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

by John Fitch

The ability to stay focused on a single task is very important to Sivers, and he is skeptical about connected technology: “I don’t use any apps on my phone, for this same reason. I don’t want to depend on apps for productivity. Actually, I tend to avoid my phone, in general. I just use it for calling friends, or for GPS. No email. No social media.

Collaborative Solitude

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Solitude does not have to be antisocial either; in fact, it can help us recalibrate our social senses and learn to be more empathetic. The solitude found in books is a great example of this.

Reflection

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Effective Action Requires Quiet Reflection

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Writing down your thoughts helps you get them out of your head and makes reflection less daunting.

Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics

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“How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.”

The first step on the way to facing obstacles is training ourselves not to be subjective and reactive, but to have a calm and imperturbable mind instead.

Taking the time to journal, like Aurelius did on a regular basis, is a powerful tool to practice this.

No one is born with an Inner Citadel. We have to build it through introspection, and constantly reinforce it by reflecting on what is within our control. It is a concept that can be learned. Cultivating your Inner Citadel for tranquility and time off is equivalent to having a good rest ethic.

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Seth Godin

In his piece, “Do Less,” Godin reminds us that “you can’t have everything. Same thingʼis true with our business life. We can’t have everything. We’ve tried, and it doesn’t work.

Marie Kondo

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Try to actively cultivate these rituals and use them as a strategic tool whenever you feel the need to clear your mind and reset.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

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However, in a modern (and potentially secular) context, we can interpret his words as looking at the root of what we truly love, trying to discover our true motivators and then attempting to satisfy those. Probably, in many cases, we are chasing false goals or drowning our dissatisfaction in busyness because it is easier than pausing and taking the time to reflect on what we truly love (whether that is a person or group of people, an activity or occupation, or even a place).

Play

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Many of us have forgotten how it felt to race, whooping and hollering, into play, but it’s not too late to rediscover its importance. On playgrounds, we encounter profound wisdom.

The Playground Mentality

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A playground is an environment for play – an essential context for imagination and exploration – and such an environment can exist anywhere.

Environmental enrichment + curiosity + enthusiasm

To make the most of our creativity, we need to unlock our sense of playfulness again. And at the heart of being playful is allowing ourselves to leave behind our everyday concerns, past and future, and get fully absorbed in the present moment.

Environmental enrichment + curiosity + enthusiasm + flow

Alan Watts

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We are increasingly living with our minds in the future, forgetting to be happy (or even notice) where we are now – we are so absorbed in what may lie ahead that we lose touch with what is real and right in front of us.

Watts knew that one of the best ways to be present in the moment, and leave our past and future worries behind, is to be playful.

What kind of light are we shining?

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Regularly exposing ourselves to new and unfamiliar ideas and trying to see the world from someone else’s perspective (maybe even someone we disagree with) are some of the best ways to temporarily flip into lantern mode.

Alice Waters

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We can learn two things from Alice Waters. One, granting time off in a time-sensitive industry helps foster more innovation and enthusiasm (as we also saw in the story of Fäviken). Two, taking time to cook and slowly enjoy a meal can help us return to our playfulness and humanity.

Embracing Silly Ideas

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Breaking your usual routine is one of the best ways to switch from spotlight to lantern mode, and to restore a sense of awe and wonder. Giving up your deeply ingrained habits and patterns is not easy in your usual environment, but it comes almost automatically if we change our surroundings.

Hermann Hesse

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“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”

JOMO, the joy of missing out. Many of us are perpetually afraid of missing out on the next big thing, be that a new development in our field of work or a cool party all our friends are going to. But Hesse believed that missing out on such things can actually improve our quality of life, as well as the quality of our work. There is no need to follow every news article, see every new movie, immediately read and reply to every message we receive, or be aware of every development in our chosen field. In fact, those activities that give us a quick fix of feeling productive or entertained are often precisely the things that distract us from real productivity and joy. Instead of fearing what we are missing out on, we should celebrate the pleasure of having gained a little more time and mental space and courageously defend this decision.

Anti FOMO (fear of missing out)

Occasionally restraining ourselves from enjoyment, taking time off from it, will make the times where we do indulge in it all the more joyful. Constant exposure to enjoyment (or anything really) just makes us dull to it. We forget how to be playful.

Travel

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Leisurely Travel

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If we slow down and look at our surroundings through the curious eyes of the traveler, which are not too different from those of a child engrossed in play, even our daily commute or a stroll through the backyard can become a form of exciting travel. And we might spot creative breakthroughs and brilliant ideas that were right in front of us the entire time, we were just too busy to notice.

Stefan Sagmeister

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“We spend about ... the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there is another 40 years that’s really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. That’s clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.”

Journeys of Learning and Self-Discovery

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“It’s all because of doing things by halves, saying things by halves, that the world is in the mess it is in today. Do things properly by God! One good knock for each nail and you’ll win through! God hates a halfdevil ten times more than an archdevil!”

Lupita Nyong’o

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“Finishing an intensive project is kind of like having a hangover, where you’re so used to a rigor of existence and then all of a sudden, there’s none. I make the time because otherwise, I wouldn’t survive.”

Technology

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Technology itself is not to blame. It is the way we use technology that’s messed up.

The key is to use technology in support of what we want to do, to choose the right technologies and stay mindful of which ones to use, and how, and which to avoid.

Your Mind on Technology

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Some argue that what makes us uniquely human is our ability to slip a pause into the perception-action cycle and let executive functions take the wheel.

Ingenuity and creativity never result from reactive behavior – they require us to pause and consider the bigger picture.