The surprising importance of FUN in productive work

Catherine Price says why it might be time to rebalance your life

Catherine Price is a science and health writer who has written a couple of sensationally timely books.

Secondly, and today’s discussion focusses on this, The Power of Fun

This episode explores the concept of fun and its importance in adult life, challenging the misperception that fun is frivolous.

What is fun? Catherine Price suggests that it is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.

The discussion also addresses the impact of social media on fake fun and the role of playfulness in work and productivity. The conversation explores the importance of fun in the workplace and the impact it has on productivity, connection, and overall well-being. It delves into the challenges of creating a fun work environment, the role of playfulness in building connections, and the significance of in-person interactions. The discussion also highlights the value of fun in education and its potential to bridge social and cultural divides.

Takeaways

Fun is a feeling, not an activity, and it involves the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.
The misperception of fun as frivolous leads to the prioritization of fake fun over true fun, impacting mental and physical health.
Playfulness is undervalued in work settings, but it is essential for creativity, productivity, and building closer relationships.
Social media and technology addiction are designed to induce fake fun through dopamine triggers, leading to habituation and reduced enjoyment of everyday experiences.
Creating space for spontaneity and identifying personal ‘fun magnets’ are essential for experiencing true fun in everyday life. Creating a fun work environment can improve productivity, connection, and employee well-being.
In-person interactions play a crucial role in building meaningful connections and fostering a sense of community in the workplace.
Fun and playfulness have the potential to bridge social and cultural divides, creating a more inclusive and connected society.

Chapters

00:00 The Essence of Fun: Playfulness, Connection, and Flow

08:27 The Impact of Fake Fun: Social Media and Technology Addiction

15:27 The Role of Playfulness in Work and Productivity

31:20 Focusing on Inputs and Creating a Fun Work Environment

34:22 The Role of Playfulness in Building Connections

39:02 Fun as a Tool for Bridging Social Divides

I was put on to it by Elle Hunt’s Power of Fun article in The Guardian

Memorise it: fun is playful connected flow

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Daisley (00:06.392)

This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat, podcast about workplace culture, psychology and life. Hi, I’m Bruce DaisleyThere was a moment in the interview that we did in this week’s where right at the start where I realized actually I hadn’t questioned some of the values and the decisions that I was bringing. I said something to today’s guest, Catherine Price, about the importance of fun.

I don’t think that that was universally accepted and universally agreed. Catherine Price is a writer. writes about science. She writes about health and she’s written a couple of fabulous books. Firstly, she had a huge international success with a book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, which as she will say, started from a perspective of her trying to understand the relationship she had with her own phone and how she could make it less toxic. And she’s also written a book.

that we ended up dedicating the entirety of the discussion today to. Sometimes you never know where these interviews and discussions are going to go and I didn’t know if we’d run out of space. In fact, we filled so much time with a discussion about her book, The Power of Fun. And for me, it was just a brilliant and kind of life-affirming discussion about something that we sometimes

Leave for chance and we don’t necessarily set about creating fun as a pursuit in our lives. We’ll be back to talk after the interview, but right now let’s jump into the discussion with Catherine Price, who amongst other things wrote the power of fun.

Bruce Daisley (01:49.998)

Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. I wonder if you could kick off if you could introduce yourself and explain what you do.

Catherine Price

Sure, my name name is Catherine Price and I’m a health and science journalist and author of books including How to Break Up with Your Phone and The Power of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again.

Bruce

And your work seems to be a navigation guide of how we can navigate the changing world around us and try and find a way to greater fulfillment and greater happiness. That’s how I perceive it. Actually, how do you perceive it?

I think that’s a good way to summarize it. I mean, it’s basically a way for me to deal with my own personal issues that apparently are not just unique to me. own stuff and hoping that it will help other people do the same so that ultimately we can live more joyful and fulfilling lives.

Catherine Price (02:23.93)

I’m working through

Bruce Daisley (02:31.494)

To kick off with sort of the idea of fun, fun seems to be this sort of elusive thing. It’s the best thing to have and it’s the hardest thing to find. How do you think about fun and the pursuit of

Well, I’m glad you said it was important because I think one of our misperceptions about fun is that it’s actually not very important, especially for adults. We often prioritize fun for kids or think it’s a childish thing. And then we’re happy if it happens to us, but we don’t really give it much thought. We don’t put it at the top of our priority list. So I personally got very interested in fun after I wrote How to Break Up with Your Phone, which we can talk about too, but that’s a guide to creating healthier relationships with technology and creating better boundaries. And I realized that once I’d gone through that process myself,

I ended up with a lot more free time, was, you know, you’d think would be great, but in reality, it uncovered the fact that I’d lost sight of what I wanted to do with my own free time, which led to a bit of existential despair. It made me to try to figure out what my own priorities were. And I came to realize that the moments in which I felt alive, the most alive, were the moments in which I was having fun. And so I became very interested in looking into what fun actually is, because there’s not a good dictionary definition of it.

But that in turn prompted and then investigating what research there might be about its benefits. Which is a spoiler alert, there’s not much research about fun or its benefits, but I came up with the definition that I believe has a solid foundation of science behind it, suggesting that fun, as you just said, actually is essential for our happiness and our health. I think it might be helpful for me to give you my definition of fun so we can base our conversation on that.

Based on my research and surveys of people around the world, asking them for their own stories from their lives that they describe as having been truly fun, I came up with the definition that fun, or as I think of it as true fun, is the confluence of three separate states. And those states are playfulness, connection, and flow. So I often show this as a Venn diagram with three circles where you’ve got playfulness, connection, and flow, and the center overlapping section is what I consider to be fun.

And to clarify what those three terms mean, by playfulness I’m not necessarily talking about playing games. I think that’s a misperception. There’s a lot of misconceptions about fun, but that’s something our minds leap to is, it means you have to be childish, you have to be playing games. It doesn’t mean that. It just means having a lighthearted attitude towards life, finding ways to laugh, not taking yourself too seriously, letting go of perfectionism. That’s what I mean by playfulness. Connection refers to the feeling of having a special shared connection or special shared experience, I should say, with someone else.

