Member-only story
Rules for Resters
Building downtime into your work and lifestyle improves your creativity, relationships, productivity, and health. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Are you crushing it? Do you work on the weekends? Do you live and breathe hustle? Does raw productivity seep from your pores? Are you proud of your regime where you take a weekend morning away from your family and smash your emails? Will you sleep when you’re dead?
Why?
Performative productivity is a particularly pernicious strain of counterproductive machismo whose main purpose is to demonstrate that you’re at work, rather than to actually get anything done. It’s much more about who’s watching than what you’re working on; we’ve accidentally built a culture that values hollow demonstrations of effort more than actually being productive. It’s an easy metric for short-sighted managers: even if nobody’s officially measuring who’s spending long hours at the office, it’s definitely noticed. And nobody ever got a promotion for slacking off, right?
That’s a myth. It turns out that people who do take time off are more likely to get a raise (although whether this is correlation or causation is not completely clear). But because we generally assume that people who take downtime are not as productive, anyone not at the top of their professional hierarchy is trapped into this perverse work theater. It destroys our relationships, it destroys our health, and — ironically, but not surprisingly — it stifles our creativity and performance at work. As Harvard Business Review pointed out:
One experiment conducted at BCG, for example, found that forcing employees to take days, nights, or extended periods of time off actually increased productivity. And other studies show that brief periods of downtime, like afternoon naps, can restore focus and energy.
There’s a whole piece to be written on how psychotic work environments have to be for employees to be forced to take a night off — but I’ll abstain for now. Still, contrast this attitude with France, where a law went into effect last year that protects employee time by outlawing bosses from emailing them after hours.
