The Weekend I Stopped Filling Was the Most Productive Week That Followed

I had treated weekends, for most of my working life, as an extension of the week with a different set of tasks. Saturday mornings were for exercise and admin. Saturday afternoons for social obligations and any work that had not been completed by Friday.

Sunday was divided between meal prep, personal development activities - a course, a book, something that was improving me - and the general maintenance of a life that did not maintain itself. I was proud of this in an abstract way. I was not wasting my time.

I was not one of those people who let weekends slip by in a blur of Netflix and inertia. I had, without quite realising it, scheduled rest out of my existence because rest that looked like nothing happening felt like falling behind. The experiment that changed this was not chosen - it was forced.

A summer weekend in Hamburg when I was 28 where every plan fell through simultaneously: the friends I was meeting cancelled, the course session was postponed, it rained too hard for the outdoor activity I had planned.

I was left with a Saturday and Sunday with nothing structured in them and no convenient way to fill them on short notice. I spent about four hours on Saturday morning in a state of low-level restlessness, checking my phone, making unnecessary cups of coffee, experiencing the particular discomfort of unstructured time in a way that told me something important about my relationship to stillness.

Then, sometime around noon, I went for a long walk without headphones, which I never did. I came back and cooked something slow and involved that I had been meaning to make for months. I called my father in a conversation with no agenda that went on for an hour and a half.

On Sunday I read a novel for most of the morning and then spent the afternoon in a way I cannot specifically remember, which is itself the point. On Monday morning I was noticeably different in a way that I noticed before I understood. I was less reactive in the first meeting.

I was able to think more slowly and more clearly. I had, without knowing I needed it, given my nervous system two days to do nothing of external consequence and it had used that time to do things internally that had nothing to do with productivity and that turned out to be exactly what productivity runs on.

I have protected at least one unscheduled weekend day per month since then. Not every week is possible. But the practice has changed what I understand rest to be - not the absence of productivity but one of its most important preconditions.