I was really interested to see that in the stories I collected from people, the vast majority of them had another person in them, even introverts. So it wasn’t necessarily a distinction between introverts and extroverts, like in terms of whether or not people were involved, it would be the type of interaction, an intimate interaction versus like a group interaction, for example, between introverts and extroverts. But it seems there’s this element of connection. And then the last element of fun, I believe, is flow, which is a term that refers to when we’re

quote, in the zone, when you’re totally engrossed, actively engaged in what you’re doing, nothing else matters. You often lose track of time. It’s a very active state. So flow is different from kind of the hypnotized state we get into when we’re watching TV on the couch and seven episodes pass and we don’t know what happened to the afternoon. That’s different. That’s what’s considered to be junk flow. I’m talking about when you’re really actively engaged in a work project or a conversation or when an athlete is playing a game or you’re playing a piece of music, something like that.

So playfulness and connection and flow all have benefits on their own, which we can talk more about. There’s a lot of evidence behind their impacts on both our mental and our physical health. And then when you combine all three together, that’s what I believe is the definition of fun. And to me, that suggests that fun actually truly is not frivolous, but actually essential for us. I typically think about leisure time as being divided into three buckets. So you have on the one end, what I just described as true fun.

That’s the playful connected flow. It’s a very energizing state. It’s very nourishing. It will fill you up and carry you forward. So it’s great to prioritize anything that will create the feeling of true fun. The reason I call it true fun is to distinguish it from its evil alter ego, which I think of as fake fun, which is another one of those three buckets. Now fake fun is my term for activities or products that are marketed to us as fun, but that don’t actually result in playful connected flow.

And by far the top example of that would be social media. When we have a couple spare moments, what do most of us do? We open up our phones and we tap on the Instagram icon or TikTok or whatever it might be. That passes the time and we think of it as like quote fun, right? Cause it’s not work, but it leaves us feeling kind of empty as opposed to energized and nourished. So you’ve got fake fun and true fun. I like that distinction. Cause once you can tell the difference.

it’s easier to eliminate fake fun because there’s no real benefit to fake fun unless you want to just zone out for a little bit. And then I think there’s this big middle bucket that I think of as just activities we enjoy. So stuff like reading a book or watching your favorite TV show before it makes you feel gross about yourself. Once it passes the line making you feel gross about yourself, we’re in fake fun territory. But of course, many people love watching movies or TV shows. So if you’re doing that and it’s making you feel kind of relaxed or just, you know, it’s fulfilling some other need, great.

This big bucket of enjoyment houses many of our solitary activities that are kind of quieter activities. So again, like consuming something like a TV show, reading a book, taking a bath, going for a walk alone, stuff like that. So I like to think of these three buckets because I think it helps us make better decisions about how to spend our non-work leisure time because you have a limited amount of time in general and you certainly have a limited amount of leisure time. So if you come into a leisure situation and you can ask yourself, what do I need right now?

You know, do I need something that’s just going to relax me and kind of like be a quieter experience? Maybe then you just want to do something like read your book or go for a walk, right? Like watch a show. But could you stand to to get some energy? Like, do you want to actually put forth a little bit more effort so that you can actually get this kind of more energizing state of true fun? I just like to ask myself that because at the end of the day, you you can go in two different directions. And I think for many of us, the default is to just go to the couch, sit down, watch something. And then that’s

at its best enjoyment, at its worst it can lead to fake fun where you just feel kind of gross about yourself and emptier inside. So anyway, it’s been very helpful to me personally to think about my leisure time that way and I’d recommend people play around with it themselves to see if it can be helpful to them as well.

think you’re right about the automatic one being the fake fun and the kind of empty enjoyment, but I know that, and I know that scrolling endlessly isn’t making me feel good, and yet I keep doing it. Why is it that we keep choosing to do that kind of fake fun instead of doing the fun that would actually be enjoyable?

Well, there’s a couple of reasons. mean, one is that it’s easy, right? Like it’s, for example, I often derive true fun from going to a guitar class. take a guitar class that requires me to leave my… I have to sign up for the class. I have to go to the class. You know, I have to get myself off the couch to go to it. That’s a lot harder than it would be to just sit on the couch and look at social media on my phone. So there is some effort involved often and actually getting yourself into situations in which true fun is likely to occur.

But the other huge reason, which hopefully most people are aware of by now, is that the companies behind our most problematic apps, the most fake fun inducing apps, make money based on how much time and attention we spend on them. And so therefore they are engineered in incredibly sophisticated ways to actually hack our brains, like actually induce the secretion of dopamine, which is a neurochemical that’s designed to help us establish and maintain habits to actually stay on their apps for extended periods of time.

So it’s really kind of, I find it infuriating because the entire business motivation is to keep us on the apps and they’re really, really good at it. They’re really good at it. And it’s them versus our feeble human brains. And just to clarify what I mean by that, if you actually do an, let me back up, dopamine essentially is our brain’s way of recording when a behavior is worth doing again. So it’s essential for the survival of our species because dopamine will do things like.

Remind you that, yeah, I was in the woods and there was this raspberry bush and I ate the raspberries and they tasted good and I felt nourished and I didn’t die. well, I should remember where that bush is and I should go there again. So it’s a motivation chemical, right? That’s great. Dopamine also makes us reproduce. again, species survival, great.

But our dopamine systems are non-discriminatory. They do not care or have any judgment behind what behaviors they’re reinforcing. If you encounter a dopamine trigger in your environment, you’re going to establish to your brain that that’s a behavior worth repeating, regardless of whether or not it’s something you want to do. And that’s the reason that dopamine is also behind our addictions, because drugs and substances that are addictive actually trigger the release of dopamine as well. So the point here is that if you’re trying to create a product or a service that will get people to spend as much of their time as possible on that product or service, all you need to do is bake dopamine triggers into the product’s design. And our brains will encounter the dopamine triggers. So for example, bright colors, novelty, unpredictability, variable rewards, and that’s going to trigger the release of dopamine and get your brain to associate that behavior with something that’s worth doing again. And that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to break away from that trance we all get into when we are on social media.

