It's not really about "productivity", it's about "wasted time". To be clear, I don't consider idle, leisure, even completely bored time to be "wasted". In fact, my favorite vacation is generally cruising because (1) they give you a menu of things to you can do that day, you pick, you don't have to think. (2) it's mostly pre-paid so budgeting is easy and (3) it's generally easy to find a cruise where it's expensive/impractical to have any internet service allowing me to completely disconnect.
Wasted time is "I have a handful of really low priority things that I'm never going to do so I'll look at Netflix and see what I haven't watched yet". For me, though, it's a bit more than that. Our budget allows us to live just fine, but with what amounts to very little work, I can literally take my family on a vacation about every two months.
Before eye-rolls abound, we travel extremely cheap -- I'm talking week vacations, family of 6, under a grand. And I decided a long time ago that my priority with my children would be to put my money toward memories rather than "crap". We've had gift-less Christmas's in favor of a (way over-budget) vacation[0] more than once and we'll probably only do it that way from here on out.
Given a choice between channel-surfing-Netflix, which I get plenty of (and I think a lot of us find ourselves in that spot) and driving around to places in my local city that I haven't been before (and it's surprising how many there are), I'll take the extra paycheck. Honestly, I'm nearly out of things to repair/improve in my home with my spare time. There's still a whole lot closed down up here.
[0] Partly because of that, we have a hard time when we aren't planning a post-Christmas trip. Our kids don't want much. I mean, they have basically everything in the palm of their hands from Apple and Gooble, as it is. :)
Wasted time is "I have a handful of really low priority things that I'm never going to do so I'll look at Netflix and see what I haven't watched yet". For me, though, it's a bit more than that. Our budget allows us to live just fine, but with what amounts to very little work, I can literally take my family on a vacation about every two months.
Before eye-rolls abound, we travel extremely cheap -- I'm talking week vacations, family of 6, under a grand. And I decided a long time ago that my priority with my children would be to put my money toward memories rather than "crap". We've had gift-less Christmas's in favor of a (way over-budget) vacation[0] more than once and we'll probably only do it that way from here on out.
Given a choice between channel-surfing-Netflix, which I get plenty of (and I think a lot of us find ourselves in that spot) and driving around to places in my local city that I haven't been before (and it's surprising how many there are), I'll take the extra paycheck. Honestly, I'm nearly out of things to repair/improve in my home with my spare time. There's still a whole lot closed down up here.
[0] Partly because of that, we have a hard time when we aren't planning a post-Christmas trip. Our kids don't want much. I mean, they have basically everything in the palm of their hands from Apple and Gooble, as it is. :)