Every year, new productivity hacks promise to save us from burnout, inefficiency, and disconnection at work. We reorganize calendars, color-code to-do lists, and install apps that track keystrokes and hours. And yet, despite all the hacks, employees are exhausted, disengaged, and creatively stuck.
What if the problem isnt that we need more productivity toolsbut that we need more play?
Thats not a metaphor. I mean literal play. The kind that is open-ended, imaginative, and unconcerned with outcomes. In my decades as a play designer and educator, Ive watched executives, engineers, and designers from companies like Google, Nike, and Lego light up when they are given permission to play again. Not because they suddenly learned to be creativebut because they remembered they already are.
Play as Permission, Not Performance
Play is not the opposite of work; it is the antidote to burnout. Free playspontaneous, nonhierarchical, and outcome-freerequires us to embrace possibility, release judgment, and reframe success. Those three elements are exactly what todays teams are missing.
When I lead workshops, I dont hand out another strategy framework or ask people to brainstorm. I hand them Rigamajig planks or a pile of cardboard and say, Create something. Thats it. No rules, no rubric. At first, people fidget, waiting for the point. Then they loosen up. They laugh. They collaborate without titles or hierarchy. They invent.
What Ive really given them is not a toy but permissionto stop performing professionalism, and to start playing again.
I think of myself as a play coach. Like a sports coach, I help people unlearn the stiffness of adulthood, the belief that play is frivolous, and retrain their instinct to experiment. The difference is that play is not about winning. Its about rediscovering curiosity.
Why Hacks Fail and Play Works
Productivity hacks focus on controlling the process and outcome: more efficient emails, tighter schedules, and measurable success. But outcomes arent the only reason we work, and controlling the process usually kills any joy in the work. Play demands the opposite of control: letting go.
Consider what happens in my sessions. At first, people compare credentials and second-guess every move. Then they start tinkering. Soon theyre laughing too hard to judge one another. Some even take off jackets and shoes. The shift is unmistakable: They move from performance to presence.
Play is also radically egalitarian. In a room where the CEO and an intern are both building oddball contraptions out of wood planks, hierarchy fades. Everyone is invited to contribute, not for efficiency, but for the diversity of talents that play reveals. That leveling effect fosters the kind of psychological safety that research shows is essential for innovation.
The Playful Mindset
From my research and practice, Ive found that adult teams thrive when they adopt what I call the Playful Mindset:
Embrace Possibility. Ask what if? and treat the workplace like an adventure playground.
Release Judgment. Let go of worrying about looking silly or wasting time. Play is a judgment-free zone where odd ideas arent embarrassing but essential.
Reframe Success. In play, success isnt about hitting a metricits about the experience itself. The fun is the point. And paradoxically, that freedom often produces the very innovations teams are chasing with their hacks.
Be Your Own Play Coach
The good news: You dont need an outside facilitator to begin. You can become your own play coach. Start small. Turn the next team meeting into a tinkering session with random office supplies. Walk the long way to lunch and make a game of it. Bring in an activity that has no deliverable attached.
Play doesnt ask you to stop workingit asks you to work differently. It invites teams to reconnect as humans, to experiment without fear, and to rediscover the joy that fuels real creativity.
If you want better collaboration, stronger resilience, and more authentic innovation, dont download another productivity app. Hireor becomea play coach. Because your team doesnt need another hack. They need to play.
I can’t think of anything better than assembling Lego blocks. Except assembling gigantic Lego that I can actually walk, jump, and nap on. Which is precisely what Lego and Nike did at Baoshan No. 2 Central Primary School in Shanghai.
The school has 1,400 students who previously had insufficient sport and play facilities. Nike, which is building 100 playgrounds in schools all around China, decided to partner with Lego to fix that (the two are already partners in a series of cross-branding Lego sets and sports gear). According to the companies, the design was deeply collaborative and student-drivenand it shows: Instead of the previous sad concrete playground there’s now a bright orange-and-yellow shock-absorbent bouncy surface. On it, drawn in white, a 2-by-3 brick outline marks play areas, serving as a blueprint for students to arrange giant blue or white Lego pieces of different shapes in obstacle courses and any other structure they can imagine.
The concept originated from students at Baoshan No. 2 who participated in a Lego China Build the Change workshop, where they used Lego bricks to design their ideal playground. Several student insights directly shaped the final architectural design, according to the company. “Children are our role models and creativity is their superpower,” a Lego spokesperson told me. “They have an endless imagination and can think outside the box.”
OLA Shanghai then translated the children’s miniature prototypes into a playground layout and full-scale modular structures, which are giant interlocking Lego pieces that could be easily assembled, reconfigured, and stored.
