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…
