Ariana Huffington liked this book more than I did. She makes some good points, but she doesn't address the fact that Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less can make you feel like you need to go lie down. Then, she is a household name throughout the world. For those of us who don't yet have a Wikipedia entry at all, the idea that we should get a good night's sleep and take a walk and go down the Shore for a week, not because we like to, but because Einstein did, can be a bit, I don't know, exhausting.
However, it was gratifying to see how many of the chill habits of highly effective people I already practice. Long walks? Check. Weekly day off? Check. Stop while you're still ahead? Almost always. Actually, let's talk about that one a minute. The idea is that you start a project because it's your job; at some point you find the flow; and at some later point it's on the schedule to move on to something else. It's tempting to want to keep pushing until you "come to a good stopping point," but I learned when I was a calligrapher that it's better to stop in the middle of a word than at the end of a paragraph. When you come back, you'll be more able to re-enter the rhythm you had developed and will get a more consistent result. In the same way, whether I'm making a list or working on an art project, if I have to stop, I try to do so before I hate the whole thing.
The practice I was most interested in was Recovery. That's when you just go off grid for an evening or a day or a weekend and engage in relaxation, exercise more control over your environment than you normally might, and choose "mastery experiences" (recreational activities that are challenging but that you do well), all so that you can mentally detach from work altogether.
This is a practice I have been engaged in for years: it's the principle of the Sabbath Rest. "On six days shall you labor and do all your work, and on the seventh shall you rest." Scholars turned the Sabbath into its own sort of work, debating exactly how much you could carry, how far you could walk, and what kinds of emergencies you could respond to on this beautiful day, but it can also be practiced more simply. The goal is to take a day completely off from whatever you construe as work and choose activities that will facilitate physical, mental, emotional and spiritual restoration.
For me, a perfect Sabbath rest may include an extended period of Bible study, time to work on an art project, reading a novel, and/or some time outside. It will not include a lot of conversation, heavy physical work, political angst or, of course, directly work-related activities like test prep or researching lesson plans. But I will often find that towards the beginning of this recovery period, in odd moments, ideas related to work will come bubbling up from my subconscious. It's worthwhile to quickly scribble these in my calendar. Not all of them hold up under the cold light of Monday morning, but some of them are pretty worthwhile, and I couldn't have seen any of them while I was in the thick of the moment-by-moment struggle.
It turns out, according to this book, that all these habits of doing things that don't look like work are actually productivity tools. Stuffing the day, week, month and year full of scheduled activity doesn't get the same results, in quantity or quality, as leaving margin. Margin enables us to mentally and physically putter around completing small tasks and solving intractable problems while maintaining energy reserves for our periods of deep concentration. Even naps and sleep give us the mental margin to be more accurate or effective when we come online again. So, although I don't particularly recommend the book, I do recommend the concept: Rest.