Bruce Daisley (12:08.11)

So what’s happening then? If that is activating dopamine, then when you have the components of pure fun or real fun, I think you called it, what’s the difference? Is your brain interpreting it in a different way? Is there oxytocin there as well from the connectivity? What would be the difference and how would my brain interpret those things? I love this model, playful, connected flow. And it’s made me sort of sort of rattle around through my head now of all the things I love doing. And I have to tell you, your book has had so much influence on me that the very question that I said at the start was fun was so important is because in the two years since I’ve read it, I’ve thought about fun all the time. All the time I’m trying to, truly, honestly. And there was a wonderful Guardian article about it. And honestly, it’s forced a constant appraisal for everything I do. But I’m just interested then back to the brain element.

Why would one be experienced as satisfying and one have this sort of artifice to it? What’s the difference?

Catherine Price

So I’m not neuroscientist, so I don’t want to overstep my boundaries here, but what I would guess is happening is that when you’re engaging in social media, as you’re saying, it’s kind of like a pure dopamine drip, which unfortunately does mean that we get habituated to just getting these little bits of dopamine. I remember speaking to someone who founded the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction here in the States way back in the late 90s. He was very ahead of his time and he was talking about one of the big challenges of tech addiction in general was that people start to derive less enjoyment and pleasure from everyday experiences because as he put it, like a sunset becomes less satisfying if you’re used to constant novelty, you know, via social media on your phone. But I think that you’re probably right that there is an element of oxytocin and other quote, feel good chemicals being released when we’re actually in a social interaction in person with other people having fun. And I find that absolutely fascinating. So I should also back up. There’s really no research on fun.

I think because we don’t have a definition of fun until now. We think of it as frivolous. know, if you were evaluating grants and you’ve got one that’s for cancer research and another for the benefits of fun, I’m pretty sure you’re going to give it to the cancer research. But I think what you said stands to reason that there is a cocktail of hormones and chemicals being released by our bodies when we’re in these more nourishing fun situations that can’t be replicated online. So I think that’s part of the reason that we end up feeling a lot more nourished than we do.

and also because…

when we have these in-person fun experiences than when we do something that is a fake fun, such as scrolling through social media or sitting alone on the couch. And I think it probably does have a lot to do with our intrinsic need for socialization. Humans are an incredibly social species. And there’s been a lot of research done on the health effects of loneliness and isolation, which is fascinating to me. I mean, I think a lot of people know by this point that emotional stress is not good for us physically because emotional stress over time leads to chronic

chronically elevated levels of a different hormone called cortisol, which is a fight or flight hormone. It’s very important if you’re trying to run away from something, but it’s really bad for us if it’s elevated over time. And when you experience, but what I think people don’t recognize is that it’s not just emotional stress that triggers long-term chronically elevated cortisol levels, but also loneliness and isolation. They cause emotional stress too. And so loneliness and isolation are associated with the same health risks as emotional stress over time.

And it’s such a big effect that there was one really big meta-analysis that found that the health effects of loneliness and isolation were comparable to those of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A day, 15 cigarettes, mean, totally insane. And so I think that’s really interesting because again, while no one has studied fun in this way directly, I think it stands to reason that since fun is by definition, by my definition, a relaxed state and one in which you are socially connected, it probably carries the same health benefits or rather, counteracts the negative health effects of loneliness and isolation seems like it’s such a difficult task to have true fun. know, there’s on the one hand, the addictive dark patterns that these tech companies are creating that are lulling us into this fake fun side. But then also when I think about your three elements of fun, flow and connectedness, would say culturally or maybe socially, we might see more of a benefit to that as adults. But playfulness sticks out as one that I could imagine.

Bruce Daisley (16:34.752)

many people, as you said at the top, of think, no, that’s for kids. What’s your experience of those three elements and how people resonate with those? Well, can I first ask you why playfulness sticks out to you so much?

Catherine Price

I think certainly when if I think about flow, I get this sense of I’ve heard about that about athletes. I’ve heard about flow in terms of a real deep thought. And I guess my lens is maybe on a professional lens where it feels more serious or at least not serious, but there’s a purpose to it. And certainly, think I’ve been socialized to think that it’s not important unless there’s an output. that it’s kind of a productivity element to it. And similar with connection over the last few years with the pandemic, I really deeply understood the need for connection. But it doesn’t feel like that’s permeated in the same way with playfulness, at least in my opinion.

Right, so I mean, think that what you’re saying certainly mirrors the reaction I get from a lot of people. It’s like. of that flow makes sense, but playfulness, especially in a work context where everyone is already kind of walking on eggshells, not to offend anyone anyway. It can be kind of difficult to think about playfulness. So, I mean, one thing that comes to mind, though, is to point out that really our most effective moments in life are moments in which an element of playfulness are. Okay, connection, I get. has been involved. So for example, if you think back to your own education and you think about your favorite teachers, I mean, for me at least, I mean, some of my favorite teachers were the ones that were funny that who like gave us some reason to laugh where you became very engaged and there was an element of humor there or and or I should say where you were given an opportunity to explore things and experiment with things on your own. where you weren’t just spoon-fed information, but rather you were given a prompt or something that you were supposed to explore. That exploration and experimentation is a form of playfulness because you’re trying things. You’re not confining yourself to one path. You’re actually opening possibilities. And that’s an important element of playfulness. I would also say that creativity and playfulness go hand in hand. If you have…

you’re inner critic in full effect and you’re shutting yourself down or you’ve got, we’ve all been in like brainstorming settings or conversations where there’s one person who just, instead of saying yes and they’re always saying, well, no, that won’t work because blah, that’s not playful. If you actually get yourself into a state where you feel comfortable having the wrong answer or giving an idea that’s not perfect, that’s when you actually generate enough ideas to have a good idea come out of it. So I think the quick summary answer to your question is that we misunderstand playfulness. And so we don’t.

