Hello! Seiiti Arata. Many people come to Arata Academy searching for ways to better manage
their time, increase focus, achieve goals, and expand upon other productivity-related topics.
But do you know which search is almost never done? It is the search for how to rest.
Resting strategically is as important for your productivity, creativity, and even
your health as mastering techniques or tools that allow you to produce more and better.
Resting also means knowing when to stop, being satisfied with the work you've already produced,
and enjoying other aspects of life. This has always been a difficult question for
anyone who likes to work and be productive, but it has become even more relevant now
that we are 100% connected at all times. If you feel pressured to keep producing something
all of the time, running after another goal, and overcoming your own limits, it's time for you to
learn how to stop and rest strategically. You can learn to feel satisfied when the time is right.
The world has evolved for people to work less. But we are all working harder and harder.
Allowing people to work less should be one of the main advantages of technology. For example, people
used to collect all of their dirty laundry, wash and hand rub them with harsh soap, hang them up,
and wait for them to dry. In my own life, I have lived in places where I had to wash clothes by
hand. This was a time-consuming process. Today, all you need to do is throw the clothes
in the washing machine, add soap powder, and press a button. It takes a couple of minutes,
and that's it. Depending on the model, the machine not only washes, but also
dries your clothes, so you already have them prepared to store in the closet.
With this simple example alone, technology has freed up many hours for us every month.
There are plenty of other examples, as well. Until recently, I used to
waste much of my time vacuuming the floor at home, but today a robot does it for me.
This frees up my time. Right? It depends on what I do with the time that is now available.
If I add new commitments, I can feel myself getting busier and busier all over again.
Advances in technology should be creating free time in our lives. But what do we do with that
free time? We clog every minute with work or superficial distractions...such as pointlessly
scrolling through social media feeds. It is not by chance that many people complain of
tiredness. We simply don't take the time to rest anymore. Try to remember the last
time that you stopped to do absolutely nothing. When was the last time that you took a moment
to contemplate the direction of your life? When was the last time you took a good rest,
without having your eyes glued to the screen of a cell phone, computer, or television?
If you are a person who enjoys productivity,
goals, and to-do lists, a good idea is to play the productivity game itself. This means
making a commitment to rest and putting rest as one of your tasks to be accomplished. Instead of a
waste of time, rest is something that will improve your quality of life, including your work.
Monitor your work time and avoid working more than your goal.
This pause can improve your quality of life. Consider how many hours you work per day.
Back in the day, someone decided that people should work eight hours. This was a random number,
based on the logic of spending a third of your day sleeping, a third working,
and a third doing other activities. But it was created primarily with workers from an
eighteenth-century, assembly-line factory in mind. Now, more than two hundred years later,
with every advance in technology, what have we done? We increased that number to nine, ten,
twelve hours…or every minute we can squeeze in for more and more distracted work.
For example, imagine that you have decided on working a total of eight hours per day,
from Monday to Friday. Okay. Monitor this time and focus on accomplishing all of your tasks
within that period. And then? Then rest.
Rest deeply. Put your cell phone aside. Go out with friends or family, play a sport,
cook, play, pursue your favorite hobby…anything other than work or superficial distractions.
If you feel like you're wasting time, or that other people are going to have more
of an edge because they work twelve hours a day, or that you're being unproductive…then
it's a sign that you're on the right track! Planned and strategic leisure makes you
more productive, creative, and healthy. In the past, most people did manual work.
They operated machinery, took care of plants and animals, were homeowners who fixed their
own things, and carried items from one place to another. Of course, many people still do this,
but with the help of technology. These people need good physical rest.
Nowadays people work more and more with their brains only.
Intellectual work needs planned and strategic downtime to give space for ideas to flourish.
Domenico de Masi has books [source: https://arata.se/source-kpdcr] that show
how important these rest periods are for everyone who works more with the mind than the body.
This acknowledgement of the value in simply resting is very important nowadays,
where business people live locked inside companies with fewer ideas and more
fear of the world outside the company. Total commitment to a job was useful when the work
was more mechanical. The less the worker had a life, the more they obeyed the machine and became
productive, turning into a machine themselves. But today, it is just the opposite. If your work
can be done by a machine, then it should be done by a machine. You must do creative work.
The more time someone spends in the office, squeezing work from
every minute, the less creative and productive overall that person
is and the fewer ideas they have. If we are increasingly mentally tired,
we need to compensate for this exhaustion somehow. And that compensation is precisely
idleness. Idleness does not mean standing still without thinking. Rather, it means doing other
activities to get your mind to process information and combine ideas in the background.
That is, your mind is somehow still working, but it is thinking freely,
relaxed, and without mandatory rules or harassment from the timer or the boss.
Those who find it difficult to rest can be trapped in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction.
If, despite all of this, you are still not convinced that you should work
less and rest more, beware. You may be stuck in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction.
The cycle of dissatisfaction is something that has been noticed by many people, from very old
religions to famous thinkers, like Freud. You've probably noticed this cycle yourself:
you want something, so you work hard to get it, but when you finally get it, you only get
temporary satisfaction. Soon you start wanting something else, and you will work for it until you
get it. But the cycle resets again soon after. This process can trap you in an eternal cycle
of dissatisfaction. If you're not careful, life passes by, and you waste all of your time chasing
the next desire, never stopping to rest and enjoy what you've already achieved.
Yes, it's true that if you work harder and harder with productivity and enjoyment for every minute,
you can reach your next goal. And so? What are you going to do next? Will
you really enjoy this achievement? Or will you move on to the next wish?
If you promise yourself that you will really enjoy the next achievement, why not stop now
and enjoy the achievements you already have? Why does the next one only matter? Why not
balance working toward the next goal with rest, enjoying the previous goal already achieved?
Rest is strategic. Don't confuse rest with laziness.
If you're on the other extreme, producing nothing, then we shouldn't even use the word
rest. Rest happens as a way to balance a life that is productive, where there is real work.
If you are someone who is running often, always busy, but never feels like you're
really producing anything, you can see our Arata Academy Summary about the book Deep
Work [https://arata.se/aratasummary15]. Basically, you must understand the value of dedicating
yourself to activities that actually make a difference. And work on them with full focus.
So remember that rest is strategic. There is risk at both extremes. On the one hand,
you don't want to fall victim to the endless cycle of dissatisfaction
and work non-stop. On the other hand, resting all day is not rest. It's called laziness.
The balance lies in you being able to do productive activities that you are proud of,
while also having the amount of rest that is necessary for a good life.
Rest is as important as work. One should not live without the other. From now on, you can
seek that balance and thus live a life that is both more productive and more relaxed.
Technology has created plenty of free time for us. But instead of enjoying that free time, we stack
more and more tasks into every minute. We always add more work, more goals, and more productivity.
We leave no time for quality rest. Resting strategically has the power to
increase your quality of life, bring about new ideas, and improve your performance. For that,
you need to learn to make a commitment to rest after your work hours goal has been met.
This is a better way to manage your time. But there are others. That's why I recorded a special
class from the Productivity Ninja course about time management. You can see this class open right
now by the link in the description or by visiting https://arata.se/timemanagement