Feb 8, 2021
Every once in a while I regret how unproductive I have been for the day. It gives me a sense of guilt as well. In a similar manner I have days that I took off to rest and recharge myself but at the end of the day I just don’t feel recharged at all. I don’t feel good on these days but I wouldn’t say I feel guilt after these days. Recently I realized that the second type of day is as harmful as the first one.
The point I am trying to make is not that we should feel the same guilt on the second type of day. If we want to talk about guilt that would be a whole other essay but the short answer is that we should feel similar after both days and since most driven people seem to feel guilt after the first type, they should as well on the second type.
So what does the second type of day look like? For me when I stay inside my room all day watching Youtube videos I feel like I don’t feel recharged at all. Going to an art exhibition or meeting some friends for a nice chat would have me much better recharged. For other people it could look different and maybe even vice versa but I am confident most people have different degrees of recharging depending on what they do on their rest day.
A good comparison would be athletes. Athletes go through a series of recovery and therapy sessions when they are off the pitch. These sessions help them recharge and perform better on the pitch. They need to make good decisions of what to do with their muscles both on and off the pitch. For many of us who use brains when doing productive work the same logic applies. We should make good choices of what to do with our brain when we are not on our desks.
The difference is that athletes are spending time to recharge the most efficiently on purpose, many of us do not take days off to become more productive. We take days off to have fun. The blissful irony is that the amount we recharge is correlated with how much fun we have. So imagine a graph where the x-axis is fun and y-axis is productivity. I think most people can move to a further upper right point: more fun and more productive. If people don’t want to have more fun on days off they would not be spending money and time to travel instead of going through a series of Netflix series at home. And once we reach Pareto efficiency we will have to make the choice of choosing between fun and productivity. Most people including myself still have room to reach that curve.
The next question becomes how do we reach this Pareto efficiency? To find this out I recorded how I spent my time off, my daily happiness score, and my daily efficiency score for 50 days. Then I ran some code scripts. Since I am currently in the army during Covid-19 times, the ways I can spend my time off is very limited but I still found I really enjoyed and was recharged when I read and called friends back home. I didn’t have to spend much time calling above a certain point. I consider it like a vitamin. I don’t have to do a ton of it but missing the threshold really hits me. Some people can figure out without recording but I think this technique will help many.
Writing about this I am almost shocked that something to help people figure out how to better spend time off does not exist yet. (Or maybe I am just unaware of it.) I would definitely pay for such a service and I am sure many people would. It means more fun and more productivity!
To recap I am not trying to say you should consciously spend your time off to boost your productivity. That would lead to more stress and actually bring down your productivity which is opposite of what I am trying to say. The lucky fact that more fun helps people recharge more productivity means we can raise productivity by having more fun. So if the idea of giving thought of how to spend time off distress you see it as putting in some effort to have more fun. And who doesn’t like more fun.