get its value. But if you think, even to think about your friendships, like if your favorite people to spend time with, sure, you’re going to have some people who are pretty serious by nature and you have kind of deep conversations, but even those conversations can be playful if you’re exploring, say, a philosophical topic or a political discussion. But I also guess that many of your favorite people to hang out with are the ones who make you laugh. And that’s a form of playfulness, too. So I think we kind of get it wrong. And we also don’t really understand the value of playfulness at work. I think we often think Or we conflate like playfulness with teasing. Those are not the same thing. Teasing makes someone feel bad. know, joking around with someone when everyone’s in on the joke, that’s a form of play. Teasing is not. And obviously like harassment or something, that’s not. Or, you when you make a joke that’s totally inappropriate and then say, I was just kidding. That’s not playfulness. That’s just totally inappropriate. But, you know, I’ve been doing these workshops with this group called Fundmentum Labs here in the States, and they focus specifically on how to harness the benefits of fun at work and

Just as an example of how you can use playfulness to actually come up with good ideas, they have this wonderful exercise that they call worst first. And the idea is that if you’re in a brainstorming situation, it can be tricky if you’re trying to come up with good ideas. Like right now, if I was like, okay, let’s figure out the best taglines for your podcast, right, or something, it’s just you’re self-conscious, you’re worried about saying something dumb, that you’re gonna leave that hanging and everyone’s gonna think you’re an idiot.

So what they do instead is they actually suggest you come up with horrible ideas. So the goal is to come up with as many bad ideas as possible in a certain amount of time. And what they often do is break people into groups and give a time limit. So three to five minutes, like the worst ideas. And this often ends in hilarity. You know, I remember we did one, we did a Zoom workshop and it was like, are the worst ways to create a sense of connection on a Zoom call? And it was like, oh, I don’t know, you can have mandatory, make it mandatory that everyone leaves themselves unmuted for the entire call. That’d be a bad idea. Or like,

ever start that call where every person makes a comment on someone else’s physical appearance. It’s just like.

These horrible ideas are like, you know, how

one of your parents come to the Zoom call and just sit in the background if you’re working from home, from your parents. Anyway, but the idea is that that loosens people up. And what they do at the end of the exercise is to have people come back, look at that list of quote unquote horrible ideas and then say, is there the seed of anything good in there? And most of the time, there’s the seed of a good idea in there that you never would have come to if you hadn’t allowed yourself to be playful. So that’s kind of a rambling answer to your question. But think bottom line, we misunderstand playfulness and we don’t recognize its value and we don’t know how to apply it to settings that are not just leisure time. It’s actually useful in all regards. It also bonds people together. People you play with, you’re closer with. So the more you can play or be playful with people, the closer you’ll feel with them, the closer you feel with them, the stronger community you’ll have, the more productive you’ll be, the more creative you’ll be in just all aspects of your life. I mean, I can’t, I am obsessed with play. We all need more play communities. I could talk about it for the rest of our time together, but I’m going to shut up now.

That makes sense. Is there a sense that we’ve created this false opposition that productivity is in opposition to play? I sat with someone on Tuesday and she sort of rattled through all the things that she was accomplishing and her goals going forwards and it just was ever-present in my head. And she hadn’t smiled for 30 minutes and it was just ever-present in my head. This woman doesn’t look like she’s enjoying life. She looks like she’s accomplishing things. And is it because we’ve created this false opposition, do you think? The productivity is so as a topic. think totally, I mean, because they’re linked. First of all, productivity shouldn’t be your only metric in life, right? As you’re saying, you should probably try to enjoy it because no matter how productive you are, we’re all going to end up in the same place. So I don’t know, might as well enjoy your time here. But without getting overly morbid, I also think that, yeah, we create this false dichotomy because you’re most productive when you’re having fun.

I mean, going back to the education thing, if you were enjoying a class or, know, if you study with friends, for example, often a lot more fun than trying to drill yourself on your own on this subject. So I think we get it totally wrong. The more you’re enjoying yourself, the more you’re going, the more you’re going to have these, as we’re saying, feel good hormones and chemicals in your body that actually helps you learn and help you absorb information, help you come up with new ideas. So we really do need to try to break down the wall we’ve erected between playfulness and enjoyment and quote unquote productivity. There really should not be.

they shouldn’t be separated in the way that we currently have them.

think my question was kind of the opposite of that, which is what if you start to view fun as a means for productivity and start to try to like optimize it because you’re going, okay, if I have fun, I’ll do better work. How do you avoid falling into that trap of it just becoming like another thing on your to-do list, another way to be more productive and be better?

Well, I think you should try to incorporate little things that feel fun or that delight you into your everyday routine. So that actually is useful to kind of try to hack your way into, I think. But I also think that in terms of how to have fun, you do need to make room for spontaneity and you do need to remember that ultimately, like if you try to force fun, it’s kind of like romance. Like if you try to force it, it’s going to run away. Like things are going to not work. have to, I like to say you kind of like light the candles for fun, but like you can’t come on too hard to fun.

But I think that there’s, I don’t know, I think about it in two ways, engineering fun and then making space for fun. And so when I say engineering fun, well, let me back up one more step. I want to clarify something very important. think people get wrong about fun. Fun is a feeling. It is not an activity. This is essential because a lot of times if I talk to people about what they think is fun, they’ll give me a list of activities that they enjoy, which is great. And those activities might often lead to fun, but fun is the feeling that results.

So, you for example, here in the States, at least pickleball is like a big thing. People love pickleball. And you could play the exact same game or sport with the exact same people, honestly. And one time it’s incredibly fun and one time it’s not that fun. We’ve all had that experience with any of our preferred activities. And in the same way, you’ve probably had experiences where something that seems like it objectively would never be fun ends up being really fun. Like I recently heard from a guy who said he had a ton of fun waiting for a delayed flight.

at an airport because he had this really fun conversation with these strangers who were standing next to him. No one would choose delayed flight as like their top, you know, fun activity. So fun is a feeling, not an activity. With that said, we all do have a collection of activities and people and settings that are more likely than others to lead to fun for us personally. And I call those fun magnets. And I think that’s an important concept because if you can identify your fun magnets, the people, the activities and the settings that often lead to fun for you.

