Hi, Cal. This is Sonali. I am a huge fan of your work and have listened to your podcasts and have all your books. My question today is about inertia. So I find that during the work week, I am busy and engaged with work and have a hard time, you know, sort of separating myself and getting into weekend mode.

During the weekend, I run around doing fun stuff, housework, recreational activities, and similarly have a really hard time getting myself back into work mode. What do you do about inertia and what is a good way to, you know, make that step change from work to leisure and leisure back to work?

Thanks for all that you do, and I look forward to hearing your response. Well, this is a good question. I've thought about this because I've had similar issues with it's hard to relax or it's hard to go back to work. I get this. I actually think there's a lot of useful wisdom to be extracted from the Jewish tradition.

And I do feel bad that we're sort of bastardizing here something that has a rich theological history to apply to issues of productivity, but that caveat in place. If you look at the Shabbat Havdalah tradition in the Jewish tradition, what you have here is a ceremony that kicks off the beginning of the weekend, that kicks off the Jewish Shabbat, which is Saturday, but it is a rituals that begin in preparation for the sundown Friday.

So sundown Friday, sundown Saturday, that's Shabbat, and during the period of Shabbat there's no work you're supposed to do, there's various restrictions that depend on exactly what type of Jewish tradition you follow, but it's different, it's a day of rest. But there's ritual that is done in the lead-up to Shabbat starting.

You clean the house, there's candles that you light, there's prayers that you say. There is wisdom in that wisdom tradition, right? This is a...we're going to go through certain motions to accomplish exactly this goal of changing our mindset away from the prosaic and towards the theological, away from the everyday and towards the heavens.

The same carefully designed rituals executed the same time each week go a long way towards shifting your mindset. So you can imagine having something similar. Friday night, we do this preparation for sundown, this is where I'm going to shift into weekend mode, something you do every Friday, whatever the equivalent is you want to create for lighting those candles and saying those prayers and cleaning the house, I think could be very effective.

Jewish tradition then has the Havdalah ceremony after the sun goes down on Saturday for ending Shabbat, and it involves candles and other sorts of things. Well, from a productivity perspective, you should have a similar ritual for the ending of the weekend, and maybe this makes more sense on Sunday, right?

But I'm going to go through some sort of ritual to say I'm leaving relaxation mode, and probably what could happen during this ritual is weekly planning. This seems like a natural way to end the weekend mode. You're saying I'm now going to not just jump into I'm on email and I'm trying to work, I'm going to jump into looking at my quarterly plan and looking at building my weekly plan off of that, trying to get a sense of what's coming on this week, what's going to happen, what's on my plate.

It's actually like a fantastic transition back into the world of productive efforts. Now some people do this Sunday night, some people do this Monday morning. I like to do it Monday morning so that I can leave my footprint of the weekend bigger, but it does eat up time on Monday morning, so however you want to do it.

But you put those two ideas together, and I think we have a pretty nice ritual here for transitioning in and out of relaxation. So to summarize, have something you do on Friday at the end of the workday, something ceremonial, something physical, we clean the house, we have a glass of wine, we go out and have dinner at the same restaurant, I go to the same dive bar where the regulars are, whatever it is that you do to ritualistically switch into weekend mode.

By the way, do a really clean shutdown before you start that. Don't leave open loops. Make sure your mind is completely happy. There's not an email we missed. That's critical. There's not work that needs to be done this weekend that I forgot about that you can close those open loops, do the ritual.

Then in that weekend, using the weekly plan alternative, our sort of bastardized, secularized Havdalah, I'm going to sit down and build my weekly plan. It's going to take me about 30 minutes to an hour. And that's going to put me back into work mode. I'm not just jumping into it cold turkey.

Alright, so that's my suggestion. We all should be a little bit more Jewish when it comes to how we manage our weekends.