There was a stretch last year where I quietly stopped resting. Not dramatically — no announcement, no burnout headline. Just Saturday nights that turned into “quick” debugging sessions and Sundays that became catch-up days because the backlog didn’t care what day it was.
Babcock drilled a rhythm into me that I didn’t appreciate until I broke it: a full day, set apart, where the laptop stays closed. Call it Sabbath, call it a hard weekly reset — either way, it’s the one habit from university that I actively had to fight to keep as an adult with a company to run.
The thing I got wrong
I used to think rest was the thing you did after the important work was finished. Turns out the important work is never finished — there’s always another ticket, another client Slack message, another “quick call.” If rest waits for an empty inbox, it waits forever.
So I stopped negotiating with it. One day, set apart — not for guilt, not because I’m supposed to, but because I actually believe the instruction behind it is wiser than my calendar. Some weeks that looks like church and a long walk. Some weeks it’s just deliberately, stubbornly not opening my laptop.
What it does to Monday
Counterintuitively, the weeks where I actually rest are the weeks I ship the most. Not because rest is a productivity hack — I refuse to reduce it to that — but because a mind that’s had a real stop in it makes fewer dumb mistakes on Tuesday. Fewer typos in production configs. Fewer “wait, why did I write it this way” moments.
I’m not going to pretend this is a clean formula. Some Sundays I still think about the backlog. But I’ve come to believe the discipline of stopping is itself the point — a weekly reminder that the company, the code, the clients, none of it is actually holding the universe together. Something else is. I just get to be useful inside of that, one standup at a time.