Then you can make space for that within your day. So you can kind of engineer opportunities for fun, set the stage for fun more regularly. As a personal example, as I was saying, I take a guitar class. meets Wednesday nights from six 30 to eight. And I’ve been going for, geez, I think it’s six years now. And I really do try to treat that as sacred time. I do my best not to miss guitar because I know that’s a fun magnet for me. It doesn’t always results in ridiculous amounts of fun, but it’s always more fun than sitting at home.

But the other flip side, so I would say prioritize your fund magnets, identify them and prioritize them, make space for them in your schedule. But then the flip side is you also just need space for spontaneous fun to occur. And I think that’s getting at what you’re talking about too. You want to just not always be staring down at your phone, for example, because if you do, you’re never going to have spontaneous interactions with people or you’re never going to notice other opportunities. You need to not pack your schedule so tightly that you don’t have space to say yes to something. random or decide on a whim that you’re going to go do something that might be fun or delightful for you. So I think that there’s two sides to this. There is the engineering side of making sure you know what’s likely to lead to fun for you and making sure to prioritize it. And then there’s also leaving space so that these unexpected moments of fun, which we’ve all experienced, we’ve all had moments of fun that were totally unplanned that just led this, I don’t know, created delight in your day that stand out in your memory, but you never could have planned for them. So you need to do both those things.

could workplaces leave that space for fun? Because I think the inclination of lot of bosses is, okay, we need to have fun. We’ll do enforced, engineered social activities. How do they not do that?

Well, I think that in order to create more fun at work and harness the benefits of fun at work, if that’s what we’re trying to do, employers need to not focus on fun as the top goal, but rather focus on the ingredients. So how can you create more connection, playfulness and flow in a workplace setting? With flow, that’s kind of the, I think one of the biggest problems because everyone’s constantly being interrupted by everything, by Slack notifications and emails and…

I think more rarely people interrupting them in person. That would actually be great if our interruptions were all in person, but we’re hardly able to focus. So I think that employers and bosses could do a lot by actually giving their employees more space for flow by doing things like setting boundaries on when emails should be sent. For example, nights and weekends are not a time to send people emails. If you, and I should back up there.

start by defining what an actual emergency is in your workplace and then establish a system for how emergencies will be communicated or people will be communicated with in this situation of an emergency. And it shouldn’t be email. So you want to make it possible so that people can actually step away from their work email and their computers at night to give them space for whatever they need, whether it’s quiet relaxation or pursuing fun. But there needs to be kind of a company wide effort to create that space for people.

And then also creating boundaries around meetings or just distractions during the work day and modeling that as a boss or employer. And for connection, mean, you can do various kinds of like conversation starters at the beginning of meetings. remember speaking for one company whose CEO told me that they had a tradition at the beginning of each meeting of giving each person a minute or two to just say something about what was going on in their life. And they could choose. I mean, it could be something silly and superficial, or it could be something.

you know, deeper or more personal, but they would basically like share a little bit about themselves at the beginning of the meeting. And it led to this really great feeling of connection and community that I could feel as a speaker coming to that place. And actually the same place did something for playfulness that I really loved, which was that they gave employees more autonomy in creating playfulness within the workplace. So I think a lot of times companies will do things like a happy hour, you know, or like they’ll be kind of a traditional thing like a sports game, which, and both of which kind of exclude people by definition, because maybe people don’t want to drink at work with their colleagues. That’s not, it’s kind of weird, right? Like that’s a weird thing to do. People are worried about being inappropriate and they’re like, let’s just get avI have a lot of alcohol and have you all hang out.

on a Friday anyway, or you know, the traditional like golf outing where if you don’t like golf, you’re just not part of that work community. Anyway, this one company had a thing where they, had a budget to allow people to appoint themselves as CEOs of a particular interest. So there was like a CEO of fancy coffee or there was like a CEO, I think it was actually of beer, but a CEO of something that they were interested in. And then the employee could organize something for their colleagues. So one person really liked.

baking. They were like the CEO of baked goods and people would come in on Tuesdays and the employee would have some things that she baked and like people would come in. So it was like basically giving people a little bit more control to kind of show their personalities and show their playfulness and their creativity in the workplace setting. And it didn’t feel top down. It felt bottom up. So I think that that’s a really great opportunity or way for companies to empower employees to feel more connected to their workplace community.

show a little bit more of themselves in an appropriate way that can then lead to more fun interactions because the next time someone runs into them in the hallway, they’ve got something else to talk about rather than just a work project. It kind of has all these immeasurable dividends that it pays out down the line in creating more ties between people in the company.

Bruce Daisley (31:27.886)

love the idea of focusing on the inputs rather than focusing on the outputs. And it makes me think, you know, certainly over the last few years, we’ve seen such a huge investment of time, energy, and money into wellbeing initiatives. You know, we have nowadays yoga, meditation, interestingly, the types of things that five, 10 years ago would have been scoffed in a boardroom. And it makes me think similarly with certain things like some of the exercises that might lead to fun.

But it’s interesting around focusing on the inputs rather than the outputs. Where do you think businesses often go wrong, you mentioned in terms of happy hours, when they’re trying to force this fun?

