Work / rest cycle

Charlie Hoehn has been making the guest-blogging rounds to promote his new book on avoiding workaholic burnout.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made has been ignoring the necessity of a fixed work/recovery cycle implicit in the Biblical Sabbath and Jesus’ words, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Without a fixed work/recovery cycle, work became a game of constantly pressuring and pushing myself into the endless critical todo pile, with no end in sight, no break, no breather. Then when my well-being and energy tanks ran low, crashes, slumps, drifting off into low productivity. More negative emotion associated with poor performance. Finally a crash where I’m forced to rest, and then restart the cycle.

I decided to put a stop to this, and Googled for an hour or two last night on the Sabbath and related holiday time cycles, including the year of Jubilee cycle.

I decided my personal Sabbath would run from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.

This time works much better, and is vastly more relaxing, than the Sunday sabbaths I observed as a child. Those were stressful and completely sucked. After the Friday night and Saturday late night partying, you had to wake up early, attend boring ass pointless stupid fail church, not fall asleep, go home and do nothing fun all day. Leaving mostly an impression of Circadian pain, excess sunlight exposure, and a sympathy for a beached, drying fish.

A Sabbath from Friday sundown hits the cessation of the typical workweek schedule perfectly, right when my weekly reserves are tapped. I’m ready to chill, or perhaps party. The Sabbath lasts through sundown Saturday, by which time my reserves have generally refilled to the point where I again naturally wish to undertake purposeful activity. And generally some preparation is needed before the start of the workweek – it’s most efficient to do this work on Sunday.

During my Sabbath, I can chill, slack, socialize, etc, guilt free. I exit the phone checklist / cyborganize mode of execution for something directionless.

I don’t try to legalistically define work. The difference in mode is the primary thing – the experience of restfulness. E.g., some kinds of play can be hard work, such as travel. Other forms of pseudo work are quite restful, such as reading. The point is that I’m perfectly free to lay on my couch amusing myself however, and no external checklist or calendar will gainsay the urge – only my internal whim.

Of course, should one stay in, one is at risk of developing depression from emotional isolation. Conversation with friends and girls, from text to phone to in person, helps. Failing that, put the TV on the music video channel in the background on mute, maybe play your inspirational video loop on your computer in the background, maybe play your Pandora station, maybe watch your favorite emotional drama TV series. The more you can simulate emotional contact, particularly by seeing human faces, the more you can prevent a purely biological isolation depression crash.

I now recognize that rest and recovery are actual equally valid and important phases of work. R-mode integration, slack time, innovation, strategic reorientations, big picture, improvement – all of these depend on the rest/recover phase. God’s way was right. (Although the Churchian Sabbath I grew up with still completely sucked.)

It’s bizarre, really. In agricultural Israel, a day of not working your ass off on the ranch/farm would’ve been a real holiday treat. Now in America, Sabbath is a day when we forego modern ease and RETURN to rural discipline. WTF?

Below is my spreadsheet output with my Sabbath rest plan, from pomodoro breaks through Jubilee year.

I use Impetus interval timer (free on Android) to create a nested set of timers for one Watch cycle (at the end of which I take a nap. There are 3-4 watches in a waking day.

My koans are designed to prevent my well-being and motivation tanks from becoming drained by hard work and stress, but koans alone are not enough. There must be a clear rest point in sight. That is part of having confidence and hope in life.

I would recommend that anyone with deep eye sockets schedule their rest, to avoid info addict burnout. Those with shallow eye sockets may need to schedule their work, instead!

One last thing. I tried to puzzle out how “leave the ground fallow” might apply to modern times. Closest thing I could come up with was the salary, hourly wage, commission, project fee, etc. What if you just declined to accept money for a year (besides investment returns?) That would mimic the principle of living off the increase of the previous six years. It would also fit the stoic principle, promoted by Tim Ferriss, of regularly practicing poverty to combat fear.

With all activities paying the same, it would free you from the dictates of the market, and be a good time to explore new passions and potentially profitable directions. The Sabbatical year, the mini retirement, etc.

The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men. A sabbatical year forces you to make yourself redundant in your long term business projects, and this is for the best.

Not that you stop working – I could never stop working for a year, in the sense of cyborganize, checklists, purpose, achievement, direction. You just stop making earnings a factor in your decisionmaking, by returning or donating any money that might influence you in that direction.

This is an experiment. It may not work. But at least at the weekly level, I’ve been building towards it for a long time, and have a lot of experience saying it’s necessary. I will try it and see how it works.