Prioritize rest

If your work matters.

But before we get to the main course …

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And … do you have a working life-related puzzle or situation that you’d like me to write about in one of these emails (and give other readers the opportunity to comment on, too)? A practical or psychological thing you struggle with and haven’t been able to resolve? Part of a team that’s not thriving? An unhappy marriage between your work and the rest of your life? Something else? Reply to this email and tell me about it.

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Prioritize rest.

In an earlier email, Get more done, and do better work, by working less hard, we looked at research showing the benefits of working fewer hours a day, and fewer days a week, than the norm. Most of us will accomplish more—not just more in a given amount of time but more overall—, and do it better, if we take it a little easier.

But why do we consistently achieve more by working less? Part of the answer is that the world has changed in the last couple of centuries or so: in contrast to how people were working before the Industrial Revolution,¹ contemporary economics and labor markets conspire with human psychology to have us working sub-optimally and getting inadequate rest.

But an important part of the answer lies in why rest matters. What we think of as rest is, for our brains, anything but inactivity. Pause for a moment and it’s obvious that our minds aren’t idle when we stop doing things. Unfettered, our minds wander, ruminate, turn to problems for which we haven’t had time when busy. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of brains—scans that show which parts are most active—confirm this: left to think undisturbed, some parts of our brains quieten down but others, in particular something called the default network or default mode network, get going.

The default network is just that, a brain system that becomes more active when you’re chewing the cud. There’s no idling. We have, as in much of neuropsychology, only a sketchy answer to the question What is the default network for? But it’s clear that its work is vital, necessary for memory, for thinking about the future, for imagination—for some of the prerequisites for the meaningful things we do in our waking hours, including work. The default network seems to be important to intelligence, the performance of complex tasks, memory, social and emotional functioning, mental health, and more. And this is while you’re letting your mind wander, or daydreaming. We need mind-wandering time.

(Another reason, if you needed one, why disappearing into social media, when you have a few minutes of downtime, makes your day worse, not better.)

How often do you think: I’ll do just a bit more, stay up a bit later to finish this chore, give up those couple of hours when I was going to drink coffee and read the Saturday newspaper, try to do this at the same time as that—because it’ll help me get more done? Caught in the maelstrom of work and other responsibilities, it can be hard to appreciate how much of a problem is our failure to take rest seriously. Struggling to focus on things you need to get done? Feeling overwhelmed? Perhaps you’re not, first, focusing enough on rest. Relaxation is no indulgence. It’s a prerequisite for productive work. Rest more, accomplish more. And it’s lovely.

And it matters most when we feel we haven’t got time to rest. There is almost always time: the common explanation for feeling that there isn’t is the loss of perspective caused by rest-deficiency.

If you’re not getting much rest at the moment, if you feel pulled in several directions at once, if you’re exhausted, imagine your mental clarity, energy, and effectiveness if, day after day, you were better rested. Consider how the quality of your work would improve and how much better it would feel, how it would affect the time you spend with those you care about, what it would do to your ability to have fun, how it would improve your sleep.

So:

a)    When you have time off, the first priority is usually rest.

If you don’t get through all of that list you wanted to, you haven’t failed. What is serious is not getting the regular, high-quality rest we all need.

Build a lot of rest into your weekly schedule.

b)    Resist the need to tackle your list of things to do. Rest first.

In your time outside of work you need rest, leisure, time for life’s responsibilities, and sleep. The instinct of many who are attracted to work that matters is, as soon as we’re done, to tackle life’s responsibilities first, to get those out of the way. But they will never be done. There are always more. And they’re always going to take longer than you think they’ll take. Rest isn’t a luxury. You’ll do everything else more efficiently, and better, if you’re rested. Rest first.

c)    Schedule relaxation—and how you’re going to relax.

Otherwise you won’t get your relaxation, or you’ll fritter it away. Two hours on the sofa listening to podcasts or reading a magazine may be the most important thing (other than sleep) you do this weekend.

d)    Don’t conflate rest and leisure. You need both.

Rest means that you’re resting. You’re not doing other things. The criterion is: does a spell of it leave you feeling rested?

e)    Take seriously the feeling that you really don’t want to do something.

The laundry. The tax return. The shopping. If you really don’t want to do it, if you feel more tired when you think about it, perhaps you should pay attention to that feeling. Perhaps you do in fact need more rest than you’ve given yourself. Of course, those chores may be important. But perhaps they’re not as important, right now, as having an hour or two’s rest.

f)      Review, regularly, how well you’re resting.

Stop every so often, and look at whether you have struck the right balance between rest and everything else. Do you need to cut your commitments and make more time for rest? Do you need to take some time off to rest, so you can regain enough perspective to be able to answer that question accurately?

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Further reading:

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (London: Penguin Life, 2017).

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Next week: meetings.

1. See Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Toronto, Ontario: Allen Lane, 2021), 17 – 26; see also Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015), 51 – 52; Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Millennials became the Burnout Generation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020); Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to our Jobs Keeps us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021); Celeste Headlee, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving (New York: Harmony Books, 2020).