You Need That Day Off More Than You Think
Stop feeling guilty for needing a break.
(Author’s note: This story was written specifically for an audience that tends to overwork itself. Ergo — most of Medium. If that doesn’t sound like you…try to find few guides on how to be productive. Like mine!)
I was depressed in 2015.
It wasn’t quite an existential depression, or a crisis of self (that was 2014), but rather a crisis of vocation.
I remember staring at the number of zeros behind my then-current levels of student loan debt, thinking to myself, “I could’ve bought a Lexus with that money.”
That realization only amplified my demographically-appropriate levels of angst and anxiety and began to give me more and more anxiety. To top it all off, I had just transferred colleges and dropped my religion.
It wasn’t exactly a time of great comfort or solace.
I remained in a funk for months. I was a writer without a cause — a self-professed creative without an income. I felt lost.
I spent a great time of time pontificating about how broken “the system” was and binging television at a rate that shocked my roommates into staging an intervention for me.
I was distracting myself. And I only stopped soon after I had discovered a little musical by a certain founding father, and found inspiration in a strange and misguided place.
There’s little to say on the subject of Lin-Manuel Miranda — or his musicals, or his tenacity, or anything else — that hasn’t already been said. So I’ll spare my praises while acknowledging the brilliance of Hamilton.
If you’ve never seen (or like most of us, listened) to Hamilton, somewhere towards the middle of story, we bear witness to a crisis of self.
Alexander Hamilton faces an inevitable scandal that he’s sure would ruin his name and reputation. In a fit of self-reflection, he describes his achievements in life thus far to the audience.
In the bridge of the song, he cries out in self-aggrandizing fervor —
And when my prayers to God were met with indifference,
I picked up a pen — I wrote my own deliverance!
(Just a quick aside here— maybe shaming yourself, your wife, and your reputation in a strange act of political self-immolation isn’t exactly a great move, or worth idolizing. But I wasn’t concerned about specifics.)
I appropriated the hell out of those lyrics.
I was a recently-apostatized and very jaded twenty-something who had convinced himself that those lyrics were speaking to me like the divine word of my recently denounced deity of choice.
In two years:
- I switched majors from Film Production to Broadcasting and then later to Communications.
- I transferred colleges — again.
- I wrote a feature film, worked with a friend to make that feature film, and began writing the music for that feature film.
- I ghostwrote a book. And some articles. And essays for friends in college.
I even wrote 3 other feature films since then. As of now — they make great doorstops.
I had fetishized the idea of success.
I thought being a self-made man would make me happy. I thought that my prayers had been met with indifference, and that I would have to work and work harder and work ever harder than that until I achieved success.
Even if I didn’t know what success was at the time.
I did anything in my power to have an outwardly abnormal life. I didn’t know what success was — but I knew what failure looked like.
It looked like an office job. It looked like a wife and two-point-five children, owning a house in the suburbs, and dying of a heart attack at 68. It looked like everyone else.
I wanted to be different.
I had to be different.
I switched to an online degree to save time commuting. I stopped talking to many friends.
I locked myself in a basement, and I pitched and I pitched and I pitched until I had enough money to quit my job. And then I did.
It took me two entire years before I realized that I wasn’t any happier.
That I had an obsession with success.
I had focused so much on bucking the norm and being self-made, I wasn’t enjoying life anymore.
So much time was sacrificed in the name of living later on — so much so, that I had forgotten to live in the first place.
I had resented so many others for doing the same things, and I resented the idea of meaningless work so much, I started producing it.
I thought self-employment was going to free me from a rat race, but all I was doing was running that race with extra steps.
I was seeing diminishing returns on my productivity, and had more more time left to throw at the problem.
Eventually, I figured out three things:
1. Success is meaningless without reward.
There is no reason to achieve anything without getting something out of it.
In our first 25 years of living in America —
- We go to school to get good grades (and because we have to).
- We go to college because we think six figures worth of financial burden will ultimately make us more money.
- We work nights and weekends and ignore our friends because we think we’ll gain something out of it.
Working towards success for personal fulfillment is dangerous. If you haven’t defined that personal fulfillment, or if you’ve convinced yourself that happiness won’t occur without a certain set of parameters, you’re practically begging for stress and heartache.
No one can finish a race when they don’t know where the finish line is.
2. The days off are just as important as the days on
I remember struggling last year to make ends meet. The harder I worked, the more difficult it seemed for me to gain any sort of success.
Eventually, I figured out that throwing lots of time at your problems isn’t exactly going to solve them. You have to use your time effectively.
I ended up picking four days of the week that I was going to use to become productive.
In my case, those days were Monday through Friday, but with Thursday off…for some reason.
(I still don’t know why I did that.)
I used the remaining three days to go work on hobbies and go out with friends, but most importantly — to not think about work.
My productivity shot through the roof. I went from broke to literally making more money than I ever had. And the funny thing is I actually work less often than I used to.
It’s like working out — if you keep going without downtime, you’ll hurt yourself. It’s the same with any sort of creative endeavor.
(Or at least, creative endeavors attempted while sober.)
3. Plan to do nothing — don’t just let it happen
Balance is key — and it seems that most people on Medium struggle with overworking themselves. It should go without saying that underworking yourself is not going to get anything done, either.
That’s why you need to plan your laziness. Set up your schedule in a way that allows you to actually unplug during downtime.
No checking emails.
No brainstorming sessions.
Nothing.
It’s harder than you think.
Try to compartmentalize yourself. Splitting the difference between work and play makes both half as efficient. Focus at work so that you can focus on relaxing. And vice versa. You need both to function, and function well.
Stop feeling ashamed that you need a break. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to work X number of hours to be happy. You may need X number of hours to get the work done this week , or make X amount of dollars— but your happiness is a whole other story.
If you haven’t relaxed — and I mean completely relaxed — in longer than you can remember, you might need to consider taking a day off.
You may need it more than you think.