Well, I think that businesses often don’t recognize that the goal should be to make work itself feel more fun. If people are having more fun doing their work, they’re going to do better work and they’re not going to be resentful about it. And they’ll feel more connected to the company, more loyal, honestly. So, so yeah, I think happy hours. mean, there’s a time and a place for happy hour. That’s fine. But I think that it’s very awkward if people are just together in a room with no activity to do and they’re in it’s not work time. So you’re not really supposed to be talking about work, but you have nothing. You have no alternatives. You haven’t given them an alternative.

other than to drink alcohol. So that’s what I think the problem is with happy hours. If you can provide an activity, so sorry, let me back up. If it’s outside of work hours, providing people with an activity to do is very helpful. Like a class or just something where they can engage with one another. I think that’s why like axe throwing has become a big thing, at least in the States or escape rooms had this big, you know, momentary like fad before the pandemic. But another mistake I’ve seen, this one made me laugh. It was like a… you

Catherine Price

I won’t even say what kind of company it was, but it was a very intense company where people were paid by the hour and they’d set up like a game day and there was this like big Jenga game and in one of these rooms that people were supposed to go play these games in the middle of the work day. And I was like, but you have people who are billing hourly for their services and you’re telling them now that they’re supposed to be grateful that you set up a game of Jenga that they’re now feeling obligated to go play in the middle of the day. Like that is, I get where you’re coming from, but that’s not actually.

helpful, that’s just going to make people roll their eyes and feel annoyed at it, right? So that’s where I think trying to incorporate more rituals, for example, and practices within the workday that can actually make people feel a greater sense of playfulness and connection and fun is very useful. So for example, you know, know other companies that start with some kind of ice breaking question at the beginning of zoom calls and it feels a little bit forced at first, you know, like is pineapple acceptable pizza topping is one I’ve heard people use or.

what’s the last internet rabbit hole you fell down, really like anything. You can find lists of these online, but it actually does create a sense of connection and you can spend just five minutes at the beginning of a call on this and you’ll notice that people’s demeanor changes on those calls and they actually end up being more productive calls because you’ve introduced this element of playfulness and connection to the call. So I think trying to incorporate the elements into the workplace as part of work is really important and not to think of these as you work in one room and you play Jenga. in the other room.

It’s interesting you say that. was chatting to some educators, some teachers this week, and they were telling me the challenges of remote learning. quite often these teachers were dealing with excluded pupils, so pupils that have been expelled from school. And they were talking through the challenges of remote working. And my instinct was, I think, aware of what you’ve said and aware of something that saw someone from an emergency room at hospital said.

Bruce Daisley (35:01.694)

I said, have you tried experimenting with opening with a game? And it’s interesting, isn’t it? That it’s probably something that we might wince at if we, before we did it. But quite often we find ourselves in a changed state by having engaged in these activities. The same people told me that they’d organized a school trip for everyone, all the teachers to be part of a choir. When people found out they were going to be part of a choir,

There were so many of them that tried to back out that didn’t want to do it. But the head’s teacher said, we’ve been overwhelmed with the response to it. That people didn’t want to do this, but they’ve said it was their favourite ever day at school. And so it’s so interesting, this sort of strange, conflicted relationship we have with passing through the membrane of fun, that sometimes we only really appreciate the benefit when we’ve gone through, the osmosis is complete.

I think that’s definitely true. mean, it’s the same when you’re trying to motivate yourself to get off the couch. You’re like, we would feel better, but it’s so easy to stay here. I mean, I in those cases, you know, it’s important that it’s a paid day. You wouldn’t want to be like, it’s quiet. That was the problem with the Jenga thing. It was like, well, now you’re not making your hours, but you’re supposed to be. But I think that’s definitely true. It’s really amazing once you’ve experienced it to see the difference in a group of people once they have played together.

I I kinda, I know I pro-

Catherine Price (36:09.044)

and you don’t get paid.

Speaker 4 (36:23.426)

You know, and it’s very interesting to me. I’m very interested in education. I was briefly a teacher right after college. And just to notice that we seem to get that play-based learning works for like little kids. It’s like, yeah, play-based learning. That’s like a whole buzzword here. But it’s true for adults too. We kind of are like, no, at some point you just sit at a desk and you do your work, but that’s not how our brains work. It’s certainly not how neurodivergent brains work. It’s really the amount of executive.

control that it requires to sit there and just like, I don’t know, force yourself to work as opposed to making it enjoyable. You remind me of a story I recently heard myself from a teacher, a woman who’s in education, who’s just fantastic in terms of her approach. And she did a teacher training where instead of having the teachers sit in a room and be lectured to about like age appropriate ways to design lesson plans, what they did is the whole group of teachers in the training went out to this natural site. They listened to this.

kind of hands-on talk by this geologist. And then they came back to their training room and they all were given kind of art supplies that were based on the ages that they taught. for the teachers of smaller kids, there were, you know, things that like a kindergartener would use, a five or six year old would use versus a high school or someone who’s 17 or 18 years old, different materials. And then the teachers were put into groups and given time to actually try to represent what they had learned using the materials that they had.

been provided with and then to talk to the group about why they chose to do what they did why it was appropriate for their age group all this stuff and the woman i was speaking to use it was by far the best teacher training ever because the teachers themselves and engaged in play and they had gotten into the minds of their students in that case inexperienced through their students eyes and that internet made a much more body with their groups cuz they had a project to work on they weren’t just abstractly talking about something and people were laughing and having fun and.

it was the most memorable and she thought best teaching workshop they’d ever had. So there’s just, if you actually start looking for these examples in your own life or just in life in general, you will start to notice that the times in which we have the most fun are the ones when we felt the most bonded with the people we were with, when we got the most done, when we remember the most. You know, I think actually it’s fascinating to think about humor as a teaching tool. And if you’re listening to a lecture and the person makes you laugh,

Speaker 4 (38:39.522)

To me, at least that’s a much more memorable lecture than someone who’s a dry lecturer. Like, guess what? The difference between a good lecturer and a dry lecturer is the amount of engagement you feel and the amount you’re having fun listening to them. I mean, to me, it was really like a mind blowing moment to recognize there’s this feeling that we all know and we’ve experienced and that we just don’t value. We’ve never thought about it. And once I started to think about it, then like you, it became kind of all consuming. I just think about fun all the time and how to create. And I notice instances where

people use some element of fun to create community, to create a different vibe within a group of people. And I notice how differently people interact if they’ve had fun. You I think it’s actually could be an incredibly useful tool for building greater connections between people of different groups within society. Because when you’re having fun with someone, you actually don’t see their differences. Like you don’t see them as a different nationality or race or religion or anything. My favorite example of that is Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama who had this wonderful friendship.

