Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress

by John Fitch

What Is Time Off?

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We commonly think of rest as the opposite of work. We either rest, or we are productive.

If we want to accomplish the big things we’ve set out to do – to create, lead, contribute, and make an impact – we need a rest ethic as strong as our work ethic.

Finding Your Rest Ethic

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Think of your work ethic as the inhale (it is, in a way, as essential to your career as air is to your body). With a good work ethic, we make, execute, coordinate, manage, fulfill, and get things done. Task list – inhale. Project execution – inhale. Making our ideas come to life – inhale. But we can’t keep inhaling forever. Eventually we have to exhale. This exhale is your rest ethic, and it is just as essential.

A solid rest ethic gifts us inspiration, ideas, and recovery. It allows us to build up our enthusiasm and sustain our passion. Gaining a fresh perspective – exhale. Project ideation and “aha” moments – exhale. Letting big ideas incubate in your mind – exhale. And just as a deep exhale prepares you for a better inhale, your rest ethic enables you to have a better work ethic.

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A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck.

Time Off is Timeless and Universal

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They created quality work not in spite of taking time off, but because of it.

Time Off Throughout History – What Went Wrong?

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For most of history, people knew that in order to be fully present and focused when working, they had to balance busyness with high-quality rest and switch off from work mode.

Two hours at 50 percent doesn’t even get close to one hour near 100 percent in terms of productivity, and this is especially true if the task involves a creative component – which more and more tasks do; the days of repetitive factory work are all but numbered, as we will explore.

At the Beginning of Time

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And according to one of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle, leisure was not only essential, it was the highest ideal anyone could aspire to.

Aristotle

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“All of life can be divided into work and leisure, and war and peace; and of actions, some aim at what is necessary and useful, while others aim at what is noble.… Just as war is for the sake of peace, so work is for the sake of leisure and what is necessary and useful is for the sake of what is noble.”

Work is done for a purpose, a utilitarian goal. Leisure, on the other hand, is done purely for its own sake, in search of meaning rather than purpose.

Aristotle also did not consider rest as a form of leisure.

In Aristotle’s hierarchy, we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure. But leisure is defined entirely through itself. It stands at the top of the hierarchy.

without leisure, we become a society without big ideas.

True leisure, noble leisure, is not passivity or relaxation. It is an activity in which we can find our greatest fulfillment as humans. As the Noble Leisure Project blog puts it: “To be at leisure is to be free to pursue studies and activities aimed at the cultivation of virtue (such as music, poetry, and philosophy). These are properly the ends of noble leisure.” Think for a moment: What activities bring you the most fulfillment outside of work? Have you been ignoring them?

Practice: Learn to practice noble leisure Noble leisure is the ultimate goal, the shining beacon that we hope will guide you through the remainder of this book. If we can return to noble leisure, we have truly mastered the art of time off. But to master time off, we must first recognize its value. Then, we can move on to what Aristotle called “the principal point: with what kind of activity is man to occupy his leisure?” While Aristotle had an answer to this question, we think that today each of us has to find our own answer. We hope that the following chapters will help you define this principal point for yourself, and find your personal way back to noble leisure.

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Valuable Time, Necessary Work, Noble Leisure

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Knowledge needs space to breathe and time for contemplation. Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus described it as “listening to the essence of things.”

On a societal level, we have lost track of the main point – we have confused the roles of work and leisure, and started equating the latter with laziness and sloth.

Visible Time: Productivity is King

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This task-oriented notion of time is the most natural. Cows must be milked when they are ready, not when it’s “milk o’clock,” and the boats have to go out with the tides.

When time became a valuable currency that could be traded for money, leisure’s value declined.

Kairos & Chronos

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“Every kairos is a chronos, but not every chronos is a kairos.” – Hippocrates

While chronos involves the quantity of time an activity takes, kairos looks at the quality of that time.”

At some point, we have all complained that there never seems to be enough time. We’re trying to squeeze more hours into our days because we are afraid of running out of it. But when we were younger, we were not this way.

This woman believed that the reason people live so long on this particular island is that they live most of their lives thinking about Kairos time rather than Chronos time. She calmly elaborated that fixating on Chronos stresses us out because we can’t control the timing of everything. We get attached to it and then worry about something we can’t control. Worrying is a by-product of paying too much attention to Chronos. The people of Ikaria have lower levels of stress because they are intentional about not being slaves to clocks and watches.

Practice: Enjoy a No Chronos day Pick a day where you are going to intentionally not pay attention to your watches or clocks. Time off and time on are rhythmic decisions that we can make in our work and other activities. Think about how you will stay healthy in body and mind throughout the year by deliberately oscillating between intensity and renewal. As much as you operate by Chronos time, try to cultivate Kairos time as well. It is less about balance and more about being able to transition between them with a smooth rhythm.

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When Time became Sacred, Work became Noble, and Leisure became a Sin

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We might not really know its origin, but we all know this nagging feeling that we need to pretend to be busy, stressed, and overworked to deserve our pay, and that it can’t possibly be the enjoyable parts of our jobs that we are being paid for.

Busyness, stress, and overwork have become our modern form of divine self-sacrifice.

God, Your Boss, and Everyone Else Who Owns Your Time

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Rather than a sin against God, the newly emerging class of industrialists started to equate idleness with another moral vice: theft. They paid for their employees’ time, so they felt like they owned it.

Работодатель не владеет временем работника.

Instead of being rewarded or praised for doing your work quickly, if you’re paid hourly, you’re often punished with pointless busywork. Even if you finish your work, you better keep your butt in that chair, because your boss paid for it to be there.

Instead of noble leisure, Ford preached profitable leisure.

The morality of work had been so deeply established that we have all but forgotten how to use leisure, even if it’s there for the taking.

Bertrand Russell

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“The morality of work is the morality of slaves,”

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“and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

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Russell made a bold suggestion: working hours could and should be reduced to four hours per day. But he was quick to add, “I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity.” Instead, the extra time and energy should be reinvested into education and contributing to our culture.

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Practice: Save some energy for your time off Do you spend your leisure time in an active or passive way? If passive, is it because you are too tired and don’t have any energy left to make the most of your time? Reflect on how you can set aside time from work (even just 30 minutes) and reinvest this energy into your curiosity, creativity, and learning. Don’t try to wishfully fit it in. Plan it out like you would any work task.

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Visible Time 2.0:Busyness is King

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We worship busyness more than ever. We are stressed out, burned out, and busy – but not productive.

So instead we use “busyness as a proxy of productivity.”