Track rest, not just work

I think keeping track of how many hours I work is worth doing. It helps me stay calibrated on how productive my week has been, which in turn helps assuage any anxieties about whether I’m doing “enough”. It also helps with priority-setting — I can see whether I’m actually dedicating my time to the things that matter.

But tracking work is hard. At a team retreat recently, we were discussing whether our time at the retreat “counted” as work. On the one hand, we were at a work retreat — attendance was more or less mandatory, and we were discussing work topics — so, we were working. On the other hand, the retreat was fun. We spent a lot of the time socialising and playing games and not making any direct progress on work-related goals. It didn’t feel like work, but it also wasn’t leisure time/time off. If you track this as work, it might not shake the feeling that you’re behind on your core goals. But not counting it as work seems obviously wrong too.

Several other things make work hard to track. Speaking for myself, I tend not to work within strict hours (does replying to that one email in the evening count?), I’m often in semi-work mode (what about thinking about my day in the shower?) and I can have hours where I am at my desk, but distracted by personal tasks.

This can lead to me feeling like I’ve had an intense week, but my tracked work hours might not reflect this, perhaps because I failed to capture lots of this low-level or unfocused work I did. If I track work hours strictly (only counting focused hours) and take the low tracked work hours to indicate I’ve had a slow week, I might (falsely) think I don’t need as much rest, and should make sure I either make up some time, or work extra hours next week. This might lead to burnout, or poorer outputs.

Track rest

To balance this tendency, I try to track rest[1]. This is a useful input because, in my experience, it’s easier to know when I’m resting than when I’m working. Rest often looks like being free to do ~whatever I want[2] (that might involve writing, or exercising, so a pretty broad definition).

If you’re queueing for a flight to a conference, or at a team retreat, or even doing some necessary personal admin, you might not be working in the sense that you’re doing useful things, but you’re not not working. You’re not at ease, not free to do as you wish. You should probably try and minimise this grey area of work; those times where you’re neither producing useful things nor resting.

Once you have a better sense of what rest looks like for you[3], you can form a sense of how much of it you need, and then track that too (your rest baseline, if you will). I’m a fairly regular Joe when it comes to work-life balance — I know I need a few hours of rest each weeknight and at least one full day (usually two) to rest each weekend to keep working sustainably. Others might need a bit more than that, and some need a lot less. If you meet or exceed your rest baseline, you can probably work quite a lot in the remaining time, and often work with better focus.

Here’s a visual way of thinking about it:

With this input, we get a clearer answer on the retreat question. Perhaps that time meant we couldn’t work on our top-priority goals, and that’s worth being aware of on the work side, but it clearly wasn’t rest. After the retreat, we all still needed to rest before we could get back up to full speed.

To clarify, I don’t think tracking rest is a substitute for tracking work — it doesn’t help with priority-setting, and isn’t directly connected to any important terminal outputs (like impact, or profit). I think it’s a useful input, which can give you a slightly clearer sense of what it looks like to work sustainably.

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Footnotes

[1] Not closely, and not with any sort of timer, just thinking about how much I’m getting, now and again.

[2] For parents or carers, this is probably not the right thing to track because it’s rare, and the balance will look different in lots of ways. The best substitute might be “time with family” but I don’t know whether that’s right either.

[3] This is harder for some than others, it might never be that clear and it might fluctuate. It could be worth thinking back on the (hopefully rare) times when you thought “I really can’t sustain this pace” to at least get a bare minimum.