Sorry, this isn’t going to settle the REST vs. GraphQL debate. I’m talking about a different kind of “rest.” This article will be more general and contemplative than technical.
The alternative to rest is burnout, and you’ll learn this one way or another. Both are forms of “downtime”. Being good at rest is about being intentional about the downtime you get and on what terms it happens. You might say: get rest, or it will get you.
We can easily sabotage our rest with thoughts like, “I can’t” or “I won’t be able to.” But if you want to and need to, you probably can. There is wisdom in recognizing that rest looks different for different people in different phases of life. For a new parent, evenings might not be restful at all, while a retiree might find their days counterintuitively filling up faster than they ever anticipated. It’s about knowing ourselves, and if you’re building a team culture, it’s important to know others, too.
Have you ever hugely crashed and still not felt rested? Perhaps our mental model for rest should be less about “putting it in park” and more about “shifting gears.” Both are necessary, but we might feel more satisfyingly rested if we incorporate more pivot and less “crash.” Some theologians have observed how religious rest is more of “a transition into a different type of work” than an “absolute cessation of labor.” This can be a helpful way to think about it. Sometimes we need to do nothing but sit on a couch, but often that doesn’t leave us feeling truly rested. We need to do something different, something that’s low-intensity and exercises figurative “muscles” we don’t use in our day-to-day jobs. Many people find a few hours buried in a hobby to be an excellent form of rest.
It can be a little humorous to think about this from a detached, remote perspective. Imagine an anthropologist from another planet observing an office worker who says they need rest and then proceeds to take their young children on a week-long camping trip. The intensity! Or someone taking a fishing trip with friends. Is that really “rest”? They are doing so much work to catch fish which they will need to clean and fry! An observer might conclude that they aren’t getting rest, per se, but rather an alternate ritual. Or maybe our definition of rest is just a bit too one-dimensional at times?
In a modern work environment, so much of this boils down to logistics and information management: learning the right levers to control the flow of notifications, routing information, and setting up processes to keep you from being sucked in. It’s all about structuring things to make it easier to escape. Do not underestimate what it takes to shift your mind from the things that have been consuming your working days!
Here, the perfect might very well be the enemy of the “good enough”. If we always wait for a big block of rest, we may end up with very little rest.
Getting enough rest will mean balancing incremental rest (small breaks throughout the day) with block rest (consecutive days of disconnect). Both are important. A five-minute break can help you unblock a debugging problem at work, but most of us need a few consecutive days, or even a week, to truly recharge and thrive.
Let me also add that when you are feeling burnt out but need to remain focused on a project you can get some measure of rest by finding a “productive pivot”, a different way to lean into your objectives which provides enough variety to be refreshing.
One way to accomplish this is to “adjust the dial” between following a script and improvising. Doing something very mechanical over a long period can be exhausting, but on the flip side tasks relying on a lot of improvisation can also lead to burnout. Here’s a great opportunity to “turn the dial” and adjust the balance between the two poles, providing a refreshment which approximates some rest. Perhaps you need a little more (or less) improvisation.
So much of our life’s work is spent building, fixing, and finding things. When it comes to rest, I think there’s something to be said for simply getting lost. Lost in the woods. Lost in a good book. Lost in a game of catch. Lost in an open-ended conversation with a loved one. Some of my most restful moments have been exactly like that and these have been a really good category of recharge activities for me.
What makes you feel rested?