If it interests you, dear reader, my writing break took on one key feature that defines a break - no writing. It wasn't planned that way but once I realized what was happening it was fairly straightforward to put everything TOA-related out of mind for a few weeks. I guess it remains to be seen whether this rest did me any good (again, the gas analogy, I'll push the pedal next week) but I have a good feeling that I've finally done a break correctly.
That said, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up today. I suspect The End (as it relates to this break) is somewhere around the corner, but I wouldn't anticipate a flood of new posts in the near future. This is more of a logistical comment because the complete break from writing means I don't have anything to post at the moment. It might require a few more weeks before TOA begins to look normal, which these days should mean a few posts a month. But since you did come here anticipating a post I suppose it would be unfair to leave you hanging, so let's wrap up with an extended thought about breaks.
I think most people understand the need to step away and recharge from time to time but I don't think most people understand much about putting this idea into action. In my mind, there are three components to a good break (which I present now with a prerequisite "WELL DUH" alert) - knowing when to break, knowing how long to break, and knowing when to come back from break. Yes, groundbreaking insights all around, but I did warn you.
So again, the strategy is obvious but most people can't execute the plan. What's the issue? I think most people deal OK with the first part - they take a break when they think they need one. It helps that society has certain structures in place to support this step - the concept of an eight-hour day or forty-hour week, weekends, the esteemed summer vacation, the holiday period at the end of the calendar year, and so on. These built-in considerations serve as a form of insurance for the type of person who can't adequately make this determination for themselves - even if you are the sort who won't take a break when you need it, once Thanksgiving rolls around society kind of forces you to do it (1). One way or the other, people end up getting a break whether or not they are proactive about taking one.
The second part is a bit subtler and perhaps the source of most challenges - the length of a break. As noted earlier, most 9-to-5 types are forced to take a two-day break each weekend, but perhaps this isn't long enough to provide adequate recovery in certain cases. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, I'm just saying we don't know. I think there is also a related question here of intensity, which is relatable through a host of needless analogies. Let's try the technological one - if you attempt to recharge your phone with an outdated charger, you might have it plugged into the wall for twice as long as you would with a current alternative. There is something like this at play with breaks - perhaps two days off is enough for someone who can put work completely out of mind throughout that time, but for the person who dwells on issues (or even compulsively checks emails on Saturday and Sunday) the mind is at least partially occupied during the break period. How long you need to take a break could be significantly impacted by your ability to fully rest during that break, but I think this is a possibility that eludes most people.
The final part is perhaps the most important, though this is somewhat influenced by the fact that I've learned a few things about it this year. Longtime TOA readers may recall that back in January I took a break from running, which improbably stretched until mid-February. In hindsight this seems a bit excessive, but my thought process is fresh enough in my memory that I can explain myself - it wasn't until I started feeling like running again that I considered running again. By this, I don't mean some stray thought that I turned into immediate action, but rather a slower process that involved accumulating little instances of a returning inclination - feeling a bit of restless energy, for example, or breaking into short jogs as I would cross the street. Eventually, it was clear that I was ready. I went through a similar process over the past couple of weeks - I would look over at my desk during some idle time and consider booting up TOA again, but then the impulse would pass and I'd go do something else. I understood the feeling was building, however, so I started thinking about what I would do when I came back - which patterns to revive and which to discard, whether I would try some new styles, if I should sack the Business Bro, and so on. Now that I'm back at the keyboard, it seems obvious that I'm more or less fully recharged (and ready to resume whatever I'm supposed to call this TOA project).
I think it's hard for people to develop this level of trust in their own instincts. Are you confident enough to wait until you know that you are rested? For most, it seems easier to align breaks against an external framework. How long should a summer vacation last? One workweek, but of course you would include portions of the bookend weekends to create almost ten continuous days off (the true creatives may even take the preceding Friday off). This approach also has the built-in component of forcing you back to the abandoned task, which might be necessary for the kind of work that you would never choose to do for its own reward (2, 2A). This may suggest that what I've described merely applies to the types of things you like to do - interest and hobbies, passions, perhaps the aspects of a career that energize you - because these tend to be the sort of activity that does not require an external pressure to return.
But whether it applies broadly or not, I think this ability to trust our own instincts about being recharged is a critical skill that eludes most people. Without it, there is a circular futility regarding taking breaks - you don't know if you need to take a break because you don't know the difference between being run down and being rested, which means you don't know how long to break because you can't tell if you are ready to come back. Is it any wonder that so many of the things we once loved to do seem so distant to ourselves today? As life changes, we naturally develop new interests in response to fresh circumstances, and of course in reverse this means we lose some of our interests as well. But I think in some cases we are merely suffering from making life more difficult for ourselves. Is it truly the case that we are tired of something, particularly those things we once loved to do, or is it possible that we have simply made ourselves tired of it? It may be wise to consider the possibility that we just might still love to do the things we once loved to do, if only we took more care in protecting the energy we need to do it.
Footnotes! Surely, this is evidence that TOA is back?
1. The burnout issue
Some may be tempted at this point to cite conditions such as burnout, with it serving as evidence that not everyone knowns when to stop, and I accept that perspective. However, I also think it's hard to say with certainty that burnout itself isn't simply another example of a signal that you need a break, and that it merely reflects a destiny embedded in the structure of particular tasks, responsibilities, or careers. In certain situations, I think it's hard to determine whether burnout represents going off-course or if it was the destination all along. If a particular job leads to constant burnout, then why is the default question about how to reduce burnout? It seems possible to me that a better question is to ask about the structural realities that require such a job to exist in the first place.
2. Not that I know anything at all about sleep, but...
The way we schedule breaks has certain similarities to the way we take in our most mundane form of rest, the nightly sleep. I know bedtime can be determined by a constructed schedule and that many wake up in the morning to a screaming alarm. It might not be realistic to simply sleep and wake in response to fatigue signals but this would surely be the way to maximize rest.
2A. What are you doing today? Digging out!
I suppose you would come back on Monday so you can participate in the hallowed ritual of "digging out from email" (or whatever the hot corporate buzzword is for essentially spending the first few hours after a vacation reading the equivalent of old newspapers). Do you know what I did when I reopened TOA today? I hit "new post". There might be some kind of BS metric I can cook up here - the degree to which you like doing something is inversely correlated to whether you feel compelled to do the equivalent of "dig out" upon returning from a long absence. (Alas, I contained this digression in a footnote, so it should be obvious what I concluded about this idea.)
