How Do You Handle Inertia from Work to Leisure?

00:00:00.000 | Hi, Cal. This is Sonali. I am a huge fan of your work and have listened to your podcasts

00:00:10.840 | and have all your books. My question today is about inertia. So I find that during the

00:00:17.940 | work week, I am busy and engaged with work and have a hard time, you know, sort of separating

00:00:27.340 | myself and getting into weekend mode. During the weekend, I run around doing fun stuff,

00:00:34.840 | housework, recreational activities, and similarly have a really hard time getting myself back

00:00:42.320 | into work mode. What do you do about inertia and what is a good way to, you know, make

00:00:51.040 | that step change from work to leisure and leisure back to work? Thanks for all that

00:00:57.960 | you do, and I look forward to hearing your response.

00:00:59.880 | Well, this is a good question. I've thought about this because I've had similar issues

00:01:07.340 | with it's hard to relax or it's hard to go back to work. I get this. I actually think

00:01:11.720 | there's a lot of useful wisdom to be extracted from the Jewish tradition. And I do feel bad

00:01:18.640 | that we're sort of bastardizing here something that has a rich theological history to apply

00:01:23.640 | to issues of productivity, but that caveat in place. If you look at the Shabbat Havdalah

00:01:32.120 | tradition in the Jewish tradition, what you have here is a ceremony that kicks off the

00:01:36.520 | beginning of the weekend, that kicks off the Jewish Shabbat, which is Saturday, but it

00:01:42.080 | is a rituals that begin in preparation for the sundown Friday. So sundown Friday, sundown

00:01:48.200 | Saturday, that's Shabbat, and during the period of Shabbat there's no work you're supposed

00:01:52.920 | to do, there's various restrictions that depend on exactly what type of Jewish tradition you

00:01:58.880 | follow, but it's different, it's a day of rest. But there's ritual that is done in the

00:02:04.360 | lead-up to Shabbat starting. You clean the house, there's candles that you light, there's

00:02:10.520 | prayers that you say. There is wisdom in that wisdom tradition, right? This is a...we're

00:02:16.080 | going to go through certain motions to accomplish exactly this goal of changing our mindset

00:02:21.520 | away from the prosaic and towards the theological, away from the everyday and towards the heavens.

00:02:27.480 | The same carefully designed rituals executed the same time each week go a long way towards

00:02:34.760 | shifting your mindset. So you can imagine having something similar. Friday night, we

00:02:41.160 | do this preparation for sundown, this is where I'm going to shift into weekend mode, something

00:02:46.120 | you do every Friday, whatever the equivalent is you want to create for lighting those candles

00:02:51.000 | and saying those prayers and cleaning the house, I think could be very effective. Jewish

00:02:55.640 | tradition then has the Havdalah ceremony after the sun goes down on Saturday for ending Shabbat,

00:03:00.840 | and it involves candles and other sorts of things. Well, from a productivity perspective,

00:03:04.980 | you should have a similar ritual for the ending of the weekend, and maybe this makes more

00:03:09.900 | sense on Sunday, right? But I'm going to go through some sort of ritual to say I'm leaving

00:03:14.740 | relaxation mode, and probably what could happen during this ritual is weekly planning. This

00:03:21.040 | seems like a natural way to end the weekend mode. You're saying I'm now going to not just

00:03:25.880 | jump into I'm on email and I'm trying to work, I'm going to jump into looking at my quarterly

00:03:30.520 | plan and looking at building my weekly plan off of that, trying to get a sense of what's

00:03:34.840 | coming on this week, what's going to happen, what's on my plate. It's actually like a fantastic

00:03:38.880 | transition back into the world of productive efforts. Now some people do this Sunday night,

00:03:44.520 | some people do this Monday morning. I like to do it Monday morning so that I can leave

00:03:48.880 | my footprint of the weekend bigger, but it does eat up time on Monday morning, so however

00:03:52.480 | you want to do it. But you put those two ideas together, and I think we have a pretty nice

00:03:57.840 | ritual here for transitioning in and out of relaxation. So to summarize, have something

00:04:02.940 | you do on Friday at the end of the workday, something ceremonial, something physical,

00:04:09.640 | we clean the house, we have a glass of wine, we go out and have dinner at the same restaurant,

00:04:14.120 | I go to the same dive bar where the regulars are, whatever it is that you do to ritualistically

00:04:20.000 | switch into weekend mode. By the way, do a really clean shutdown before you start that.

00:04:25.220 | Don't leave open loops. Make sure your mind is completely happy. There's not an email

00:04:28.600 | we missed. That's critical. There's not work that needs to be done this weekend that I

00:04:31.440 | forgot about that you can close those open loops, do the ritual. Then in that weekend,

00:04:36.640 | using the weekly plan alternative, our sort of bastardized, secularized Havdalah, I'm

00:04:42.040 | going to sit down and build my weekly plan. It's going to take me about 30 minutes to

00:04:45.560 | an hour. And that's going to put me back into work mode. I'm not just jumping into it cold

00:04:50.480 | turkey. Alright, so that's my suggestion. We all should be a little bit more Jewish

00:04:53.960 | when it comes to how we manage our weekends.

How Do You Handle Inertia from Work to Leisure?

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