From Bertie Forbes, “Recreation,” in Keys to Success: Personal Efficiency (New York: B. C. Forbes, 1918) 222-230.

If you want to accomplish the largest amount of work of which you are capable, you simply must maintain the balance of your mental, nervous, and physical powers. That we call “taking recreation.” Every man needs a different program from every other….

Every one needs fresh air, the slight and nervous quite as much as the muscular person. Next, how do you get nervous relaxation? Is your work physical so that you need mental relief? Or is it mental, so that you need physical and social? Are you getting enough social relief? Or are you getting too much? Too much and too little are equally bad.
If you need social relief and do not have congenial friends, what shall you do? Go to the theatre. Go to church. Join a club. Anybody can join an improvement club, to work for others, and in working for others you will certainly get just the social relief you need and you will be astonished at how much you will enjoy the work.

If you need mental relief, join a study club or a study class, or take a correspondence course.

If you see people too much, shut yourself up quietly three evenings every week and read a good book. Or would spending the time teaching and entertaining your children, or younger brothers and sisters two or three evenings a week give you the relief you need?

Write down each one of these heads, and opposite it write a single sentence summarizing your situation and needs in regard to it. Life is a complicated thing, and you can’t possibly tell where you stand unless you set down every point and decide on that point by itself where you stand, and then later balance up all of the different points as a separate, final mental operation.

Enjoyment comes in the highest degree not from going out to seek “fun” and trying to chop it out of life with an axe, so to speak, but in calmly studying your mental and nervous and physical nature and deciding what parts are underfed, what parts overfed, so that you can deliberately find employment for the neglected parts.

Doing those things will give you more real pleasure than you ever had before in your life, whether people ordinarily would call what you do recreation or work. Digging a ditch is the finest kind of recreation for one man, and studying Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles” for another. The theatre, church, the club, and sport of course suit the big majority.

Just what, now, should your personal program be? Write it out.