Obviously two men of very different backgrounds and very serious, like traumatic, you know, experiences. The two of them were giggling constantly. There’s an amazing documentary that has joy in the title. I always forget the name of it, but they’re just joking around with each other, giggling, know, Archbishop Desmond Tutu tries to get the Dalai Lama to dance at some point. And they just talk about the importance of joy and the importance of focusing on things that create joy and fun as a

way to overcome life’s traumas and as a way to overcome our differences.

Bruce Daisley

There’s an adjacent story to that actually. In the Northern Ireland peace process, was a long period where there were two adversaries, Dr. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. And Dr. Ian Paisley was the most senior and most strident Protestant, and Martin McGuinness kind of represented the political wing of Sinn Fein, the IRA. they started, initially they wouldn’t speak to each other, they wouldn’t be in the same room as each other. By the time they’d both served as the… the First Minister and Deputy Minister of Northern Ireland, they were known as the Chuckle Brothers because they used to go round laughing at everything together. And it was so fascinating that being in each other’s proximity and both having the same playful sense of humour gradually took them into a place where they kind of begrudgingly loved each other. It’s sort of, you know, it’s a film waiting to be made, that one, but I love that story of how…

Playfulness really took them to a place that they never ever expected to go to.

Catherine Price

Exactly. And I think we need more of that. And it doesn’t mean, you know, it’s not like a Pollyanna ish thing where it’s like, and then they got along and the conflict was resolved and peace was ever after. No, but they were probably able to have more productive conversations. There’s a number of examples that I’ve come across of that. mean, for example, the former secretary of state here in the U S Madeline Albright had this friendship with the Russian think foreign defense minister, Yevgeny Primakov for the two of them. Southeast Asia and.

There was some summit in there was a tradition of the delegates actually putting on musical numbers together, which itself is like, at first you’d be like, why the heck would you do that with taxpayer money? what is happening is people really bonded. So the two of them ended up doing an adaptation of the musical West Side Story. And instead they did East West Story and they substituted instead of the, just met a girl named Maria. was, just met a girl named Madeleine Albright. And they had this like, apparently vodka fueled night, you know, courtesy of the Russian delegation where they rewrote all these lyrics. my god, but in reality…

They were like ambassadors dressed up as gang members i’m sure it wouldn’t fly now but if you read the news articles about this it’s hilarious and when i’ll break used to say is that you know it doesn’t mean that they like got along on everything they obviously had very different opinions and positions on stuff but they had this foundation this friendship that was based on playfulness that enable them to work more productively together.

And indeed, if you look up pictures of the two of them together, there’s this warmth that is almost shocking when you consider all the differences they must have had between them. And a lot of that came from the fact that they were able to play.

I’m struck when you said, you know, even just a throwaway comment of one might be surprised you spent taxpayer money on it. I find that so interesting because it seems like there’s this professional veneer that we have to break through. almost if Silicon Valley doesn’t, you know, say that meditation is important, then no one does it. then Silicon Valley is now giving the green light to yoga. So now other businesses are doing it. It feels like there’s so many things that we intuitively have probably known for thousands of years that are good for us.

walking in nature, exercise, having fun, that we maybe know on some level, but aren’t given that kind of professional tick. And I’d be curious to get your thoughts on almost why is that? Why does it take so long to break into the world of work and not in a cynical way? think unfortunately they can get packaged up in a cynical way to meditate because you’re more productive as Ellen said.

But it seems to take so long for things that we have known are good to kind of come back around.

Catherine Price

I there’s a lot of different reasons. I I know I said this before, but I do think one of the fundamental issues is not having a good definition of fun. You kind of know, you know, walking in nature, like nature, it’s a thing. Like you could have different types of nature, but we all basically know what nature is. But you’ve got all these different kind of conceptions of fun. And sometimes fun, as I mentioned before, is conflated with teasing or you’re having fun because you all got really trashed after work and went out to a strip club. Like that’s not what we want. know, the first step is to really record, like to narrow in on what is meant by fun, which hasn’t really happened. And yeah, think and I think we just don’t think about it. That really is the other thing. We just don’t think about it. It’s just a concept that’s under our noses, but we’ve never really given it much thought. And we have typically thought of it as the opposite of work and seriousness. I think that probably also has to do with our upbringing. I mean, as I was saying, you we we prioritize play for kids, but at some point you quote, get serious and you think of play is just for children. It’s child’s play, right?

and we don’t think of it as something that adults do. But then, I don’t know, it just shocks me because whenever you do have an experience in which you laugh with someone, even if it’s a stranger on the street or like the guy I met who had the great time, you know, waiting for a delayed flight, like those are the moments that light us up. They’re the moments that we remember. They’re the moments that bring us the most joy. And to me, it’s just almost tragic that we don’t prioritize it much because we’re missing out on some of the moments that make life worth living. And we’re kind of poo pooing them.

I mean, there’s so many, I could just go on. It’s like, yes, I think yoga and meditation are amazing and very good for you. But one of the main goals of both those things is to make you present. Well, when you’re having fun, it’s a flow state, right? And you cannot be in flow if you’re not present. If you’re distracted, you’re not in flow. So anytime you’re in flow, you are present. So if you want to be more present and you’re not into yoga and meditation, just prioritize fun because you’ll be more present by definition. Same thing with happiness. All of us are so obsessed with happiness. I want to be happy, but like…

Happiness is very nebulous. You someone pointed out to me once that if you asked, if I asked you guys, like, are you happy? We could spend the next two days talking about, what is happiness before we could even get to that. But if I asked you, did you have fun this weekend? You’d probably tell me yes or no like, immediately, right? But the thing about fun is that when you are having fun, you are happy. You just happy.

