Are You Making the Most of Your Bleisure Time?

7th July 2009

Contrary to what many of you may think, I do spend time away from a computer and actually do other things with my time.

One such occasion occurred last Saturday morning when I found myself reading the Saturday Times newspaper having bought a copy a few minutes previously. The thing about these ‘broadsheets’ on a weekend is that they take some reading and I still found myself reading the supplements the following day in order to get the paper finished and as such, the best value for my money – we are in a recession you know!

When I eventually got to The Magazine; in and amongst the lifestyle profiles of the ‘beautiful people’, adverts for clobber that warrant a house remortgage and interviews with artists who have their heads stuck where the sun don’t shine; I came across an article which introduced me to a new word combination, namely;

Bleisure Time

The article went on to say that whilst this is not the prettiest of words, being an amalgamation of the word ‘Business’ and ‘Leisure’; but it was a word we should get used because of the “always-on”, internet connected world that we now live in.

Bleisure time is that kind of lifestyle where we are addicted to emails on our Blackberry’s, regularly download music to our laptops, are fanatical about iPhones that allow us to downloadable a whole boat load of applications designed to entertains us, improve our efficiency or organise our lives.

When this level of lifestyle is reached the boundary between “at work”, “on the way home from work” and “not at work” has become blurred to such an extent that for many “always-on” people, there is no difference. Bleisure time!

We check work emails at home, we check our Facebook and eBay accounts at work, our customers and colleagues expect to reach us on our days off and it’s all because of our “always-on” culture and the technology that is driving it.