sown in the right environment for strong growth. Plants are nurtured with what they need to flourish.
And the reward of this investment is a harvest of time — time you can spend discovering what excites you, exercising your creativity, keeping your mind and body healthy and actually having fun.
If you don’t cultivate it, it doesn’t grow. Simple as that.
Tom Hodgkinson, founder of The Idler and author of the excellent How to Be Free, argues that the modern obsession with productivity has colonised the very concept of leisure.
We’ve been taught that time not spent earning or optimising is time wasted — and Hodgkinson argues this is the great modern swindle.
Idleness isn’t laziness. It’s the fertile ground where creativity, self-knowledge and pleasure actually grow. Replace ‘idleness’ with ‘free time’ and you have the argument for reclaiming yours.
But most of us don’t reclaim it. Instead, we reach for the autopilot response: I don’t have time.
And that response is often code for something deeper. Perhaps a fear of failure. Perhaps guilt about doing something purely for pleasure, especially when generations before us — my immigrant parents included — grafted all hours as a measure of success.
It’s why so many baby boomers reaching retirement age have no idea what to do with themselves once they stop working.
It’s why a freelance BBC colleague in her mid-thirties told me, ‘I don’t have any free time — I work all the time. I can’t say no to an opportunity to earn more money, I’d feel bad turning it down.’
And it’s why a friend with a toddler, working four days a week with no family nearby, once said to me: ‘The only free time I have is when I sleep.’
That line has stayed with me ever since.
But here’s what I’ve noticed.
The instances when we really want to do something (watch the latest series everyone’s talking about) or when something absolutely has to be done (a plumber booked to fix the leaking dishwasher) we manage to manifest the time. Even when we were certain we couldn’t fit another thing in.
So it’s often not impossible. We just have to want to do the thing enough.
As Emma Gannon puts it: ‘The elephant in the room is: usually ‘finding time’ means sacrificing something else.’
Here’s a practical place to start. Do a time audit for one week. Use the stopwatch on your phone to track how long you actually spend on different tasks — replying to emails, watching TV, scrolling, tidying. Note the exact durations down. Don’t guess them and don’t cheat.
You might be surprised. My average daily Instagram usage is 34 minutes. If I gave that up for a week, I’d create almost four extra hours of free time and lose nothing.
What would you do with four found hours?
A word of caution before you find your thing
Once you start making space, the next temptation is to monetise whatever you discover.
Capitalism has trained us to view every interest as a potential side hustle. As one writer put it, ‘my hobby didn’t feel legitimate until I’d made it productive.’
Be careful with this.
A friend of mine adored books and spent nearly all her free time lost in their pages. Then she decided to study English Literature at university, where she had to read a tonne of books, analyse them and write essays about them in order to pass exams and get grades.
Her love for books quickly diminished and became a shadow of its former self. It was a sad thing to witness.
When a hobby starts involving money, deadlines or results — and the graph starts moving in the wrong direction — the fun can be sucked out of it fast.
Protect the joy. Not everything needs to be optimised.
How to figure out what lights you up
So, you’ve carved out some time. The question now is: what do you do with it?
If you’ve been out of touch with your own interests for years, this can feel genuinely hard. Here’s what has worked for me.
Follow your flow state
Is there anything you sometimes find yourself completely engrossed in for lengthy periods — so absorbed you forget to eat? You probably already have things that make you feel good but haven’t identified them as hobbies.
One of my flow states is gardening. I can lose entire afternoons in it without noticing.
Revisit your childhood
What activities did you relish as a kid? Dancing, taking things apart, pretending you were a zookeeper? I was always amazed by emerging leaf buds on bare branches each spring and would often be rummaging in the grass for insects.
Some of my hobbies today — nature, herbalism, permaculture — are direct descendants of that child.
Notice what you’re noticing
What stops you in your tracks? What makes you look up and think ‘wow’?
A busker playing music, someone’s outfit, the smell of paint, a bird you can’t identify. Be aware of what demands your attention without you choosing it. Follow that thread.
Ask what’s missing, not what’s popular
What way of being might be absent from your life? Perhaps you’d like to feel more energised — try sport. More calm — try nature walks. More connected — try volunteering. More digitally free — try an offline day.
Let the feeling you want guide you to the activity, not the other way round.
Remove all inputs and see where your mind goes
Occasionally try removing every external influence — people, screens, adverts, books, music — and spend time alone with your thoughts in a peaceful setting.
Give your mind the space to wander.
Where does it go? What does it land on? I love to do this on trains gazing out the window. It’s where I often get my best ideas for things I want to try.
Use what you already know
What can you talk about for twenty minutes without doing any further research? What can you happily read up on for hours without losing interest? Follow your curiosity. It already knows where it wants to take you.
You were not put on this earth to optimise spreadsheets, answer emails then collapse into a scroll at the end of the day.
You were put here to find out what makes you come alive — and then do more of it.
Free time is not a luxury we’re often guilted into believing. It is a basic human right. We are not meant to toil all hours of the day with no space left for our minds to meander. Defend that third space.
And if someone asks you what you’d do with a free day tomorrow, have an answer that makes your eyes light up.
What’s the hobby or interest you’ve been meaning to explore but keep putting off? Tell me in the comments — I’d love to hear them.
I‘m Leyla. I write about remembering who you are underneath all the noise, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.
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