Catherine Price (46:04.547)

And that was another kind of mind blowing moment for me to realize, wait, if I can get into this state, this feeling of fun more often, I will be happier by definition because I’ll be spending more time. And that really has changed the way that I view and structure my own leisure time, both for myself and for my family. I think my family, I’ve got one kid and my husband and I, so it’s three of us. We often used to do things just the three of us. You we’d just take our family unit and put ourselves somewhere else.

Happy. And…

And there’s a benefit to that and that can be fun to explore a new place, novelty can be very fun. But I realized that one of the things I love the most is when we interact with other people. Whether it’s people we know already, like, you know, trips with friends or just having a shared activity with strangers. just as an example of the past two years, you know, I just spent August trying to prioritize going to family camps. I have a total reputation, well, first of as a crazy person among my friend group, like as this camp addict, because I go to all these different camps.

But it’s so nice because you’ve got activities that you’re doing with your family. You’re also interacting with other people. And to me, at least, that often leads to a feeling of fun that’s not achieved if we were to say, go someplace, just the three of us, and do a traditional vacation. I’m certainly not like a lie around on the beach person for vacation. That’s another misperception people have is that, I need to be rejuvenated. I have to go relax and not do anything. That’s totally wrong. A lot of times the most rejuvenating thing to do is to be engaged in something, to be actively engaged. Anyway.

So it’s really changed my own decision making in terms of how to spend my time individually and then what activities or what to prioritize as a family.

And this idea of connection, so you said, wanting to be around other people. Elephant in the room at the moment, obviously with workplace culture, is hybrid, virtual, in person. Do you have a sense from your research whether there’s a difference in the quality of connection if it’s virtual or in person?

Speaker 4 (48:02.668)

Yes. I mean, I we all know this intuitively, right? It doesn’t feel the same. If the four of us were in a room together, it would feel very different. Now, of course, that would require international travel, and I’m grateful that we can do this remotely. So there’s obviously benefits to being able to do this, but it’s just not the same. And I think that that is a real challenge we face right now is that work is so hybrid now, and so many of us are working remotely and even people who are going into offices.

Maybe in a situation where it doesn’t really matter they’re in the office, they’re doing zoom calls from their office with their door shut and they’re not interacting with people. So I think it’s one of the challenges of our age, honestly, but I do think one thing that we can do is to recognize the value of being with people in person and to prioritize it when we can and to respect your differences. know, some people going back to the introvert comment from earlier in this conversation, some people are not going to want to spend that much time with other people, which is totally okay. Or

So I just ask yourself, who are the people with whom you feel the most comfortable and what kind of social interactions feel the most nourishing and energizing or whatever you need, you know, to you and prioritize those. Don’t worry about if it doesn’t match with what other people say you quote should be doing. But I think just recognize that for all humans, social connection of some kind is important, but it differs by the person. So doing a little bit of introspection to figure out what that is for you and then in as much as you can, prioritizing it.

is very important.

of out of time and so I’d love to just know your advice of best steps. I was really struck by journaling or keeping a fun diary seemed to be like a really interesting device that you mentioned. I know you also run a course on these things or you run activities. If you were to give someone the catalyst, the taper that they could like to give themselves more fun in their lives, what is that step?

Speaker 4 (49:52.27)

Well, I think the first step is to, once you decide you’re going to prioritize it, which hopefully we’ve motivated you to do, is to try to figure out, as I said, some of your fun magnets and some of the characteristics of those magnets. Basically, try to figure out what tends to lead to fun for you so that you can start to build more of that into your schedule. And you can do that on your own just by keeping a journal, you know, a daily journal. think of it as a fun times journal where you notice moments where you experienced playfulness or connection or flow. Tiny moments are fine. Doesn’t matter.

and jot those down and label them with a P or an F and a C and notice if more than one occurred. Cause that’ll give you a way over time to look for themes, be like, wow, you know, I wouldn’t have thought that I often have fun when I go grocery shopping and speak to this particular person at the butcher counter, but I actually do. So maybe I should make, you know, not order groceries online. It’s like you could just discover things about yourself. So I’d recommend starting with that. I also have a free fun starter kit on my website, which is KatherinePrice.com.

And I created a 14 day find your fun course, which basically walks people through the steps in my book. Some of the book has the book, power of fun starts with an exploration of what fun is, why it’s actually important, you what we get wrong about fun. And the second half is like a step-by-step plan for how to have more of it. So I took all of that and put it into a course, which is also on my website. but I’d say, you know, really a good place to start is just to notice the fun you’re already having and build on it.

Because you probably are having more moments of playful connected flow than you realize, but you haven’t had a name for those moments and so you haven’t been valuing them. So any moment where you have like just a fun interaction with somebody that counts. And I just love that because to me it’s like collecting beads that you’re putting on a necklace of these little memories of fun. And when you’re feeling down and like you’re not having fun, you will have these memories to look back on and to savor, which is a psychological technique that’s been shown to boost our moods.

and you’ll also have material that you can mine for ideas going forward of how you can have more fun in the future.

Bruce Daisley (51:47.138)

Catherine, I just want to tell you how influential your book was on me. There was a Guardian article I mentioned that me and my sister both simultaneously sent to each other saying, going forwards, our lives are going to be optimized for fun. was like the remarkable synchrony of us both sending this article to each other. And I promise you, it’s been my philosophy in life ever since I’ve done it. I’m obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with…

I’m obsessed with trying to cultivate it, trying to bring people along to it. love it. I love it. it. love love love love it. it. love it.

Yeah, well, if you ever want to do something with your listeners where it’s like a fun intervention and we can touch base, I don’t know how you stay in touch with people, but we could actually invite people to come with us on prioritizing fun for a month. I often do that in February because I think, you know, it’s the shortest, darkest, to my mind, least fun in the month of the year. So I to do a fun intervention then. But I’d love to join forces on that, because I do think the more people we can get involved, the better.

I love it. love it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. This is wonderful.