Legos golden 2-by-3 rule
The architects decided to build the playgrounds layout around the geometry of a standard 2-by-3 Lego brick, a plastic block with two lines of three studs, much like the Danish companys own Lego House. The 2-by-3 shape is painted on the ground, which serves as a blueprint for students to organize the Lego blocks that they can assemble for their own training and play circuits with bricks big enough to climb on. There are infinite configurations for the playground; the bricks can be stored when theyre not being used so the space can serve other purposes.
In practice, the whole thing works like a life-size Lego set that allows children to become the architects of their own space. The playground features more than 10 dynamic zonesfrom athletic activities to imaginative spacesdesigned specifically for China’s “10-minute breaks, the government-mandated rest periods between classes designed to promote athletic and social interaction. Nike says that within these breaks kids are invited to move freely, play boldly, and unleash their creativity. The zones include adaptable climbing structures, balancing and exploratory elements, interchangeable routes and obstacle zones, and seating.
Recycled sneakers
The playground is made from recycled sneakers; Nike used approximately 4 tons of Nike Grind to build it. This is a material made from manufacturing waste and consumers’ old shoes, all processed into rubber granules at a facility developed and managed by Nike’s technology partner Tongji University. The entire buffer coating layer, which is the safety surface kids land on when they fall, was paved exclusively with Nike Grind.
This playground is number 50 in Nike’s Sport Access for All initiative, which is committed to building 100 sustainable courts in Greater China by 2030 as part of the company’s Move to Zero sustainability program. Nike has been partnering with athletes, artists, and designers across China to create these spaces.
Previous collaborations included the “Bufferfly Court” in Yunan province with fashion designer Susan Fang, the “CR7 Court” in Gansu province with footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (where limited-edition football boots were auctioned to fund construction), and the “FIBA Pigalle Basketball Court” in Beijing with Parisian designer Stéphane Ashpool. Nike told me the company partnered with Lego “because both brands share a deep belief in the power of creative play and movement to unlock kids’ potential.”
The court at Baoshan No. 2 Central Primary School, Nike tells me, marks a “significant milestone” in combining youth sport, creative play, and sustainability in a single collaborative model. Lego says the company was “glad to join hands with Nike to support their Move to Zero initiative and help create an active play themed playground and bring the Lego play experience to more children,” which is marketdroid speak for We made a playground where kids can finally build something bigger than themselves.
The playground is something they can actually use. And it’s something that doesn’t require batteries, screens, or a subscription service. Just imagination, rubber granules from old shoes, and blocks big enough to prove that sometimes the big ideas come from the people small enough to dream them up.
A single stream of income is simply not cutting it for todays young professionals. Instead, income stacking is the new way young people are weathering an unstable job market and rising cost-of-living.
The annual Next Gen of Work survey from freelancer services company Fiverr polled over 12,000 respondents from both Gen Z and Gen Alpha across the U.S., the U.K., France, and Germany. It found that for almost half of Gen Z (46%), their biggest career fear is not making enough money to live comfortably.
Cue income stacking.
Gen Z is watching the single-paycheck model wobble, and instead of waiting for it to steady, theyre building safety nets of their own design, Michelle Baltrusitis, Fiverrs associate director of community and social impact, told Fast Company. Income stacking is their response to a volatile economya way to diversify risk and create stability on their own terms.
While its not unusual for young people to work multiple jobs through college and early in their career, Gen Zers are stacking jobs on top of jobs as a way to DIY their own careers. (One Gen Zer, Carissa Ferguson, says shes earned more than $144,0000 selling voiceovers, content creation, and copywriting on Fiverrs platform.) Of those surveyed, 67% said that multiple streams of income were essential for a sense of financial security.
Many are already striking out on their own, with 38% already freelancing or planning to startthe average age to start being just 19.
The rising cost of living is just one part of the picture. Gen Z also isnt buying into what they see as a broken social contract, where a linear path up the career ladder is seen as the most reliable route to success and financial stability. Its also a generation in which freelance employment has been modeled in the form of influencers, content creators and podcasters online.
As career paths grow less predictable, 56% of GenZ predict traditional employment will be rendered obsolete in the future. By forging their own paths, younger workers are no longer at the mercy of big companies that can lay them off at the drop of hat.
In fact, the desire to work for a household name corporation ranked as one of the lowest career ambitions for Gen Z, at just 14%. Early-career workers are not trusting anybody else to take care of their future.
For the first time, Gen Alpha was also included in Fiverrs survey, despite the oldest being just 14 years old.
Rather than lemonade stands, social media has made it easier than ever for the next generation of workers to start their own side hustles. Of the more than 4,500 13- to 15-year-olds polled, 31% said they wanted to freelance, with 30% crediting social media for introducing them to different career paths.
Their screentime is already paying off. A recent survey by social commerce platform Whop found Gen Alpha are pulling in an average of $13.92 per hour from their online side hustlesnearly double the U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25. Based on those hourly earnings, that equates to a $28,000 full-time annual salary, all before turning 16.
Hows that for pocket money?
